Connecting the Beaglebone Black to Cat-M1 Network using SARA-R410M

[Nicolas_Theoret]

The current Beaglebone tutorial posted in Hologram’s documentation is rather incomplete and uses the Huewei dongle. Link to tutorial: https://hologram.io/connect-beaglebone-to-cellular-network/

To connect the Beaglebone Black to the Cat-M1 network with the SARA-R410M dongle, follow these steps:

1. Flash the Beaglebone Black with the latest Debian image from here (version 9.9 as I’m writing this): BeagleBoard.org - latest-images
2. ssh into your beaglebone and login
3. enter command: sudo apt get updates
4. remove all of python3.5 using command: sudo apt-get remove python3 – the BBB’s Debian image comes with both python 2.7 and python 3.5, both of which will not work with Hologram’s SDK. You must delete python3.5 prior to installing python3.7 to avoid pip install from installing packages in the wrong python directory.
5. install python 3.7 using the instructions here: https://linuxize.com/post/how-to-install-python-3-7-on-debian-9/
6. as a precaution, I also removed every file and directory related to python3.5 in the /usr/bin/ and /usr/local/lib directories
7. enter command: python3 -m pip install hologram-python
8. enter command: hologram activate
9. sign into hologram and choose the plan

Done.

I’m putting this here for documentation purposes. Knowing this information would have saved me a lot of time, hope it works for you.