Book Image

BeagleBone Black Cookbook

Book Image

BeagleBone Black Cookbook

Overview of this book

There are many single-board controllers and computers such as Arduino, Udoo, or Raspberry Pi, which can be used to create electronic prototypes on circuit boards. However, when it comes to creating more advanced projects, BeagleBone Black provides a sophisticated alternative. Mastering the BeagleBone Black enables you to combine it with sensors and LEDs, add buttons, and marry it to a variety of add-on boards. You can transform this tiny device into the brain for an embedded application or an endless variety of electronic inventions and prototypes. With dozens of how-tos, this book kicks off with the basic steps for setting up and running the BeagleBone Black for the first time, from connecting the necessary hardware and using the command line with Linux commands to installing new software and controlling your system remotely. Following these recipes, more advanced examples take you through scripting, debugging, and working with software source files, eventually working with the Linux kernel. Subsequently, you will learn how to exploit the board's real-time functions. We will then discover exciting methods for using sound and video with the system before marching forward into an exploration of recipes for building Internet of Things projects. Finally, the book finishes with a dramatic arc upward into outer space, when you explore ways to build projects for tracking and monitoring satellites.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
BeagleBone Black Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Using Node.js with Johnny-Five


In this section, we will cover a recipe for Johnny-Five, a unique library built in JavaScript/Node.js that is increasingly getting the attention of the open source software world. Although positioned as a robotics library, Johnny-Five is a great tool set to scratch the itch that many JS developers have for hardware now.

One of its principal advantages is that it greatly simplifies the process of managing pins and allows a programmer to use more obvious naming conventions in their code, such as LEDs, buttons, sensors, and servos, rather than high pins, low pins, and so on. Although it does not yet have out-of-the-box ease that BoneScript has for BBB, you should consider it a viable and, in some ways, more robust alternative. It is also a more modular library than BoneScript as the code can be easily ported to a variety of platforms. Finally, if you are an Arduino aficionado, you will appreciate its familiarity as it is based on the Arduino Firmata protocol.

How...