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)

Transistors


You might have already wondered what can we do if we would like to control devices that require higher voltages or current levels than those that are available from our headers.

For example, you might want to engage a 12 V motor that moves a rig holding your SLR camera for a time lapse movie, or you might want to use a high-power LED that requires much more current than the usual 4-6 mA available in our GPIO pins. And there are plenty of other use cases you might want to consider.

For this kind of application, transistors are ideal. Without going too deep into the theory on how they operate, you can think that transistors can be used as switches of a certain kind that you can operate with a low-power input signal (they are also used as amplifiers, but this is not really in the scope of this book).

Transistors mostly fall into two main types: field effect transistors (FETs) and bipolar junction transistors (BJTs). We will focus on BJTs and their main categories: NPN and PNP. Both...