A few weeks ago I purchased a BeagleBone from Amazon. The BeagleBone is a small ARM based computer with programmable Input/Output pins developed by Texas Instruments and is part of their beagleboard line of ARM development boards. After finally deciding what to do with the computer, it was time to build a new computer case.

Where is it Going?

At the thrift store, I purchased a nice jewelry box with flowers etched in its glass. The small, solid box was $3.00.

The plan (play the A-Team theme), is as follows:

1. Connect a rotary phone to the BeagleBone for input
2. Do some other sweet shit (more on that later)

Alrighty! time to get crackin

Gutted

Step 1. Remove the guts.

For some reason, whoever created the box thought it would be a good idea to put a bunch of stuff inside that I don't want or need.

Here is the box with the lid removed and the crap removed.

Making Some Standoffs

When I made the clock server case, I kept some of the wood bits that I needed to remove from the internals of the clock. A wood saw and some small screws made some sweet standoffs for the beaglebone.

A black marker was eventually used to color the light wood.

Mangle the Box

Any dreams I had about making an very clean access hole in the case was dashed upon the rocks of my poor power tool using skills.

Oh well, it doesn't get seen, and it works as it should. Why am I complaining?

Wall Hanging Mount

Some twisted baling wire and two wood screws will make it very easy to hang the box on the wall.

Time to warm up the hot glue gun.

So Far So Good

Once the glue gun was hot, the standoffs were glued into the box.

Look at all of that empty space! The BeagleBone has a USB port so I will be putting something in the box, but I don't know what it will be. So far, I'm thinking it could be:

• a nice laptop hard-drive for file storage
• a character LCD to display information
• or... I could ditch the case and put the BeagleBone in the phone itself

On The Wall

All plugged in a running sweet!

Currently, my BeagleBone is running Arch Linux.
Originally, the BeagleBone ships with Ångström Linux, but I couldn't find any documentation for configuring the opkg package manager that ships with Ångström, and since I was looking to eventually run Lighttpd and MySQL on the device, I switched to a distro with an extremely useful wiki.

The Computers in the Corner

The Phone
The Bone
The Router
The Clock Server
The DSL Modem
The Status Server (between the modem and the router)

Now What to Do?

Put some LEDs in the box and write a program to light up the LEDs when something happens. That something is to be decided

But what else?
Options include putting a hard drive in the box and use it as a federated status.net server or put a character LCD in the case and use LCDproc to display various bits of information.

Currently the machine is programmed to:

• Dial 666 : play random Iron Maiden track on my MuttonChop machine
• Dial 75337 (sleep) : shut down computers
• Dial 9253 (wake) : emit wake-on-lan signal to various computers

Now I need to write a bunch of little programs to be run when various numbers are dialed on the phone, and I need to find a way to get the cables out of the way.

Until next time, hack on!

The BeagleBone story continues at http://www.jezra.net/blog/LEDs_BeagleBone_and_my_ToDo_List