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

Kernel application binary interface


Now, let's do a quick, simple task with a command to find out which kernel we are running. The command can serve as a first-level "diagnostic" tool when we need to troubleshoot errors or incompatibilities with any software we want to add or compile for our system.

Getting ready

This is a simple setup, so all you need to do is connect your board via USB to your host computer and fire it up. Then, open a terminal window.

How to do it...

The steps to do this are simple:

  1. Firstly, log in as the root user using the following command:

    $ sudo -i
    
  2. Now, run a command that tells us a few important things about the kernel. Let's choose the -a option to show all information about the system, as follows:

    root@beaglebone:~# uname -a
    Linux beaglebone 3.8.13-bone67 #1 SMP Wed Sep 24 01:36:09 UTC 2014 armv7l GNU/Linux
    

    From this command's output, we discover several items of interest, as follows:

    The kernel version: According to our output, the installed version of the Linux kernel...