Powering off the board

This material has been superseded. Visit learn.bela.io for the maintained version.

Unless you are writing to disk, it is very unlikely that unplugging the BBB will cause any troubles. Still, it is not recommended.

There are multiple ways of turning off Bela:

• the button on the Bela cape should safely turn off the board if you hold press it for a couple of seconds. This is the recommended method when operating the board in stand-alone mode. The button on the cape is tied to P9 pin 27. So if, for example, you wanted to put Bela in a device with an external power-off button, you could connect a pushbutton between P9.27 and ground. Hold it for at least 2 seconds and it will initiate a graceful shutdown of the board. Careful with your wiring, though, because the neighbouring pins are sensitive digital signals to the audio codec, which might not like being shorted to ground. See here for more on how to customize the behaviour of the button.
• if you are using the IDE, go to the settings tab and at the bottom you will see the shutdown board button
• if you are using the scripts, a dedicated script halt_board.sh is available.
• if you are already ssh'd into the board, just type $ halt at the terminal.