Beaglebone Blue

General Discussion
1

Has anyone tried this board, I am very interested in learning more about getting this board working.
Thank You

2

We don’t support it, what are you interested in doing with it?

3

I teach High School, I have a few students looking to build a ROV. I have five of the boards, and was looking for advice on using it for this application. Sorry for wasting your time.
Robby

4

Not by a long stretch! It depends on what you want to accomplish, and in what amount of time.

The other ardupilot vehicles have support for the board, we might be able to add ArduSub support also.

5

Thank you!
I think the ultimate goal would be for them to make a an ROV to compete at the mate competition. As far as time frame we do not have one, as we ( them and I) are still learning the BBB.

Thank you so much,
Robby

6

I suppose it would make more sense to invest in a pixhawk, I was just trying to use what we have.

7

It also depends on what you want to focus on with the students. If you want something that is already made, and has more to do with reading documentation, and plugging together /building the system and getting into the water, then ArduSub + pixhawk is a good choice.

If you want to focus more on the programming side of things or linux/sbcs, then the BBB will work fine, but you will have to do more of the system design and implementation.

8

So I was able to pick up a PixHawk up for $20, which I thought was a good deal. I will continue working with the Beaglebone blue to see if I can get it to work. Thanks for the advice.

Also can the Raspberry pi be a 2 or does it have to be a 3?

Thanks again

9

I experimented with a BBB back in October 2017 and I ran into a problem interfacing it with the BR ESCs. IIRC, the BBB has realtime processors to handle PWM signalling, but they don’t do much until the OS finishes booting and your code runs to load the RoboticsCape library. The problem (at least back then) was that the BR ESCs want a 1500 μs PWM signal within 1-2 seconds of power up, or they won’t initialize correctly. I was looking at BBB boot times of 55s, and I could imagine boot times as low as 8s, but I couldn’t see how to get that down to 1s. I believe that it’s possible to re-program the ESCs to avoid this problem. I ended up switching to a Pololu Maestro instead: small, cheap, and can be programmed to send PWM signals before the host computer finishes booting. You can talk to the Maestro from any device with a USB port.

Good luck!