This chapter will focus on giving you an introduction to what physical computing systems are, what they are composed of, how they work and where they are used. First, we will get started with a brief introduction to physical computing systems, which will give you a basic idea about the basic composition of physical computing systems with an example followed by its application areas, and at the end we will see how we can build our own physical computing system using BeagleBone Black with a push button and LED using Python programming to change the LED state based on the push button press input.
The contents of the chapter are divided into the following topics:
Prerequisites
Introduction to physical computing systems
Basic elements of physical computing systems
Application areas
Simple project: Push button input triggers event on Python code to toggle LED on and off