Beaglebone White alongside Beaglebone Black
http://foto.a20.net/fb/1000/20130505-2480.jpg
What is the cape on the BBW?
The Towertech CAN cape, http://www.towertech.it/en/products/hardware/tt3201-can-cape/ . Under the duct tape there are also a http://www.exp-tech.de/Shields/Adafruit-Ultimate-GPS-Breakout-66-channel-10-Hz-Version-3.html connected to one of the UARTs and a http://www.acmesystems.it/EPS to allow for 12V power supply, so it can be vehicle powered.
GPS and powered by a vehicle! Do you have writeup of what you did? This is very similar to an idea that I’ve been toying with and I’d like to see what others have done.
Not yet, but it’s not that big a deal, maybe I should do a writeup. The EPS basically supplies 5V, the GPS spits out 1, 5 or 10Hz NMEA data to ttyO4. The CAN bus sees data from the ECU/vehicle, it gets logged from there.
Currently I’m struggling with Linux 3.8 pin control; currently with a newer Angstrom image and Linux kernel the can interfaces don’t show up (with either White or Black).
You should definitely do a write up. Have you tried any other distributions on the BB? Personally, I’ve almost always used Arch, although recently I’ve been running Debian, and I’ve been doing this so that I can use newer kernels and a package manager with better documentation.
I’ve deinstalled all gfx / desktop related packages because they don’t matter for my purpose. On the one hand it would be great to use a standard distro (ubuntu, debian, centos or such), on the other hand all low level work for the bones seems to get done on angstrom first. The platform has enough memory and storage that an embedded oriented platform is no longer very necessary or useful, I think, but tools and drivers for embedded type things do count. Ideally I think it would be good if the 'bone community would get behind Ubuntu/Debian or Fedora/CentOS.
If you are running your development tools on your target device, you would almost certainly be more efficient if you switched to a cross-development method where your tools run on a powerful desktop machine and only the resulting target code runs on the target machine. The Angstrom distribution was built this way, and if you follow the build instructions on its home page you should be able to easily recreate the cross-development tools and build custom images from the comfort of your powerful desktop!
Well, for a suitably advanced definition of “easily”, anyway. The tools are certainly easier to use than they were back in the OpenZaurus days, but it might take a bit of reading and experimenting to get up to speed.
Join the dark side of the source!
@joseph_yarborough … yes, no python please - civilized people use Javascript to modulate their PWM’s… 
@Bert_Lindner Have you been able to get the CANbus cape working with the black? I cross-posted on the google groups list; running into the same issue. Cape is recognized but it doesn’t load the firmware for the cape and I get no can interfaces.
[ 4.445426] bone-capemgr bone_capemgr.8: failed to load firmware ‘BB-BONE-SERL-01-00A2.dtbo’
@Corey_Thuen No not yet, unfortunately. same thing here. I guess it will take a while before 3.8 pinctrl configs reaches most boards, and I haven’t really wrapped my head around it yet.