Suppose you want to maintain the temperature of the machine. If the temperature of the machine goes beyond 50 degree Celsius, you want to be notified by e-mail. This exercise can be part of your home automation. An Internet connection is essential for this exercise. Your router to which you connected BeagleBone should have some kind of working Internet connection via fiber, WAN port, DSL RJ11, or GSM dongle.
We are going to use the nodemailer JavaScript library for sending an e-mail using a Gmail account. Let's install it by running the following command in the BeagleBone shell:
sudo npm install –g nodemailer
The source code and other information can be found here: https://github.com/nodemailer/nodemailer.
We are going to use a Gmail account to send e-mail. Even a local mail server can be set up on BeagleBone to send e-mails. But it is a learning curve itself. Google does not allow you to e-mail directly using its SMTP servers. You need to use some settings...