Apart from the BeagleBoard itself, you will need:
Let’s go through some of those items in a bit more detail.
The BeagleBoard is shipped without any power supply. It requires a regulated 5 volts DC input, and has a barrel connector of the most common size. The BeagleBoard itself will consume something like 1 amp, but may need more in some circumstances, most notably at start-up. You really don’t want to give it less than a 2 amp supply. You are going to connect a minimum of 3 USB devices (keyboard, mouse, memory stick), so you’re going to need a hub; the devices plus the hub will need power. Best is if the hub has its own mains power supply, so it won’t need power from the BeagleBoard; but if you can’t power the hub separately, you’ll need to take that power from the BeagleBoard, which means up to another half an amp that the power supply must give.
Realistically, you will probably want your BeagleBoard on your network, so you’re going to want a USB Ethernet dongle. This means 4 ports of your hub are going to be used. If you use a 4 port USB hub, that precludes the possibility of connecting anything else via USB, which is why I suggest that a 7 port hub is preferable. Otherwise you should be able to cascade two 4 port hubs (but that means yet another power supply…) One USB Ethernet dongle that I have found to work is the Lindy USB 2.0 Fast Ethernet Adaptor although you may be able to get it a bit cheaper elsewhere.
The monitor with digital input is a must. The BeagleBoard simply doesn’t have any analogue video output apart from S-video, which is only of limited resolution. The digital video output is unencrypted HDMI, which is electrically compatible with DVI-D. It must be admitted that DVI is pretty confusing; if you’re not sure about it, there are plenty of places to look on the Internet. Wikipedia’s entry is a good start. DVI-D is digital (and suitable); DVI-A is analogue (therefore not suitable); DVI-I supports both digital and analogue feeds, and is therefore suitable. Make sure you have a cable and adaptor system that goes from BeagleBoard’s HDMI socket to the monitor. I got caught when I bought my new monitor, because it didn’t have a socket and a free cable; instead it has a captive cable terminated in a DVI-I plug. Thus I needed an HDMI to DVI adaptor. Most of these adaptors are HDMI to DVI-D. A DVI-I plug won’t fit into a DVI-D socket! Fortunately there are a few HDMI to DVI-I adaptors available, but, if you need one, look carefully to see exactly what you’re buying.
As for the memory: you need an SD card and a USB memory stick (or additional SD card and USB card reader). They serve in two entirely different ways. The SD card only holds a boot script (which is tiny) and the RISC OS ROM image (which is only a few megabytes). MMC cards may also work. SDHC cards probably work too, though the extra capacity will be wasted. The USB memory stick, on the other hand, is the RISC OS “disc”, which usually contains a minimum of several hundred megabytes and growing with all your files. You won’t get away with less than 512 megabytes. The bigger the better; you can’t have too much hard drive capacity. It’s a generic USB flash drive we’re talking about here, not Sony’s proprietary Memory Stick (MS) devices.
OK, you’ve got all the items on your shopping list; now what do you do?
You’ll need the use of another computer for some of the following steps. You should at all times be careful not to damage the BeagleBoard by static electricity on your body. Keep yourself earthed frequently, by touching some earthed metal such as a central heating radiator or a metal-cased computer. When you approach the BeagleBoard, you should do so from the edge, and touch one of the metal connector shells first.
Delete all files from the SD card. Then copy two files to it:
(The above information is extracted from another wiki page on this site; it’s the “easy way” on Using the Cortex-A8 port. )
Format the USB memory stick as ADFS using !SCSIForm, which you should have on your existing RISC OS computer. Do make sure to format the USB stick, not your main hard drive! Check, double check, and check again before doing it.
From this page you’ll need two files: UnTarBZ2 and HardDisk4. HardDisk4 is a compressed image of the minimal contents of a RISC OS 5 disc image; you’ll need UnTarBZ2 to decompress it. Hard Note that UnTarBZ2 is supplied in self-extracting form. (Alternatively, HardDisc4 is a self-extracting version.) Once you’ve installed UnTarBZ2 on your exising RISC OS computer, you can uncompress HardDisc4, and copy it to the USB memory stick. Don’t forget to dismount it before you unplug it.
OK, now connect everything up, and you should be ready to go! The SD card plugs straight in to the BeagleBoard; the monitor comes from the HDMI connector; the USB hub plugs into the BeagleBoard’s larger USB socket (not the smaller OTG socket, as there are some remaining issues with MUSBDriver ); the keyboard, mouse, USB stick and USB Ethernet adaptor (if you have it) plug into the USB hub. The BeagleBoard and the USB hub need their power supplies plugged in.
In particular, the BeagleBoard documentation warns that you must not plug in a DVI monitor while the BeagleBoard is powered.
Regarding board failure, the following has been quoted by a beagleboard.org representative:
Failure rate is about 1% of which 75% of that is user abuse. Either they can’t read the 5V label on the connector or they can’t figure out how to reflash the NAND by following the instructions. There are no time based failures.
It’s probably good advice to take reasonable care when plugging/unplugging, and do so as infrequently as possible. This is to reduce strain on the board joints and is especially the case with the larger 5V DC, HDMI and S-Video sockets.
Turn it all on!
After what seems an eternity, RISC OS’s startup text should appear on the monitor, and leave you at a *" prompt. Type "desktop" and you should see RISC OS's familiar desktop. Click on the <code>?" icon. You will see an error box saying “No Boot application has been run on startup. Some facilities may not be available or set up corrctly.” but don’t worry – just Cancel it. You may also see two error boxes saying “File ‘Alias’ not found” – if you do, cancel them too.
Double click !Boot. You will get an error box saying “You cannot reconfigure this machine.” – just Cancel it.
Create yourself an Obey file with the following text in it:
SCSI Speaker off Filer_Run SCSI::HardDisc0.$.!Boot.!Boot Filer_Run SCSI::HardDisc0.$.!Boot.Utils.BootRun
You can do this with !Edit. Create it as a text file, then change its type to Obey. I’d suggest you name the file “Go”. It’s handy to have it in the root directory of HardDisc0 as you will need to double-click this every time you boot the BeagleBoard.