Book Image

Programming the BeagleBone

By : Yogesh Chavan, Amit Pandurang Karpe
Book Image

Programming the BeagleBone

By: Yogesh Chavan, Amit Pandurang Karpe

Overview of this book

The whole world is moving from desktop computers to smartphones and embedded systems. We are moving towards utilizing Internet of Things (IoT). An exponential rise in the demand for embedded systems and programming in the last few years is driving programmers to use embedded development boards such as Beaglebone. BeagleBone is an ultra-small, cost-effective computer that comes with a powerful hardware. It runs a full-fledged Debian Linux OS and provides numerous electronics solutions. BeagleBone is open source and comes with an Ethernet port, which allows you to deploy IoT projects without any additions to the board. It provides plenty of GPIO, Anlaog pins, and UART, I2C, SPI pins which makes it the right choice to perform electronics projects. This gives you all the benefits of Linux kernel such as multitasking, multiusers, and extensive device driver support. This allows you to do programming in many languages including high-level languages such as JavaScript and Python. This book aims to exploit the hardware and software capabilities of BeagleBone to create real-life electronics and IoT applications quickly. It is divided into two parts. The first part covers JavaScript programs. The second part provides electronics projects and IoT applications in Python. First, you will learn to use BeagleBone as tool to write useful applications on embedded systems. Starting with the basics needed to set up BeagleBone and the Cloud9 IDE, this book covers interfacing with various electronics components via simple programs. The electronics theory related to these components is then explained in depth before you use them in a program. Finally, the book helps you create some real-life IoT applications.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
Programming the BeagleBone
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgment
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
BeagleBone Capes
Index

Hello World program


Let's do a quick and dirty Hello World JavaScript program. In this program, we are just printing Hello World in the console view provided by Cloud9:

  1. Go to the File menu. Click on the New File button. You will see a new code editor tab opened with title Untitled1.

  2. Write the following code in the code editor view:

    // My first hello world program.
     console.log("Hello World");

    Tip

    Downloading the example code

    You can download the example code files from your account at http://www.packtpub.com for all the Packt Publishing books you have purchased. If you purchased this book elsewhere, you can visit http://www.packtpub.com/support and register to have the files e-mailed directly to you.

  3. Go to the File menu again and save as hello.js. Now, you should see the tab title is changed from Untitled1 to hello.js. Now Cloud9 knows this is JavaScript program. It will highlight the program with different colors.

  4. Click on the run button at the top of screen. You will see the Debugger toolbar from right side is expanded to the Debug pane. Click on the Resume button on expanded pane or press the F8 key. You should see the Hello World text in the output view at the bottom.

Explanation

In this tiny code, the first line is the comment. JavaScript supports C and C++ style commenting. So the pattern /* ... */ is used in multi-line commenting and the pattern// is used for single line commenting. The second line is calling the log() method on the object console. We have given the string Hello World as a parameter to the log() method. A semicolon ; denotes a terminated statement. Here, the console object provides access to the browser's debugging console. console.log() is a method to print string. It prints Hello World in the console.

As we are using a built-in JavaScript object, we have not loaded a JavaScript module/library. You can try more methods provided by the console object. You can get a detailed document about JavaScript at: http://www.w3schools.com/js/ and https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript.