Frequently Asked Questions

Accessories

Power cable

A 5V 2.5A (25W) adapter should be sufficient. It needs to be type-C. Most laptops with type-C should put out enough power to provide both power and a super-speed data connection over this cable.

• Wall brick without USB type-C cable
• USB type-C cable
• USB type-C multiport adapter

Serial cable

The 3-pin serial JST-ZH header has ground closest to the mounting hole with RX next and TX furthest away. There are several cable options available. Further, Embest has developed a JTT-ZH to 100-mil male header for connection to a standard FTDI cable.

• Pololu 30xm fly-lead
• Amazon female-to-female

Kernel status

Upstream

-ti LTS kernels

4.9.147-ti-r120

• Works pretty well, with some gaps to be documented here
• Requires an out-of-tree build of WiFi driver, currently being built with buildroot, but working on integrating the build in with Robert's patches

Extra included software

Pinmux status script: show-pins.pl

Created by Matthijs van Duin of Dutch & Dutch, show-pins.pl is a Perl script that provides the easiest way to observe the status of the pinmuxes. It reads the kernel debugfs information on the pinmux status and maps it against a table of the modes matched with the cape header pins or other board function.

• Source: https://github.com/RobertCNelson/boot-scripts/blob/master/device/bone/show-pins.pl
• Target location: /opt/scripts/device/bone/show-pins.pl
• Example execution:

sudo perl /opt/scripts/device/bone/show-pins.pl -vv