Book Image

GNU/Linux Rapid Embedded Programming

By : Rodolfo Giometti
Book Image

GNU/Linux Rapid Embedded Programming

By: Rodolfo Giometti

Overview of this book

Embedded computers have become very complex in the last few years and developers need to easily manage them by focusing on how to solve a problem without wasting time in finding supported peripherals or learning how to manage them. The main challenge with experienced embedded programmers and engineers is really how long it takes to turn an idea into reality, and we show you exactly how to do it. This book shows how to interact with external environments through specific peripherals used in the industry. We will use the latest Linux kernel release 4.4.x and Debian/Ubuntu distributions (with embedded distributions like OpenWrt and Yocto). The book will present popular boards in the industry that are user-friendly to base the rest of the projects on - BeagleBone Black, SAMA5D3 Xplained, Wandboard and system-on-chip manufacturers. Readers will be able to take their first steps in programming the embedded platforms, using C, Bash, and Python/PHP languages in order to get access to the external peripherals. More about using and programming device driver and accessing the peripherals will be covered to lay a strong foundation. The readers will learn how to read/write data from/to the external environment by using both C programs or a scripting language (Bash/PHP/Python) and how to configure a device driver for a specific hardware. After finishing this book, the readers will be able to gain a good knowledge level and understanding of writing, configuring, and managing drivers, controlling and monitoring applications with the help of efficient/quick programming and will be able to apply these skills into real-world projects.
Table of Contents (26 chapters)
GNU/Linux Rapid Embedded Programming
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

The wireless tools


These tools are a collection of user-space utilities written to support the configuration of the WLAN devices and some related aspects of networking using the Linux Wireless Extension.

Note

The Linux Wireless Extension is a generic API that allows a driver to expose to the user-space configuration and statistics specific to common WLAN devices. Further information on this topic can be accessed at:  http://www.labs.hpe.com/personal/Jean_Tourrilhes/Linux/Tools.html .

They are held in the wireless-tools package, and they should be already installed in the Wandboard (otherwise, we can install them as usual).

One of the most important tools of this collection is iwconfig, which is used to manipulate the basic wireless parameters. As reported in the command's description, the iwconfig command is very similar to ifconfig. In fact, it can be used in a similar manner to get basic information of our WLAN, as shown here:

root@wb:~# iwconfig wlan0
wlan0     IEEE 802.11abgn  ESSID:off...