Book Image

BeagleBone Black Cookbook

Book Image

BeagleBone Black Cookbook

Overview of this book

There are many single-board controllers and computers such as Arduino, Udoo, or Raspberry Pi, which can be used to create electronic prototypes on circuit boards. However, when it comes to creating more advanced projects, BeagleBone Black provides a sophisticated alternative. Mastering the BeagleBone Black enables you to combine it with sensors and LEDs, add buttons, and marry it to a variety of add-on boards. You can transform this tiny device into the brain for an embedded application or an endless variety of electronic inventions and prototypes. With dozens of how-tos, this book kicks off with the basic steps for setting up and running the BeagleBone Black for the first time, from connecting the necessary hardware and using the command line with Linux commands to installing new software and controlling your system remotely. Following these recipes, more advanced examples take you through scripting, debugging, and working with software source files, eventually working with the Linux kernel. Subsequently, you will learn how to exploit the board's real-time functions. We will then discover exciting methods for using sound and video with the system before marching forward into an exploration of recipes for building Internet of Things projects. Finally, the book finishes with a dramatic arc upward into outer space, when you explore ways to build projects for tracking and monitoring satellites.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
BeagleBone Black Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Programmable real-time units – an introduction


Now it's time for hardware magic, for serious real time, and a shift away from mere software mods on the kernel.

It's time for Programmable Real-Time Units And Industrial Controller Subsystem, also known as PRU-ICSS, or PRUs. How's that for a mouthful? More techno-acronyms are always so helpful and delicious. OK. Let's deconstruct it.

PRUs are specialized chips on the BeagleBone Black that give you real time task control over your system. These two 32-bit microcontrollers are actually separate CPUs from the main CPU and the operating system. That's right: PRUs are separate hardware. This means they are not reliant on the core kernel and are more efficient at accessing I/O pins and driving real time events.

Having onboard PRUs is one of the BBB's big differentiators in the microcomputer market. Real-time hardware control typically requires adding on daughterboards such as FPGAs (another big scary acronym) that boost your system's mojo. Using PRUs...