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

Satellite tracking using GPredict and RTL-SDR


SatNOGS is an open source initiative to build a network of ground stations around the world to track satellites. Thousands of low Earth orbit (LEO) satellites are its principal focus. Its goal is to provide a toolset and tech stack (hardware and software) that is low cost and easy to build.

The project supports VHF and UHF bands for satellite reception with the default configuration. Its software automatically tracks, receives, and records satellites as they pass overhead while automatically scheduling observations and recording them to an online database shared among other participating ground observers.

For the purpose of simplicity, we will not cover how to build the whole hardware part of the system, which includes a high gain antenna, tracking motors, and a standard RTL-SDR dongle as a receiver. In our recipes, we will only use the dongle and a low-cost antenna. You are welcome to get more ambitious with the hardware. More details are at the...