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 the SatNogs Network client / ground station and RTL-SDR


In the previous recipe, we compiled and installed the part that actually tracks the satellite. Now, we need to add the piece of the system that allows us to manage the potential flood of data, share it with others, and have them share their data back with us.

Note that this has been tested successfully on Debian Wheezy (3.8) and Debian Jessie (13.4).

Getting ready

The materials needed are as follows:

  • An RTL-SDR dongle.

  • An antenna—for the recommended low-cost antenna that we are using, refer to the Diamond Antenna in the prior recipe on plane tracking (http://www.aesham.com/glass/magnet/diamond-antenna-mr-75s/).

  • An antenna adapter—if you use an antenna other than the small one that often comes with the dongle, such as the one mentioned before, you will need to buy a separate adapter. Don't worry! They're cheap too, and ours was only about USD $6.00 (http://amzn.to/1WoB7Lq). Attach the antenna to the RTL-SDR dongle...