When running BBB with external power supply powering off button will only shut down the patch I'm running but not the whole board. Even if I'm holding it for several seconds. Could it be because of this: http://elinux.org/Beagleboard:BeagleBoneBlack#Improper_Power_Down....All_Revisions ?
Through IDE or Terminal shutting down works just fine.
Hmm. Are you talking about the power button on the BBB or the button on the Bela cape?
giuliomoro the button on the Bela cape. I also did external power-off button tied to P9.27 and ground. But it has same results.
confirmed bug.
Now fixed in master. https://github.com/BelaPlatform/Bela/commit/8bc9adadd57badaf4569793ec2588c7831b45943
You can update your board as explained here
giuliomoro for me this update didn't work. Now it only boots the patch. And if I keep the button pressed it keeps booting it over and over again. I was running heavy compiled patch though. Could it be that?
Heavy should not have anything different from other types of patches.
Hmm, what do you mean it "boots the patch"?
One thing I can think of is: when the patch is set to start at boot, then if you kill it, it will restart (this is a "safety feature": in case your patch crashes, it will be restarted automatically).
Yet, if the patch was compiled with this updated code, then it should work: the patch may restart a few times while you hold-press the button, but the "hold" action should eventually be triggered and the board should shutdown.
Can you please explain better what is happening?
What procedure did you use to update the board?
giuliomoro sorry about this. I had downloaded mistakenly branch: "master" instead of "dev". It works just fine!
well it was supposed to work also on master, not only on dev ...
I'll try it with master in the evening again. I think it might have been that while multitasking I've forgot to download new branch completely and just ran $ ./update_board.
Yes master works also for me so it was all along my own error.
Just a side note to mention that I have never "gracefully shut down" my Bela/BBB... just yanked the power cable every single time for a year. No problems yet!
well... except that your USB socket fell off 
There should be no problem in just removing the power, unless you are writing something to disk (e.g.: if you power it off half way through building a project you may find at reboot that one of the .o files, or the executable file have size 0)
It's not strictly true that yanking the power has no risks. While it is far from the end of the world and is something I do quite regularly, it does increase the risk of SD card corruption which can result in data loss, and it also adds several seconds on to the next boot, because the SD card has to be checked for errors if it is not unmounted properly.
Also, if you're going to be yanking the USB cable regularly, I would recommend to do it at the USB-A end (i.e. the end that goes into your laptop) as the mini-USB sockets on the BeagleBone are fragile and are rated for a surprisingly small number of cycles (its in the low hundreds iirc, which you can reach pretty quickly).
FWIW I'm yanking the 5V power cable, not using the USB cable (especially since it broke).
And I yank it out of the wall, not out of the BBB
