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 videos and displays in projects


It's one thing to just plug an HDMI monitor into the mini HDMI port on your BBB and get a picture. In many cases, this is may be all you care about for a project. However, for bona fide embedded or mobile scenarios where you need a display, using the HDMI option can be overkill; your needs are low power, small form factor, and just enough display to convey basic information.

In this section, we will take a look at two other options for display: a mini OLED display available as a breadboard-able PCB and a custom BBB cape designed with a very small LCD panel.

Hooking up a mini OLED

In this recipe, we will take a look at a very small 1.3 inch OLED display with a resolution of 128 x 64 pixels. It has a monochrome screen, which means that we will not be watching Lawrence of Arabia on this device. Instead, we will explore some methods for basic control and input and take a preliminary peek at typical design choices for embedded devices.

The nice thing about...