Chapter 1, Cloud9 IDE, gives the essential information you need before you start programming on BeagleBone. It gives hardware and software-related information about the boards in the BeagleBone series. It provides you different ways to connect to BeagleBone and start Cloud9 IDE to program.

Chapter 2, Blinking Onboard LEDs, covers how to use Cloud9 IDE to write the first physical computing program—blinking onboard LED on the BeagleBone. It covers another program that creates a display pattern among the LEDs.

Chapter 3, Blinking External LEDs, explains the General Purpose Input/Output (GPIO) theory and how to attach the external LEDs to the GPIO pins. Then, it covers blinking LED and display pattern programs.

Chapter 4, Controlling LED Using a Push Button, teaches how to read from input components using polling. The interrupt method programs for each of these methods are covered.

Chapter 5, Reading from Analog Sensors, covers the theory about Analog I/O and how BeagleBone supports it. Then, it has programs to read from the TMP36 temperature sensor and light sensor.

Chapter 6, PWM – Writing Analog Information, explains how the Pulse Width Modulation (PWM) technique is used to write the analog information and how BeagleBone supports it. It has a program to fade-in LED and control the servo motor using PWM.

Chapter 7, Internet of Things with BeagleBone, explains how to implement IoT in JavaScript using BeagleBone. It covers important information about IoT. Then, there are three real-life examples. Two of them are programs to remotely control LED and servo motor. Another program is to shoot an e-mail alert when overtemperature is detected.

Chapter 8, Physical Computing in Python, explains rewriting all the programs that are covered from Chapter 3 to Chapter 6 in the Python language.

Chapter 9, UART, I2C, SPI Programming, covers popular buses in the embedded systems—UART, I2C, and SPI. All these protocols are explained here in detail. This chapter covers programs that communicate over each of these buses.

Chapter 10, Internet of Things Using Python, teaches IoT programs in Python. It has programs that were similar to the programs covered in Chapter 7. It has an additional program that uploads the temperature data over the Cloud website and we will receive the temperature graph over time for analysis.

Appendix A, GPIO Control in Bash, teaches how to set the direction and turn GPIO on/off directly by writing sysfs files.

Appendix B, BeagleBone Capes, provides information about BeagleBone add-on boards called capes.

Appendix C, Pinmux and the Device Tree, gives details about the new hardware description files that help the kernel to initialize BeagleBone. They are called device tree. It covers how to use the device tree files to select the role of the BeagleBone pin among other possibilities.

This book does not cover BeagleBone Programmable Realtime Units (PRUs) and building/customising installable image.

The required hardware is as follows:

The optional hardware is as follows:

This book is for anyone who wants to learn programming on the embedded systems and understand key concepts such as GPIO, PWM, and bus. It is intended for a programming beginner who is willing to explore the embedded systems programming by doing electronics projects. This book will be helpful for a BeagleBone owner who wants to quickly implement small-scale home automation solutions. Some hands-on experience is expected on C or Python. Some familiarity with electronics is helpful. However, it is not essential.

In this book, you will find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.

Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "It can be turned on by doing shell access to BeagleBone and executing command sudo ifconfig usb0 up."

A block of code is set as follows:

var b = require('bonescript');
var state = b.HIGH;

b.pinMode("USR3", b.OUTPUT);
b.digitalWrite("USR3", state);

setInterval(blink,1000);

function blink()
{
  if(state == b.LOW)
    state = b.HIGH;
  else
    state = b.LOW;
  b.digitalWrite("USR3", state);
}

Any command-line input or output is written as follows:

sudo dd  if=<image_file_path> of=/dev/sdx bs=1M ; sync

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: "You can stop the loop by clicking on the red Stop button in Cloud9."

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To send us general feedback, simply e-mail <[email protected]>, and mention the book's title in the subject of your message.

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Now that you are the proud owner of a Packt book, we have a number of things to help you to get the most from your purchase.

We also provide you with a PDF file that has color images of the screenshots/diagrams used in this book. The color images will help you better understand the changes in the output. You can download this file from: https://www.packtpub.com/sites/default/files/downloads/ProgrammingTheBeagleBone_Graphics.pdf.