Broken USB A port; looking for alternative connection

shannoneilyce

I have a BeagleBone Black (BBB) with a Bela cape and an audio expander. The USB A port on the BBB has become slightly detached and this port no longer works unless we manually press it to the board. Soldering the port was unsuccessful, so we would like an alternative method to connect the BBB to a laptop computer. Is this possible to do with the 5v port and an ethernet cable?

The BBB boots up using the 5V barrel port, but we cannot get the computer to recognise the BBB using an ethernet connection. We search for the IDE using bela.local but can't find it. We tried pinging the Bela ip address (198.168.6.0, based on what we found on Bela websites), but it was unreachable. The lights on the BBB ethernet port are green and yellow when it is connected to the computer.

Is anyone able to offer advice as to how to connect the BBB to the computer without using the USB A port? Or, is the damaged USB A port somehow preventing the BBB from connecting to the computer?

Thank you!

giuliomoro

Powering with the barrel jack and connecting gia ethernet will work. By default, it assumes that on the other side of the ethernet cable there will be a DHCP server running, which is responsible for giving the board a balid IP address. The easiest way to do so is to connect it to a home router. The board will NOT have its canonical 192.168.6 or 192.168.7 addresses , but an IP in the DHCP's valid range. For home routers that's typically 192.168.0.x or 192.168.1.x or 10.0.0.x. You normally don't need to know the IP and can just access it via bela.local . If that doesn't work (e.g.: in the rare caee where yyou don't have a avahi/zeroconf/bonjour/mdns client running on your system), then accessing the router's admin page you should be able to see the actual IP.

Connecting directly to a host computer via ethernet, it will.most likely not work immediatelt, because you are unlikely to have a DHCP server running, so the board won't be assigned an IP address. The trick is often to enable internet sharing on the host, which should give the board an IP address. It will be hard to find out what address it has been given, but it should become accessible via bela.local