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

Adding other interfaces – ISS tracking and text to speech


It's time to make the dog talk. Or, at least, make BeagleBone Black a little more verbal. Here, we will show you the ingredients to have the board tell us—instead of showing us—when the International Space Station is getting close.

Getting ready

The materials needed are:

  • A USB Audio dongle—We will use an inexpensive, low-profile version (http://bit.ly/1KxQatr), though any USB version is fine

  • An audio speaker with a mini jack that plugs into the audio dongle

  • A USB-powered hub

  • A 5V power supply

  • An Internet connection, Ethernet or Wi-Fi

Power up your BBB via the 5V supply, open a terminal window on your client box, then SSH into the board.

How to do it…

There are five parts to this recipe:

  • Audio setup and testing

  • Installing Text to Speech (TTS) and testing

  • Python coding to calculate the ISS's current distance from you

  • Bash scripting

  • Doing a cron job to automatically run all of these

Part I: Audio Setup and testing

Perform the following steps:

  1. Although...