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

Introduction


Things are getting interesting: no more blinky LEDs from sysfs. It's real time...time to learn about how to make your BeagleBone Black perform real-time tricks.

This is not to say that the BeagleBone Black is pokey. The challenge is that, nowadays, innovators, developers, product designers, and engineers always demand faster, more predictable results, especially in scenarios where small latencies can make the difference between success or crash. Crash in this case meaning bang, crash goes the device, not just a software crash.

So, in this chapter, we will examine recipes that help boost the responsiveness of your BBB under certain conditions. To perform this, we will explore the following topics:

  • Kernel modifications for the purpose of creating real-time environments using:

    • RT_PREEMPT

    • Xenomai

  • Programmable real-time units

And now for something completely contradictory: Linux is not real time. It is fast and efficient, but it is not a real-time system.

Harummph! But isn't Linux supposed...