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

Introduction


There are thousands of satellite "birds" up there. Buzzing around at all hours of the day and night—whether commercial, military, or educational—these satellites send and receive data from professional and amateur ground stations around the globe. And as satellites get cheaper, the number of them has proliferated, leading to an increasing problem for potential catastrophic collisions in space.

Tracking all that activity is a challenge. So, why not employ your own BBB in this endeavor?

Amateur satellite watchers have been around nearly since the dawn of Sputnik, an activity that fell under the rubric of ham radio, or HamSat. Nowadays, there is a host of interesting tools available that play nicely on Linux as well as microcomputers, such as BeagleBone Black.

For your smartphone alone, you can find dozens of free, downloadable tracking apps. Given their basic purpose—telling you when a satellite might pass nearby or passively receiving basic monitoring data—they deliver quick hits...