In this chapter, you learned a few more features of the BeagleBone. Using what we wrote in Chapter 3, Building an LED Flasher, we improved it and turned our BeagleBone into a network-controlled LED flasher product.

We learned how to scan for I2C devices using low-level commands such as i2cdetect, read an I2C EEPROM using the Linux kernel I2C EEPROM driver, and served a web page from the BeagleBone. We also built a backend manager to support a user interface, used BoneScript to provide a web-based user interface to speak to the backend manager, and configured the Linux system software's systemd manager to automatically start our flasher manager on boot up.

While the LED flasher is an exercise to learn the BeagleBone, the same concepts are applicable in building other things with the BeagleBone. The important thing to remember is security considerations. They have been purposely left out to simplify the exercises. Many simple devices can be added to the BeagleBone using I2C. We will...