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

Using the Cloud9 IDE


As the name implies, Cloud9 is a cloud-hosted toolkit. For BBB, it provides an integrated, open source development environment to build BoneScript-powered (JavaScript) code. Its strengths are JavaScript and Node.js (which it actually uses on the backend; we'll discuss this in the next section), though it is also very flexible with other programming languages such as PHP, Ruby, and Python.

The IDE comes preloaded and ready to use immediately on the BBB firmware with no setup necessary. With your board still connected via USB, let's do a snappy recipe.

How to do it…

  1. To load the IDE, open a browser window to the following URL: http://192.168.7.2:3000/ide.html. The IDE will open to a window like this:

  2. Next, change the color settings to improve readability in the UI. The default black scheme is funereal; let's change it to Cloud9 Bright Theme instead.

    Note

    Not all UI screens change to the new color scheme; there's a temporary bug in this beta release of Cloud9's IDE.

  3. One handy feature...