Setting up Beaglebone Black with Debian and SSH with Windows

Beaglebone Black 2 Minutes

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Things you’ll need:

Hardware

  1. Obviously, a BeagleboneBlack and 5V power supply
  2. An HDMI compatible monitor
  3. USB keyboard
  4. Ethernet cable
  5. Ethernet router (usually your DSL/Cable modem will provide extra Ethernet ports)
  6. Micro MMC card – I’ve been using SanDisk 32GB cards,
  7. A computer able to read micro MMC cards.  Most computers and laptops have this ability, you may need MMC to microSD adapter, or use an MMC USB reader like this one.

Software

  1. An image of Debian.  As of this writing, I’m using Jessie.  Download BBB images from here: http://beagleboard.org/latest-images
  2. 7-zip for extracting the .xz image downloaded in step 1.  Download from here: http://www.7-zip.org/download.html
  3. Win32DiskImager, for creating an image on a uMMC card.  Download from here: http://sourceforge.net/projects/win32diskimager/?source=directory
  4. PuTTY SSH client for “remoting” into your BBB.  Download from here: http://www.putty.org/
  5. WinSCP SFTP, SCP and FTP client for Windows, makes it a lot easier to copy files between Windows and Debian.  Download here: https://winscp.net/eng/download.php

Steps (somewhat terse):

  1. Install:
    1. 7-zip
    2. Win32DiskImager
    3. PuTTY
    4. and WinSCP.
  2. Using 7-zip, unzip the Debian image
  3. Using Win32DiskImager, write the image to the uMMC card (make sure you don’t write it to your computer’s hard disk!)
  4. With the Beaglebone powered off, insert the uMMC into the micro SD slot
  5. Connect the Ethernet cable, USB keyboard, HDMI monitor to the BBB
  6. Plug the other end of the Ethernet cable into your router (which your computer should also be connected to, either physically or wirelessly.)
  7. Plug in the power to the BBB

When Debian boots, you should be able to log in with the username “debian” and the password “temppwd”

At the prompt, type in “ifconfig” and press enter.  You should see something similar to:

eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 7c:66:9d:53:cd:97
inet addr:192.168.1.42 Bcast:192.168.1.255 Mask:255.255.255.0
inet6 addr: fe80::7e66:9dff:fe53:cd97/64 Scope:Link

Note the “inet addr”, for example, above, it is 192.168.1.42

Launch PuTTY and for the host name, enter “debian@” followed by the IP address of the BBB, similar to this:

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Click on the Open button at the bottom of the PuTTY window.  You will need to acknowledge (click on Yes) the prompt that comes up “Continue connection to an unknown server and add its host key to a cache”.  Enter the debian password (temppwd).  You should something similar to this:

bbb4

 

 

 

 

 

 

Congratulations!  You are remotely connected to the BBB!

Open WinSCP and edit the session settings, similar to this (replace the IP with your BBB’s IP):

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Click on the Login button (you will probably need to confirm the “Continue connection to an unknown server and add its host key to a cache” question again).

You should now be able to use WinSCP to transfer files between your Windows computer and the BBB!

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What do you want to do next???

Published by Marc Clifton

Published

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