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)

Environmental sensors


Up to this point, we have only been working with digital input to our board. In the button example covered in Chapter 2, Input and Output, the external hardware input only gave us the state of the button, a high or a low state. In this chapter, we will talk about analog input; we will measure the voltage on a pin and observe its change over time. For this purpose, our board has several pins that are connected to ADC. ADC converts analog voltage to a digital value, instead of just indicating a high or a low state.

Environmental sensors, such as temperature or light sensors, change their output voltages depending on the surrounding conditions. This way, for example, a temperature of 25 degrees will result in a different output voltage than 15 degrees. For our home automation server, there are a couple of interesting sensors.

Light sensor

These sensors, also known as photocells/photo resistors or Light Dependent Resistors (LDR), are resistors whose value changes depending...