Hello everyone, I just got my BBB and I was an idiot and fotgot

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Hello everyone, I just got my BBB and I was an idiot and fotgot to get a micro HDMI cable i know i don’t need one really, But I have a remote shell already but I have a couple questions if anyone else has one here

How can I VNC into the BBB Desktop?
and Can I update the firmware and such without a display cable or should I wait till I get it?

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Brett, I have been using one for a few years now and I have been running the OLA (Open Lighting Architecture) framework on it. As far as I know you cannot run FastLED on it, but I hope that one day you can! In the meantime check out Ledscape and the various forks. These leverage the BBB’s built in PRU (programmable realtime units) which are essentially lightning fast dedicated microcontrollers that run alongside the main Linux OS.

To answer your question, I have never used a VNC to get a remote desktop running. I tried once and gave up. I pretty much always run my BBBs as headless devices and then just SSH into them using a Terminal on Linux/MacOSX and Putty on Windows. Yes, you can update software and do anything you need via SSH. There is a million things to learn about it, so remember to check the Beaglebone Google Group, which is very active.

I have two tutorials about updating the OS linked below:
http://www.voltvision.com/booting-into-debian-os-on-the-beaglebone-black-using-a-usd-card/
http://www.voltvision.com/flashing-debian-os-onto-the-beaglebone-blacks-emmc-bone-debian-7-5-2014-05-14/

I recently got OLA to send DMX data directly to the BBB UART without using a USB DMX dongle. I think that perhaps a FastLED plugin alongside OLA might be cool for larger systems, but this is certainly getting away from the “keep it simple Arduino plug-n-go” philosophy…and suddenly you have layers of OSs and Software Services.

Anyway, I hope I answered your questions. I am using both FastLED/Teensy2/Teensy3 and BBBs and rPis in an event here very soon, so I will hopefully share some results.

Good luck, its a big learning curve, especially if you are learning Linux on the fly like I was.
respect,
frenchy (Steve French)
http://www.voltvision.com

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awesome thank you very much @Steve_French I will look into all of that thanks for the push in the right direction I have an RPI as well but I’m pretty novice in programming all together so im trying to get my foundations first haha and mess with this on the side haha