BeagleBone to Android via USB Serial

As I mentioned in my last post, BeagleBone uses the Linux g_multi kernel module so that when you plug it into a PC, it appears to be a USB hub with USB-serial, USB-ethernet and USB storage devices attached.

In the other post I talk about how to plug a BeagleBone into an Android phone via USB and communicate between them using Ethernet.  Unfortunately it requires shutting off Wifi and cellular data.

So instead, I investigated communicating via USB serial instead of USB ethernet.  It should work out of the box, but none of the dozens of Android apps I tried could find the USB Serial device the BeagleBone provided.

Thus I used the same trick as before, replacing g_multi with a single-purpose device.  As in the last post, you'll have to comment out a big block of shell script in /opt/scripts/boot/am335x_evm.sh.

Then, instead of adding "modprobe g_cdc ${g_network}" and "usb0=enable" to explicitly load the USB Ethernet CDC driver, add:

modprobe g_serial

ttyGS0="enable"

When you reboot, you won't be able to "ssh 192.168.7.2" from your PC anymore.  Instead, you'll only get /dev/ttyACM0, and you'll need to login using a terminal emulator like minicom or screen.

(As before, you may want to make these changes while booting from a microSD card so that you can just pop the card out if it doesn't work).

After verifying that I could get in from my workstation, I connected my phone to the BeagleBone with an OTG adapter (careful!  Not all of them work right), then used the "Android USB Serial Monitor Lite" to connect to the BeagleBone.  (Open the "three dots" menu and select "Open Device", then send a newline and you should get a login prompt).

Connecting BeagleBone to newer Android Nexus phones (like Nexus 5X and Nexus 6P) via USB Ethernet

Update: Huh, I just discovered that this exists: Settings > developer options > networking > select USB configuration > RNDIS (USB ethernet).  But it doesn't seem to work.  So I suspect the RNDIS option there doesn't actually do anything.

The BeagleBone comes with a neat feature: when you plug it into your computer's USB port, the BeagleBone pretends it is a USB hub connected to several things: a serial port, USB storage and an ethernet adapter.  Thus you can point your PC's browser to http://192.168.7.2 and pull up the BeagleBone's built-in webserver, login via /dev/ttyACM0, or look through the files on its boot partition.

This all happens thanks to the g_multi Linux kernel module, which is one of several modules that allow devices with USB OTG ports to pretend to have things like storage, serial ports, ethernet and even MIDI ports.  g_multi aggregates a bunch of those together and presents them all to the host under a virtual USB hub.

This works great when connecting the BeagleBone to my Linux workstation over USB, and it also partly works when I connect the BeagleBone to my (stock) Nexus 5X: I can attach the BeagleBone to the phone using this VicTsing OTG adapter, and the BeagleBone will power itself from the phone and let me browse its USB storage.

I haven't had any success with the serial port, unfortunately.  I tried a bunch of different Android serial apps, and the phone seems to realize that the BeagleBone is offering a serial port, but I can't get any data between the devices.

Ethernet: if you want to talk from your Android phone to your beaglebone via TCP/IP over the USB cable, the first thing you'll have to do is, sadly, turn on airplane mode so that cellular and wifi data are disabled.  If one of those interfaces is active, pings and HTTP requests no longer make it to the BeagleBone.

Here's the other issue: recent phones like the Nexus 6P have a smaller set of USB Ethernet drivers enabled in the stock distro.  So with the BeagleBone in its default configuration, the Nexus 5X sees the ethernet interface just fine, but the Nexus 6P doesn't.

Fortunately, the g_multi can pretend to be one of two different *types* of USB Ethernet device.  The default is RNDIS, which apparently is a common thing on Windows, and is one of the drivers that got removed on the Nexus 6P.  The other is CDC, which is apparently a cleaner standard that manufacturers of USB Ethernet adapters can follow (so that each manufacturer doesn't have to invent their own driver interface).

Annoyingly, I can't find docs on g_multi's module parameters anywhere.  But I did manage to switch my BeagleBone from RNDIS to CDC ethernet with this change to /opt/scripts/boot/am335x_evm.sh.

As you can see, I just commented out the block of code that decides how to load g_multi, and instead I load the standalone g_cdc CDC Ethernet driver.  (This means you'll no longer get the USB storage and serial interfaces):

 # Added these two lines:  
 modprobe g_cdc ${g_network}  
 usb0=enable  
   
 # And commented out this big block:  
 ##g_multi: Do we have image file?  
 #if [ -f ${usb_image_file} ] ; then  
 #    modprobe g_multi file=${usb_image_file} cdrom=0 ro=0 stall=0 removable=1 nofua=1 ${g_network} || true  
 #    usb0="enable"  
 #    ttyGS0="enable"  
 #else  
 #    #g_multi: Do we have a non-rootfs "fat" partition?  
 #    unset root_drive  
 #    root_drive="$(cat /proc/cmdline | sed 's/ /\n/g' | grep root=UUID= | awk -F 'root=' '{print $2}' || true)"  
 #    if [ ! "x${root_drive}" = "x" ] ; then  
 #        root_drive="$(/sbin/findfs ${root_drive} || true)"  
 #    else  
 #        root_drive="$(cat /proc/cmdline | sed 's/ /\n/g' | grep root= | awk -F 'root=' '{print $2}' || true)"  
 #    fi  
 #  
 #    if [ "x${root_drive}" = "x/dev/mmcblk0p1" ] || [ "x${root_drive}" = "x/dev/mmcblk1p1" ] ; then  
 #        #g_ether: Do we have udhcpd/dnsmasq?  
 #        if [ -f /usr/sbin/udhcpd ] || [ -f /usr/sbin/dnsmasq ] ; then  
 #            modprobe g_ether ${g_network} || true  
 #            usb0="enable"  
 #        else  
 #            #g_serial: As a last resort...  
 #            modprobe g_serial || true  
 #            ttyGS0="enable"  
 #        fi  
 #    else  
 #        boot_drive="${root_drive%?}1"  
 #        modprobe g_multi file=${boot_drive} cdrom=0 ro=0 stall=0 removable=1 nofua=1 ${g_network} || true  
 #        usb0="enable"  
 #        ttyGS0="enable"  
 #    fi  
 #  
 #fi  
   

Be careful not to comment too much: you still want the "if [ "x${usb0}" = "xenable" ] " block below to be active so that the network interface gets set up correctly.

You might want to do all this while booted from a microSD card so that if you screw it up and can't access the BeagleBone over USB anymore, you can just pop out the card and fix am335x_evm.sh from your PC.