[Today’s run: 2 miles]
I’ve received my BeagleBone board and I have been working on it a bit.
The first task I took on was to get it to work reliably with the household wifi. That has been a disappointment. From google searching it seems that many people have this complaint. There is a package called connman to manage connections. It works fine for me with a wired ethernet connection but it does not work hardly at all for wifi. And the tools and documentation are vaporware.
It looks like a newer release of connman might help me, but I need to get more into how to upgrade the Angstrom software on the BeagleBone. So far I am not impressed with the idea of putting this thing out in yard and expecting it to do it’s thing without oversight.
But! Some folks have removed connman completely and gone with a different connection manager. I may end up doing that too.
It has turned out to be a bigger issue than I was expecting.
Another piece I need to address is the serial connection to the weather station. I can work on that while I get the wifi figured out, I can just hook it up to wired network and do the serial thing here in the house. Anyway, I needed to get a level-shifter to translate between the voltage level on the weather station (5 VDC) down to the voltage on the serial pins of the BeagleBone (3.3 VDC). I have ordered an inexpensive level-shifter and that should come in the mail soon. It would be nice to have one of those things working within the next week or so.
Here is a picture of the BeagleBoard with a dollar to show the size of the thing.
