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

What is a video device?


A video-capture device is a device that is able to convert an analog video signal (such as that produced by a video camera, analog TV tuners, or other analog sources) to digital video. Then, the resulting digital data can be stored in a file (as AVI, MJPEG, or other image formats), sent over the network as a video stream (as MJPEG or H264, for instance), or simply displayed on local display.

Tip

However, as we'll see in the upcoming sections, for Linux, video devices are those devices that are capable of generating a video image (as digital TV tuners), regardless of whether they are digital or analog devices.

An embedded device can be equipped with a video device for several reasons. However, the main one is usually for video surveillance purposes or video monitoring. The basic usage can be simply sending the images to a remote user, but more often, in these last days, it's not rare that the embedded system can do some analysis on the video stream in order to detect...