By Rena Beban

I’ll be honest, I didn’t understand a thing about circuits in Physics 1. I can draw the symbol for a resistor but that’s really the limit of my knowledge. And for that reason, Professor Wright has trusted me to give a step by step procedure on how I wired and programmed a button to print a message on my computer.

You will need:

• Beaglebone Black Board (BBB)
• Bread board
• 5 pin wires
• Button
• Alligator cables
• Power supply
• 3 resistors
• Patience

Half the battle comes in the form of connecting the BBB to the internet, starting up Cloud9, and updating the BBB so it has the software capabilities that we need for this project. Here are some links to help with that:

https://beagleboard.org/getting-started

https://beagleboard.org/upgrade

The next part of it is similar in that I followed some online tutorials to get like 95% of the way there. The other 5% is making small tweaks to the code and setup where the tutorial isn’t fully clear.

https://learn.adafruit.com/blinking-an-led-with-beaglebone-black – This tutorial shows how to connect a small diode to Cloud9 and the bread board. A couple notes that would have made everything so much easier if I knew earlier:

1. This may be obvious to some but not for me, the longer side of the diode has to be going in the right way.
2. You might be looking at the instructions like what’s P8 and P9? What’s GND? How do I know what pin goes where?
   1. P8 and P9 are the names of the ports for the pin wires on either side of the BBB. If the USB import is to the right with the lights side facing up, you can see on the top there’s a P8 and on the bottom is a P9. 
   2. GND is ground, so ports 1 and 2 of P8 and P9. P9 has other GND ports from 43-46. 
   3. Here’s a map of the board ports. They’re numbered going up and down instead of left to right, so top row is odds and bottom is evens. (see the picture below.)
3. The resistor isn’t fully necessary in this part but I think sticking to the tutorial will save you a headache of trying to reposition the wires.
4. This also might be obvious but each pin wire has to be in the same row as the diode and resistor. So a pin must be in the same row as one end of the resistor, the other end of the resistor in the same row as the longer side of the diode, and another pin in the same row as the shorter side of the diode.
5. Once you have the physical set up the coding is pretty straightforward! Just manipulate the commands the tutorial offers and use different python modules and the world is your oyster.

https://learn.adafruit.com/connecting-a-push-button-to-beaglebone-black/the-python-console

• This next tutorial is to program a button to complete an action through Python. Depending on your python knowledge, you can push the button to prompt Cloud9 to print “Hello world!” or do a plethora of calculations. 
• The same tips above apply here, the main struggle is placing all the wires in the right place which after an hour or so can be pretty frustrating.

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