November 11, 2017

The Beaglebone White - first power with SD card

After seeing nothing of interest just powering up the board via USB, I dug around and found an SD card image and copied it to a micro SD card.

On power up, I don't get a linux kernel oops on my host, which is different. However, I don't get the usual pattern of lights that I expect. Using picocomm to watch the serial port, I see a series of 8 "C" characters at 115200 baud, but that is all. Not terribly encouraging.

The image I used was bone-debian-9.2-iot-armhf-2017-10-10-4gb.img.xz which had the original beaglebone on its supported list.

To test this card, I put it into a BBG and boot it up, and it works just fine. I get:
Loaded environment from /boot/uEnv.txt
Checking if uname_r is set in /boot/uEnv.txt...
gpio: pin 56 (gpio 56) value is 1
Running uname_boot ...
loading /boot/vmlinuz-4.4.91-ti-r133 ...
8886912 bytes read in 522 ms (16.2 MiB/s)
loading /boot/dtbs/4.4.91-ti-r133/am335x-bonegreen.dtb ...
.....
.....
Debian GNU/Linux 9 beaglebone ttyS0
BeagleBoard.org Debian Image 2017-10-10
Support/FAQ: http://elinux.org/Beagleboard:BeagleBoneBlack_Debian
default username:password is [debian:temppwd]
.....
.....
uname -a
Linux beaglebone 4.4.91-ti-r133 #1 SMP Tue Oct 10 05:18:08 UTC 2017 armv7l GNU/Linux
debian@beaglebone:~$
So the SD card and image is OK, either my BBW is defective or somehow the image is not compatible with the BBW (but I would expect it to at least run U-boot, not to mention flash the lights in a sensible way).

However the Angstrom image from 2013 works just fine. What is truly curious is that there seems to be no U-boot activity.

I tried then with the debian 7.9 console image from 2015 and get the exact same result, no LED's and it slowly prints "C" 8 times. BUT, when I wait long enough, away it goes and boots linux.

U-Boot 2015.10-00001-g51aa16b
uname -a
Linux beaglebone 3.8.13-bone79 #1 SMP Tue Oct 13 20:44:55 UTC 2015 armv7l GNU/Linux
And this is truly odd. Now that it has decided to boot once, it seems to be fine. No more of the printing "C" 8 times and no long delay - even after being powered down for quite some time. Hard to figure.


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Tom's Computer Info / tom@mmto.org