Expansion CAPE for BeagleBoard BeagleBone Black with RS485 CAN DEBUG Connector Interfaces @XYGStudy

I have a couple of these but there is little or no support out of Waveshare if you want to use modern (> 4.) debian or unbuntu kernels releases. As a Cape it does not support the I2C overlay memory. the brief page they have falls woefully short and attempting to email them was a joke.I use them for CAN and considering all I really need added to the bbb is a transceiver, a couple capacitors and resistors but I can't build all that in a cape for less than this board. I have not used it for Rs485 but since it's really just hosting a transceiver it's probably fine.+ works and properly mounts a can transceiver- I spent a several hours having to manually figure out how to setup the beagleboard overlay system for 4.1 and 4.1 (same process) (Google gets 5 stars)currently running...Linux beaglebone 4.4.15-bone11 #1 Sun Jul 17 13:24:37 UTC 2016 armv7l GNU/Linux

Overall Positive experience

I have a Beaglebone Black. Angstrom-Cloud9-IDE-GNOME-eglibc-ipk-v2012.12-beaglebone-2013.05.24-MISC-cape-HDMI-v1.1. from the vendor is loaded. Two problems:After a few minutes, with the cape installed on my BBB, with only power connected, the linux heartbeart LED stops and I cannot access it. I have no problems without the cap installed. (Replace and remove the cape with power off.) So, this unit is useless to me.I also followed the instructions to try to load their version of Angstrom Linux. Angstrom-Cloud9-IDE-GNOME-eglibc-ipk-v2012.12-beaglebone-2013.05.24-MISC-cape-HDMI-v1.1. It booted from the SD card when BBB was powered up, but it would not transfer to internal memory when the boot button near the USB was pressed during startup. I used the same process with publicly available BBB-eMMC-flasher-2013.09.04 and I was able to transfer this version to internal flash. Maybe it isn't a "flasher" version.If I'm quick, I can do the CAN commands posted on the vendor's web site. I sent a CAN message to the cape and it was received and displayed. But then the BBB hung.

I'm a device programmer and this board has been essentially impossible to get information on.There is a website for waveshare that essentially has circular links. I have yet to find a definitive document that talks about jumpers on the cape and how to configure everything. Furthermore, the internet is littered with references to this device from the past 4 years, from linux kernel 3 onwards.It isn't worth the money if it comes as a brick in the mail.