I have a BeagleBone Black Wireless running satisfactorily. Imaged a Bela SD card and can get to the IDE ok on 192.168.7.2 booting from the card. So far so good.

Plugging in the new audio cape prevents the Beaglebone from booting either from the eMMc or from the SD card.
An LED next to the 5V barrel socket pulsing at about 1Hz is the only sign of activity.
That's it!

Any ideas apart from a duff cape? (I presume they are tested properly before shipment).

Thanks in advance.

What do you mean audio cape? Is that the Bela cape or the Bela Audio expander capelet?

Hi giuliomoro and thanks so much for your prompt reply. Yes the Bela cape but the problem is now resolved!

I had failed to follow a rather hidden suggestion somewhere that to boot from the SD card requires more than just holding down the USER button when powering up. This appears to work when the cape is not plugged in but doesn't when it is. The solution is to strap P8-43 to Gnd. Perhaps this should be made more prominent?

Thanks again

    Actually shorting P8-43 to GND is exactly equivalent to properly pressing the button. However the button is a bit fiddly sometimes, especially with the cape on.

    This approach will not be 100% successful, in case a spurious signal is picked up by the SPI device (see here). The proper one (especially on the BeagleBone Green) involves doing this:

    giuliomoro Last, I forgot to mention that there are other ways of forcing boot from the SD, e.g.: power on with P8_45 and P8_46 connected to 3.3V and P8_44 grounded. This is relatively easy on a stand-alone Bela, not so much when it's plugged into Salt. There may be easier configurations, too, that may require a single pin to be shorted, which is more doable, but have to double check the Beaglebone's manual.

    Still looking for the best approach for the above.

    Anyhow, P8_43 to GND is often a good enough solution, especially because normally this is only required once: once you manage to boot from the SD card you then run the /opt/Bela/bela_bootloader.sh script once and then it should always manage to successfully boot from the SD card in the future.

    bottomfeeder Perhaps this should be made more prominent?

    It is in the release page where you download the image from. Where else would you recommend to put it?

        5 months later

        Hi,
        I have trouble getting my board to consistently boot with the SD. I tried pushing the USER button or jumping P43 to P1. Both sometimes work but most of the time, all I get is a lit power LED and no movement of the other LEDs at all. (This is when using the button/jumper trick)

        When I don't use the button/jumper trick, I get stuck on the CPU-activity LED without any sign from the heartbeat LED (as if I got the CPU stuck somehow). The board doesn't show up as a drive on my PC then and it doesn't show up as a network adapter. When I remove the SD, the board boots from the internal BeagleBone just fine.

        Do you have any tips I could try? I flashed the latest release of the img on the SD. And I'm connecting the board directly to PC. So I didn't try any other connection methods besides connecting the board to a USB power adapter.

        EDIT:
        Might be related to this issue here:
        https://forum.bela.io/d/686-card-won-t-boot-on-one-of-my-beagles/2
        I'll try to use an older image to see if it changes anything.

        So it seems that you manage to boot with the SD card sometimes. If you follow the instructions here, once you manage to boot from the SD card, you can do one of the following:

        • if you have a Bela image on the eMMC and you want to keep using it in its current state: /opt/Bela/bela_bootloader.sh. This should restore functionality of the image on the eMMC, but if there is an SD card inserted, it will boot from the
        • if you have a beagleboard.org image on the eMMC, or if you want to update the Bela image on the eMMC with that is on the SD card, then run /opt/Bela/bela_flash_emmc.sh eMMC.

          giuliomoro Hey,

          thanks for the help. Second attempt works. But now it works as expected. eMMC and SD images are both up to date and it boots from SD when it's there or from EMMC when the SD is not inserted.

          One question. Is that an expected message? Was the end of the flashing process:

          copying files, this may take a few minutes...
          rm: cannot remove '/mnt/root/etc/systemd/system/default.target.wants/bela_flash_emmc.service': No such file or directory
          Done!