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)

Setting up our Android project


On your browser, navigate to http://developer.android.com/sdk/index.html; the website should present you with a download link to the appropriate Android Development Tools (ADT) bundle. The web page automatically provides a proper version for your working platform, and thus downloading and installing it is a fairly straightforward process.

Tip

If you already have an existing Eclipse installation on your machine, you can also save some disk space and download only the ADT part from the same page. The installation process is slightly more complicated in this case, but the instructions on the web page can help you with that.

Open the ADT bundle (or the Eclipse environment) that you've just installed. Before we start a new project, you will most likely have to download an SDK that is suitable for your particular device. In our example, we will be using Android 4.0 (code-named "Ice Cream Sandwich"). However, we will avoid using any recent APIs; so if you have an existing...