Flash your Beaglebone Black with Debian Buster

The BeagleBone Black is a single board computer, like the Raspberry PI. It has a single core 1ghz Cortex-A8 processor, 512Mb of memory and depending of the version 2gb or 4gb of EMMC. To extend the internal storage, it’s possible to add a microSD card or to use the unique USB port.

To flash our Beaglebone Black, we will need a computer and a micro SD card. The instructions are for GNU/Linux using command lines. If you are not comfortable with a terminal, or using another operating system, you can prepare the card with balenaEtcher.

Prepare the micro SD card

Robert Nelson is providing updated images for the Beaglebone boards. Go to the following website:

https://rcn-ee.com/rootfs/bb.org/testing/?C=M;O=A

Select the latest date, go to buster-console and download the image starting with bone-eMMC-flasher-debian.

Example:
bone-eMMC-flasher-debian-10.5-console-armhf-2020-08-19-1gb.img.xz

Plug your microSD card in your computer, it will be erased. Adapt the following line to your image’s name and run it as root.

xzcat bone-eMMC-flasher-debian-10.4-console-armhf-2020-05-18-1gb.img.xz | dd of=/dev/sdb

Flash the Beaglebone Black

Plug your microSD card into your Beaglebone Black. Press the Boot button (S2) and plug your card to the electricity. When the 4 lights are on, wait 1s and release the button. The 4 buttons will flash one after the other and the board will stop at the end of the operation.

Plug your board to your network with a cable. Press the Power button (S3) or unplug and plug your board. It will start and get an IP using the DHCP protocol.

Access to your board

By default the user is debian, the password temppwd and the hostname beaglebone, so you could SSH with the following command:

ssh debian@beaglebone.local

If you don’t find your board, try to detect its IP with nmap, adapt to your local network

nmap -sS -P -p  22  192.168.1.0/24

The network card is a Texas Instruments and the SSH port is open

Nmap scan report for 192.168.1.5
Host is up (0.0039s latency).

PORT   STATE SERVICE
22/tcp open  ssh
MAC Address: XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX (Texas Instruments)

We can now connect to the Beaglebone Black (don’t forget to adapt to your IP).

ssh debian@192.168.1.5

Conclusion

Our Beaglebone Black is now UP and running. Don’t forget to change the default password and harden your system.