Quick Start Guide#
This chapter takes you from an unpacked board to a running console. Unlike most Beagles, BeagleBadge is built to run untethered from a single-cell lithium battery, so you can bring it up from USB Type-C, from a battery, or from both at once while the battery charges.
Every connector and control named here is labelled in Board Component Locations.
What’s in the box#
Todo
List what ships in the box: whether the ePaper panel comes attached, and whether a BL-5C cell and Wi-Fi and LoRa antennas are included.
Powering the board#
Source |
Notes |
|---|---|
USB Type-C |
Powers the board and charges a connected battery at the same time. It also carries the serial console, so one cable is enough for a first boot. |
BL-5C battery |
A single-cell Li-Ion cell in the Nokia BL-5C form factor. Charge state is reported to software by the on-board fuel gauge. |
The board draws far less than a typical single board computer and has an on-board charger with power-path control, so it runs happily from a laptop port. Charging is limited to 430mA with a 45 degrees C cutoff. See Battery charging and power path for the circuit.
Warning
Check the polarity marked next to the battery connector before fitting a cell. BL-5C cells from different vendors do not all use the same terminal order.
First boot#
The board is powered by the PC over a single USB Type-C cable, which also carries the console. An on-board CP2102N USB-to-UART bridge means no debug probe or separate adapter is needed.
Connect a USB Type-C cable between the board and your PC.
The board powers on and starts booting.
A new serial port appears on your PC. Open it with the settings in Serial console.
The board runs from a BL-5C cell with no host attached, and the ePaper display, joystick, buttons, RGB LED and 7-segment digits are the whole interface. This is the mode the board is designed around.
Fit a charged cell, press the power button, and the display will refresh as the board boots. Because the panel is electrophoretic it holds its last image with no power, so a blank or stale screen is not by itself a sign that the board is off.
Serial console#
Setting |
Value |
|---|---|
Port |
The CP2102N bridge on the USB Type-C connector |
Baud rate |
115200 8N1, no flow control |
Linux |
|
macOS |
|
Windows |
|
On Linux and macOS, tio or picocom are the least troublesome clients:
tio /dev/ttyUSB0
Todo
Add a trimmed boot log, from power-on to the login prompt, captured on this console.
Boot media and boot selection#
With SELECT released, BeagleBadge boots from its on-board OSPI flash. Hold SELECT while switching the board on to boot from a microSD card instead. SELECT and BOOT are the same button. The boot table, and what the OSPI flash is for, are in Boot Modes.
To write an image to a card and boot it, follow Embedded World 2026 demo image.
Updating the installed software#
Todo
Describe updating the installed image once general-purpose BeagleBadge images are on
the BeagleBoard.org distros page: choosing
the image, writing it with Update board with latest software, and reading the installed
version from /etc/dogtag.
Running Zephyr#
BeagleBadge has an upstream Zephyr board port. The board target is
beaglebadge/am62l3/a53 and applications run on the Cortex-A53 cores.
Copy the built zephyr.bin to the first FAT partition of a microSD card, boot the
board with SELECT held, interrupt U-Boot, and run:
fatload mmc 1:1 0x82000000 zephyr.bin; dcache flush; icache flush; dcache off; icache off; go 0x82000000
Tip
The BeagleBadge page in the Zephyr documentation carries the current list of supported peripherals and the build instructions, and is kept up to date with the Zephyr tree rather than with this page.
Next steps#
Embedded World 2026 demo image: write the demo image and see the board running.
Design and Specifications: how the hardware works, sheet by sheet.
Expansion: QWIIC, Grove, mikroBUS and GPIO header pinouts.
BeagleBoard.org forum: questions and help.