Book Image

BeagleBone Home Automation

By : Juha Lumme
Book Image

BeagleBone Home Automation

By: Juha Lumme

Overview of this book

<p>Home automation lets you control daily activities such as changing the temperature, opening the garage door, or dimming the lights of your house using microprocessors. BeagleBone is a low-cost, high-expansion, hardware-hacker-focused BeagleBoard. It is small and comes with the high-performance ARM capabilities you expect from a BeagleBoard. BeagleBone takes full-featured Linux to places it has never gone before.</p> <p>Starting with the absolute basics, BeagleBone Home Automation gives you the knowledge you will require to create an Internet-age home automation solution. This book will show you how to set up Linux on BeagleBone. You will learn how to use Python to control different electronic components and sensors to create a standalone embedded system that also accepts control remotely from a smartphone.</p> <p>This book starts with the very basics of Linux administration and application execution using terminal connections. You will learn the basics of the general purpose input/output pins and discover how various electronic sensors and electronic components work. The “hardware jargon” is explained, and example applications demonstrating their practical use are created so that you will feel in control of the capabilities provided.</p> <p>Network programming is also a big part of this book, as the created server will be made accessible from the Internet through a smartphone application. You will also learn how to create a fully working Android application that communicates with the home automation server over the Internet.</p>
Table of Contents (14 chapters)

Chapter 1. The Initial Setup

So your new shiny BeagleBone (black?) is out of its packaging, and you have marveled enough at how it is engineered — now what? This is the question we will dive right into in this chapter. We will set up the necessary driver software on your host computer (be it Windows, Linux, or Mac), remotely connect to our board to look around a bit, and go over some basics on how to operate Beagle. The main topics in this chapter are:

  • Introducing the BeagleBone hardware

  • The operating system controlling the board

  • Logging into Linux and performing basic file operations

  • Creating a Hello World Python program