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

What is UART?


Universal Asynchronous Receiver Transmitter (UART) is a simple and popular way of serial communication. UART is used to convert data bytes on a parallel bus to serial bit stream which can be sent on a communication line. If this bit stream is given to another UART, it can convert back to the original data bytes. UART uses asynchronous communication, which means it follows all the asynchronous bus rules we learned in the previous section. It also uses optional error checking methods. It was actually a serial chip inside a PC motherboard or serial devices inside a modem, serial mouse, and so on. This IC implements a basic serial communications protocol that transmits and receives up to eight data bits at a time. Over time, UART logic has become widely adopted by embedded systems to give a user system log and console access. Even BeagleBone has serial pins near the P9 header to get system log and console access. Many microprocessors/microcontrollers and electronic devices have...