Beaglebone Black 1: Understanding Beaglebone Black Pinout

 This is lesson number 1 on using the Beaglebone black.

There is no capability of doing analog inputs using the Raspberry Pi, but you can do an ADC chip and connect to the chip using I2C or SPI, but I don't really want to do this. The advantage of the Beaglebone black is that it has analog inputs. They have arduino with the same purpose as the desktop machine.  

Unlike the Raspberry Pi, it has a Linux board installed and it has an external SD card and have an operating system on board. 

We need to understand the pins of the Beaglebone black. 

The red pins are voltage supply and grounds.

Digital pins are like the General Purpose Input/Output pins, or GPIO pins, which can all be used for serial communication. Try to not use General Purpose pins if they are specifically designed for a different function. 

AIN are analog inputs and these pins read 0 to 1.8 Volts, so don't try to read voltages higher than this. They have provided a pin which will give me a 1.8 Volt reference output.

Power things from the VDD_ACC which will give us a nice voltage of 1.8 Volts. There's also a shared I2C bus and a reconfigurable digital pin for display. The way to reference these pins is usually the header and the pin, for example if we hook an LED, I can do LED = "P9_18" for the SPIO_D1 pin.

The way to get all the functionality we want is through python. We should connect the beaglebone through a terminal connection, and we will be working through the terminal. The easiest thing is to hook with the ethernet and power it up using the USB.