November 6, 2017

The Beaglebone White

These are often simply called "Beaglebone" without any color designation since they were the original beaglebone version.

I have worked a lot with the BBB, and these ancient units are a whole different game.

A friend had one of these laying in a pile of "junk" and let me grab and play with it. A bit of reading reveals the following differences between this unit and my old friend, the Beaglebone black: My unit has a XAM3359ZCZ chip and 256M of ram.
Other chips:

The built in JTAG (via the FT2232) is perhaps the most interesting and unique thing. It also still has the same pads to solder on a 20 pin JTAG connector, as the BBB. You apparently have the choice of doing JTAG via your own dongle and the 20 pin connector you have to solder on, or doing it via USB and the built in FT2232.

The FT2232 is a game of its own that I have notes on somewhere. People have programmed it to be a low bandwidth logic analyzer for example. It is a little controller of its own that is on the board set up to do what they want it to.

The fact that it has a built in USB to serial console means it doesn't have the 6 pin serial header that the BBB has, you just use a USB cable, which is kind of nice.

Because the USB hub is a power hog, when you power the BBW via USB, it will run at 500 Mhz rather than 720 Mhz.

The lack of onboard eMMC is disappointing.

My experiences

JTAG

The availability of JTAG via USB intrigues me. The following link claims to describe the setup for openocd:

Feedback? Questions? Drop me a line!

Tom's Computer Info / tom@mmto.org