Until this point, the LED flasher has hardcoded parameters. It would be very nice to control the flashing with a user interface. The BeagleBone is naturally connected to the network. So far, all our accesses have been via a network over the USB interface. The BeagleBone also has an Ethernet interface that we have not used yet. Our next few exercises are to add an interface to change the behavior of the LED flasher.
Note
Up to this point, all our exercises were done using shell scripting. The BeagleBone ships with another language, BoneScript, which allows the BeagleBone to be programmed using a language similar to JavaScript. Shell script was chosen for exercises over BoneScript to provide an easier path for programmers who are not web oriented to transition to the BeagleBone environment.