I am trying to use the expansion header to control a couple motors and auxiliary task mechanism. For this I am using the appropriate pins as GPIO and merely attempting to send high or low signals as needed by the robot. (For instance, I might need the robot to move forward and so I'd send high signals on both sets of pins, whereas if I needed the robot to turn I'd send a high signal to one pin and a low to the other.)
However, the problem is that the pins will only stay high! I've followed the conventions for sysfs just via the terminal, and, although I'm able to set the "values", "active_lows", etc. to 0 or 1, I can't actually get the pins to send 0V. After checking the beagle.h file I used for u-boot it looks like the multiplexer mode is configured correctly. This is also reflected when I get the info from sys/class/gpio/gpio%/% and sys/kernel/debug/gpio. Furthermore I don't get any errors or indication from anywhere that there is something wrong...it just doesn't work!
What should I do? For the first time in my life I have seemingly exhausted the internet...
details: Beagleboard xm rev c1 ubuntu 12.04 kernel 3.6.8-x4