Serial Cable for booting FreeBSD on the BeagleBone Black

[Benny Goemans]

Paul Mather schreef op 2016-12-31 02:26:
> Dr. Rolf Jansen,
> 
> On Dec 30, 2016, at 5:21 PM, George Rosamond
> <george at ceetonetechnology.com> wrote:
> 
>> Dr. Rolf Jansen:
>>> I ordered my BeagleBone Black, and I will receive it next week.
>>> 
>>> I read on https://wiki.freebsd.org/FreeBSD/arm/BeagleBoneBlack about 
>>> booting the BBB with FreeBSD, that I need to:
>>> 
>>>   "Connect a serial cable such as the FTDI TTL-232R 3.3v
>>>    or the Adafruit 4-pin cable"
>>> 
>>> I am sorry, for needing to ask the obvious:
>>> 
>>> - connect the serial cable to where and for what purpose?
>> 
>> There are four pin connectors on the serial cable, black, green, white
>> and red.
>> 
>> There are six pins along one side of the BBBlack with pin 1 labeled 
>> "J1"
>> 
>> pin1 black
>> 
>> pin4 green
>> 
>> pin5 white
>> 
>> and red is unused.
> 
> 
> Using the AdaFruit FTDI Friend (https://www.adafruit.com/products/284
> <https://www.adafruit.com/products/284>) is even simpler with the
> BeagleBone Black: just plug it directly into the J1 jumper mentioned
> above and everything lines up automagically. :-)
> 
> Once plugged in, connect it to your "serial terminal" (e.g., FreeBSD
> host system) via a mini-B to USB-A cable and use "cu" to connect.
> Speed is 115200.  It even includes send and receive blinkenlights so
> you can see when data is flowing...
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Paul.

For the record, you can also use screen. If I recall correctly the 
command line is 'screen /dev/<device> 115200' where 115200 is the baud 
rate.
See the man page as well.

For the location of the header, see [1] (which is the official BBB 
wiki). In case you're talking about the BBB Wireless, the header is 
right next to/above the processor/mem (the big 'Octavo' chip), image at 
[2].

[1] http://elinux.org/Beagleboard:BeagleBoneBlack
[2] 
https://beagleboard.org/static/images/BeagleBoneBlackWireless_A3_horiz.jpeg

Regards,
Benny