BeagleBone: Connecting Via USB

The BeagleBone black comes with a USB cable that can be used to connect it to your computer/laptop. The cable at the one end has standard USB plug that would go into free port of your main computer and at the other end it has mini-USB plug that would go into mini-USB port of beaglebone black.

After the connection is made, the beagle bone will quickly boot up (roughly 10 sec) and you will see blinking LEDs just above mini USB port.

Connecting to Web Server:

BeagleBone also runs a mini web server. We can connect to this web server by connecting beagle bone to our network hub or router via Ethernet cable.

The alternate to this is to use USB Network bridge capability of beaglebone. To use this feature, you need to install drivers on your main computer, follow instructions on http://beagleboard.org/getting-started

When using USB Network bridge, web server running on beagle bone can be connected using
http://192.168.7.2/

You will see something like

Connecting via SSH using putty:

a. start putty and type following details

    host name: 192.168.7.2

    port : 22

b. When it prompt for 'login as :', type 'root' and press enter.

c.  For password, just hit enter.

If you face issue when connecting first time using SSH, then try this:

a. Disconnect from mini USB Port and connect it to 5V USB adaptor that comes along with it.

b. Connect device  to some monitor/LED tv using HDMI cable, attach a mouse to it's USB port for navigation.

b. Once the device boot up, you would be able to see screen similar to some linux startup screen.

c. Navigate to file system --> etc --> dropbear

d. Notice that the size of file dropbear_rsa_host_key is Zero bytes.

e. Delete this file dropbear_rsa_host_key.

f. Disconnect the device from HDMI cable, 5V adaptor and mouse.

g. Connect the device again using mini USB port to you main computer.

h. The file dropbear_rsa_host_key will automatically get created at startup and will not be zero byte file anymore.

i.  Connect using SSH and it should work fine.

Dropbear is default SSH server running on beaglebone. If you need to start/stop SSH server use following commands:

a. /etc/init.d/dropbear start

b. /etc/init.d/dropbear stop

Connecting via VNC:

Install x11vnc on your beaglebone device. x11vnc might pre-installed on your device, if not follow below steps for installation.[ Note: you will require internet connection for this. Connect Ethernet cable to beaglebone Ethernet port and connect other end to home router/hub., DON'T forget to power up device with 5V adaptor]

a. opkg update

b. opkg install x11vnc

c. x11vnc -bg -o %HOME/.x11vnc.log.%VNCDISPLAY -auth /var/run/gdm/auth-for-gdm*/database -display :0  -forever

To start VNC server automatically on start-up, you can create a file startVNC.sh under home directory and provide execute permission to this file. Put the command (c) as the content of this file.

Now navigate to System --> Preference --> Startup Applications, put entry for this script file.