Beaglebone Black audio cape

I received the new Beaglebone audio cape from CircuitCo this week, and wanted to share my experience, since documentation for this board is really not very good (Edit on the 21st of June: …but getting better all the time!). Hope this will be useful for you!

The BBB Audio Cape version B1

This is a revision of the audio cape which uses far fewer components – the card looks empty – and is based on an AC3104I chip, the TLV320AIC3104. It is now, as of June 2014, starting to become available through boardzoo, though shipping from that site is ridiculously expensive even in the US!

This audio cape simply adds a DAC and an ADC to the built-in audio capabilities of the Beaglebone. This means that the resulting “sound card” is split between native Beaglebone capabilities and the add-ons chips on the cape. OK, there is a little bit more to it such as signal processing, mixing and so on, but at a high level, this is really what it is. Just so you know…
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Train Controller: Beaglebone Cape version

If you have been following my articles on the train controller, you are probably are thinking that it looked a bit silly to use a Beaglebone and an Arduino side to side in order to control a model train.

At least, that’s what I thought, so I decided to correct this, by designing a Beaglebone train controller cape.

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Z-Scale Controller part XI: Integration on a BeagleBone

The very last step of this story, is how to put together a Linux microSD image for the Beaglebone, that works right out of the box and will turn your train controller into something you can just plug in and work with, as it should be.

Note: this article is still in progress, and will get updated shortly!

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Z-Scale controller: further work on the hardware prototype

Following up on my previous article on the Arduino Shield prototype, I have started to connect it to more accessories at the same time, and I have run into a small issue…

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Building the BeagleBone OpenEmbedded image from scratch

I recently bought a BeagleBone, and one of the first things I attempted right away was to build the Angtsrom embedded Linux distribution, which is the most popular embedded Linux distribution for this platform. There are both a lot of information and very few guides on how to tackle this, and I ended up writing this guide, more as a way to make sure I would be able to reproduce image building from scratch in case I had to at some point.

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