This section explains how to do an initial setup, for an off-the-shelf BeagleBone Black. To get started, the following things are needed.

ByteBeam BeagleBone image can be downloaded from this link.

Install the balena etcher software by following the instructions in this link.

Once the installation is done, plug in the SD card into the system and launch balena-etcher software. Follow these steps to flash the Bytebeam BeagleBone image to the SD Card.

Select the Flash from file option in balena-ecther

Select Bytebeam BeagleBone image

Select the appropriate SD Card and flash the image.

The SD Card is now setup to contain 4 partitions.

At any given point in time either "Partition 2" or "Partition 3" will be the active rootfs partition, and the other partition is referred to as the inactive partition. The download partition is where the persistent files are stored. During kernel & rootfs updates, the contents of inactive partitions are replaced with the new rootfs.

Once the flashing is complete, insert the SD card into the BeagleBone. Push and hold the boot button(S2) on the BeagleBone dev. kit and power on the board. This ensures that the device boots from the SD Card and not from the onboard eMMC. Refer to this link for a detailed description of this process.

In order to flash the eMMC with the contents of the SD card:

Step 1: Uncomment the following line from uEnv.txt in the boot partition.

Step 2: Push and hold the boot button(S2) on the BeagleBone dev. kit and power on the board.

This process generally 30 to 40 minutes.

This "Getting Started" guide talks about different ways of accessing the BeagleBone from the Laptop/PC. It is also possible to access the BeagleBone via UART. Refer to this link for details on connecting BeagleBone to the system via UART.

Once the BeagleBone is up, run the below one-time setup script. This script installs Bytebeam's Linux agent uplink as well as scripts required for over-the-air updates