Setting up the hardware

This time, the hardware setting is not very tricky since we just need two I²C chips to get the basic environment data for our weather station, while all the complexity is in the software settings, since we need at least a 3.13 kernel to manage the sensors and a complete software toolchain to talk with the Google Docs system!

Maybe this is not the case with you, but my BeagleBone Black runs a kernel version 3.8 where some drivers are missing. That's why I decided to install a new distribution based on kernel release 3.13 on an external microSD so that I do not have to modify the default on-board eMMC settings.

In any case, just to set up the hardware, I can use the current running kernel where I can enable the I²C bus named I2C1 with the following command:

root@beaglebone:~# echo BB-I2C1 > /sys/devices/bone_capemgr.9/slots

If everything works well, you should see the following kernel activities on your board:

part_number 'BB-I2C1', version 'N/A'
slot #7: generic override...