Measuring power usage
For the examples in this chapter, we need to use real hardware rather than virtual. This means that we need a BeagleBone Black with working power management. Unfortunately, the BSP for the BeagleBone that comes with the meta-yocto-bsp
layer does not include the necessary firmware for the Power Management IC (PMIC), so we will use
a pre-built Debian image instead. The missing firmware might exist in the meta-ti
layer, but I did not investigate that. The procedure for installing Debian on the BeagleBone Black is the same as what we covered in Chapter 12, Prototyping with Breakout Boards, except for the Debian version.
To download the Debian Stretch IoT microSD card image for the BeagleBone Black, issue the following command:
$ wget https://debian.beagleboard.org/images/bone-debian-9.9-iot-armhf-2019-08-03-4gb.img.xz
10.3 (aka Buster) was the latest Debian image for AM335x-based BeagleBones at the time of writing. We will use Debian 9.9 for the exercises...