12 Oct 2014

BeagleBone - Black and White

While the Raspberry Pi is the most well known of the ARM based single board computers there are other alternatives available. One such alternative is the BeagleBone. The BeagleBone comes in two varieties which differ in a couple of key areas. See the below feature matrix:

The lack of built in serial console on the BeagleBone Black caught me by surprise in particular. The BeagleBone White's ability to use a single USB cable for power and a serial console is very nice. You can use a serial terminal or screen to connect to it:

# screen /dev/ttyUSB0 115200
Arch Linux 3.17.0-1-ARCH (ttyO0)

alarm login:

If you require a serial console on the BeagleBone Black you will need to purchase a USB to 3.3V TTL cable.

While there are several Linux distributions available for the BeagleBone, Arch Linux is one of the best due to the non-bloated, modern (systemd based) install:

[root@alarm ~]# ps --ppid 2 -p 2 --deselect f
  PID TTY      STAT   TIME COMMAND
    1 ?        Ss     0:12 /sbin/init fixrtc
  105 ?        Ss     0:01 /usr/lib/systemd/systemd-journald
  116 ?        Ss     0:00 /usr/lib/systemd/systemd-udevd
  131 ?        Ssl    0:06 /usr/lib/systemd/systemd-timesyncd
  136 ?        Ss     0:00 /usr/lib/systemd/systemd-logind
  137 ?        Ss     0:00 /usr/bin/dbus-daemon --system --address=systemd: --nofork --nopidfile --systemd-activation
  138 ?        Ss     0:14 /usr/bin/haveged -w 1024 -v 1
  144 ?        Ss     0:21 /usr/lib/systemd/systemd-networkd
  155 ?        Ss     0:40 /usr/lib/systemd/systemd-resolved
  156 ?        Ss     0:00 /usr/bin/sshd -D
  162 ?        Ss     1:16  \_ sshd: root@pts/0
  167 pts/0    Ss     0:00      \_ -bash
15391 pts/0    R+     0:00          \_ ps --ppid 2 -p 2 --deselect f
  157 tty1     Ss+    0:00 /sbin/agetty --noclear tty1 linux
  158 ttyO0    Ss+    0:00 /sbin/agetty --keep-baud 115200 38400 9600 ttyO0 vt102
  164 ?        Ss     0:00 /usr/lib/systemd/systemd --user
  165 ?        S      0:00  \_ (sd-pam)

I'm currently setting up my BeagleBone White as a wireless network monitor.

• BeagleBone White
• Arch Linux
• Airodump-ng
• D-Link DWA-131