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)

Hardware interfaces


With any kind of electronic components/designs, the manufacturer always provides some kind of specification documentation. Same goes with our Beagle.

BB foundation provides System Reference Manual (SRM from now on), and you can find it at http://beagleboard.org/hardware/design. Just check your board revision (it should be printed on your box), and download the correct one. All instructions in this book are based on the first production release for BeagleBone Black called Rev A5A. At the time of writing this book, the latest revision stands at A6.

You should keep in mind that BeagleBone Black and the original white model don't have the same General-Purpose Input/Output (GPIO) pin layout. In this book all the examples are presented on the black model, so please take care if you are using the white model, and follow the guidelines given in this book!

So back to the SRM; this documentation is very useful while planning and designing your own systems, and usually you end up looking...