How to do things with the beaglebone

Pocket Beagle

Output Text to TFT

This assumes you have the game boy tft shield. Although others that are supported and detected will likely work similarly.

echo "hello" > /dev/tty0

to output to your ssh session, try

echo "hello" > /dev/tty

These are serial output or char devices (as opposed to block which would be HDDs/flash (see a unix book)).

Access the char devices in /sys/dev/char These will be the same devices as in /dev but if you ls -l on /sys/dev/char you can get the path to the control / metadata of a given device. Such as you would expect to see when flashing a LED on/off via sys/fs. ref: https://elinux.org/EBC_Exercise_17_Switching_a_GPIO_to_an_LED#Setup and https://elinux.org/EBC_Exercise_17_Switching_a_GPIO_to_an_LED#Checking_.2Fsys.2Fclass.2Fleds

Going to /sys/dev/char is intuitive, and more so than /sys/class/whatever. But /sys/class has things that dev does not have, so you must remember /sys/dev/char and /sys/class for starters. This will get you access to hw control, afaik.

Output Video to TFT

Download video from somewhere. Resize/scale to small enough resolution (NOTE: this resolution is 128x96, from book Ffmpeg Basics by Korbel)

ffmpeg -i video.mp4 -s sqcif outputsmall.mp4
mplayer -loop 0 -vo fbdev2 outputsmall.mp4

Video should output direct on /dev/tty0

Framebuffer settings:

cd /sys
find . -print | grep fb0

There should be an fb0 (graphics) and fbcon (text console) e.g.

root@beaglebone:/sys/class/graphics# ls
fb0  fbcon

ref: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/342815/how-to-send-ffmpeg-output-to-framebuffer