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

Running an ultrasonic range sensor with the PRUs


The fast twitch eye muscle on a robot is only as good as its processor. And with many robotic projects where mobility and motion is part of the design, the speed and reliability of the twitch can be the difference between a successful foray or a smash and crash.

Which is where nanosecond response time and reliability—a PRU specialty—is crucial. To that end, let us look at a more ambitious recipe that cooks up a way to use the PRUs with one of those cheap and ubiquitous ultrasonic range sensors, the kind that are commonly found on basic robotic devices. The sensor uses sound to send a ping, similar to what a submarine does to measure the time between sending and receiving a signal for determining distance from an object.

Getting ready

The requirements are as follows:

  • BBB powered over 5V power supply. If you only power the board via the USB tether, you will deliver very unreliable power to the sensor, so be sure you maintain a 5V supply.

  • Internet...