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 4. Extending Server Capabilities

Now that we have a simple networked client and server architecture working, it's time to start doing something a bit more serious with it. Currently, the server is not very useful in the end and cannot really do any complex tasks or handle any real input.

We shall start extending server capabilities to make it more useful for real-life tasks. We will show you how to build a foundation so that the server can easily be extended even further for any type of remote activity.

In this chapter, we will also introduce some new external and internal hardware and learn how to work with them. We will cover the following topics:

  • Learning how to use temperature and light sensors

  • Using the onboard ADC

  • Creating a more robust client server model, one that can support data transfer

  • Talking about transistors and how they allow us to be free of voltage and current limitations our target board sets