In this chapter, we will present three of the most used development kits for industrial applications. Respect to the most famous Raspberry Pi, these boards are based on widely used CPUs on custom boards in an industrial environment. In fact, while Raspberry Pi's CPU is not easily available on the components market, the CPUs of the following boards are widely available with different professional board makers.
In the upcoming sections, after a brief introduction of each board, we'll see how we can set them up to run a complete GNU/Linux distribution and then get access to the system console. After that, we will install a complete developing system on each board in order to be able to add our own programs.
A little tutorial about how to set up the host system is also present, and you can use it to set up a GNU/Linux-based working machine or a dedicated virtual one.
This chapter can be skipped if you already have a running embedded system with the relative host PC. However, you should consider reading it anyway due the fact that we'll present an overview of the embedded devices we're going to use in this book. In this chapter, we'll fix some common terms used in this book, and you may learn a different way to install a running system on your boards. Also, last but not least, the system that is already running on your boards may be different from the ones presented here. This means that you may need to change some commands presented in this book accordingly in order to have functional examples.