One of Hobson's goals is to maintain a small footprint so it can run on resource-limited devices. For those that don't want to incur the cost of running full PC or Mac all the time, the Beaglebone Black (BBB) shown above is a good alternative.
There are some nice advantages to the BBB:
However, it does have some drawbacks:
Even with its drawbacks, BBB is a compelling platform for home automation and Hobson runs well on it.
So, depending on what and where you buy, there's no reason you can't assemble a fully capable Hobson hardware hub for between $60 and $70.
Ubuntu recently announced its Snappy Ubuntu Core operating system as a solution for Internet of Things (IoT) devices. It's effectively a lightweight version of the Ubuntu Linux operating system that is very secure, highly reliable and easy to upgrade. Even in its current alpha state, it appears to run well and will only continue to improve. Given what it is trying to achieve and the fact that its first supported hardware platform is BBB, it seemed logical for Hobson to support it natively.
There are four steps necessary to get Hobson running on BBB using Snappy Ubuntu Core:
See the "Getting Started with Beaglebone Black" section on this Snappy Ubuntu Core page for details. Here are a couple of helpful hints:
ubuntu-core-WEBDM-alpha-02_armhf-bbb.img.xz
(or whatever the latest version is) available from this page. Note that this is an XZ compressed file. You can use 7-Zip on Windows or Entropy on Mac (a paid program but it offers a demo) to extract it. What you want is a file that ends in .img
..img
file to the SD card..img
file to the SD card.dd if=ubuntu-core-WEBDM-alpha-02_armhf-bbb.img of=/dev/sdX bs=32M
(where sdX
is the device for your blank SD card).Insert your newly flashed SD card into BBB and power it up. Make sure BBB is connected to the same network as your PC.
Note: It is highly recommended that you verify that the date and time are set correctly on the BBB. See the Hints & Troubleshooting section below.
Wait a few minutes and then use your PC's browser to visit Ubuntu Core Snappy's WebDM page: http://webdm.local:4200. It will look like this:
Click the "Store" tab at the top of the page and search for Hobson (or hobson-hub):
Click hobson-hub and then click the "Install" button:
After a minute or so, you should be able to configure Hobson by using your PC's browser to visit: http://webdm.local:8182/setup/index.html.
See the Hub Configuration Wizard page for more details.
Ubuntu Core Snappy has some idiosyncracies due to its current (as of this writing) alpha status. Here are some helpful hints in case you run into trouble.
ubuntu
and password ubuntu
and run the following command: sudo timedatectl set-ntp true
.Other Distros
BBB will also run with several different Linux distributions including Debian, Angstrom, Arch, Ubuntu, etc. If you're feeling adventurous, you can install one of these operating systems, install the appropriate Java virtual machine and install the Hobson package for generic Unix distributions (.tgz). Given the large variance across different Linux distributions, this is left as an exercise for the reader for now .