I recently picked up some BeagleBoard Green devices to act as temperature/pressure/humidity/gas sensors with the BME680 sensor.
To prove functionality, I connected the BeagleBone green to my linux box with the USB cable, and used the following command to run a terminal:
screen /dev/ttyACM0
After proving everything works with an 'out-of-the-box' unit, the next step is to see how far this can be upgraded. The units I received are running Debian Buster (the now previously stable release).
There is a list of BeagleBoard.org Latest Firmware Images, which currently has newer Buster images, but with the GUI removed. This provides for more drive space for an upgrade cycle. (there was not enough space with the factory loaded image).
Installing consists of downloading the 'flasher' image, installing to an sdcard, power cycling the beagleboard, and allowing time for the re-flash to proceed. The notes indicate that:
- flashing takes power
- remove any sensors / attachments
- remove the ethernet as it has a power overhead
- connect to a power supply (I was attempting to use POE, and I'm not sure if that was adequate)
The programming notes suggest downloading an application called etcher to write the image to the sdcard. A much simpler way (from Instructions to flash an image to an SD card):
xzcat bone-eMMC-flasher-debian-10.3-iot-armhf-2020-04-06-4gb.img.xz \ | dd of=/dev/mmcblk0 bs=64k \ oflag=dsync \ status=progress
To flash:
- install the SDCard,
- hold down the button by the SDCard,
- connect to power, wait for the LEDs to come on
- release the button.
- initial boot software will load, and ultimately the LEDs should show a Cylon circulating pattern.
- once that pattern finishes, power can be removed,
- remove the card,
- re-attach power to boot into new version
- connect to network and run any necessary upgrades
After the reflash, and a reboot, I found that quite a few packages could be updated.
apt-get update apt-get dist-upgrade
There is a note about Debian 11 (bullseye) Testing Images where the suggestion is to do an in-place dist-upgrade, or fall back to downloading an image from a testing repository.
It might be faster to download the image that it would be to download 651 packages and perform an installation.
It took a while, but the dist-upgrade worked. It did require a download only retrieval with a forced install for some firmware::
# apt -d install firmware-brcm80211 # dpkg -i --force-overwrite firmware-brcm80211_20210315-3_all.deb (Reading database ... 88560 files and directories currently installed.) Preparing to unpack firmware-brcm80211_20210315-3_all.deb ... Unpacking firmware-brcm80211 (20210315-3) over (20190717-2rcnee1~buster+20200305) ... dpkg: warning: overriding problem because --force enabled: dpkg: warning: trying to overwrite '/lib/firmware/brcm/brcmfmac43455-sdio.clm_blob', which is also in package bb-bbai-firmware 1.20210923.2-0~buster+20211007 Setting up firmware-brcm80211 (20210315-3) ...
Then, to bring the kernel up to date:
# apt-get autoremove # # cd /opt/scripts/tools/ # git pull # ./update_kernel.sh # ./update_kernel.sh --lts-5_10
The update is performed twice: once to perform a simple upgrade (which will provide options), and then use the latest option to get current
Something to try later is to run a script to flash, rather than using a special image to self-flash: Flash Debian Bullseye on your BeagleBone Black, with more info at Beagleboard:Updating The Software.
2023/06/24 There is a note about Debian 12 (aka bookworm) is now released. It seems BeagleBoard is falling behind a bit in momentum. I see the espressobin and related families seem to have current releases. I may need to obtain new boards in a line somewhere.
2024/02/17 Go to Debian 12.x (Bookworm) - Monthly Snapshot - 2023-10-07 for Debian 12 image. For BeagleBone Green, download Debian 12.x (Bookworm) Minimal Snapshot for flashing to EMMC. balenaEtcher is not necessary when performing the write to SDCard from Linux. Use the instructions listed earlier in this post. This is probably faster than performing the dist-upgrade I mentioned.