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

Device Tree and its roots


Linus Torvalds was sad and mad. ARM was making Linus sad and mad. There were too many cooks, too many ingredients, too many new hardware variations in the world of ARM devices. The architecture had become so popular in the embedded computing world that a thicket of third-party devices were being cooked up to work with ARM. Custom hardware drivers and custom kernels were everywhere. This was making the Linux kernel playground increasingly chaotic.

So, Linus roared: go back to the kitchen, cooks, and make a better recipe! So, they did. Or, so the story goes. Thus was born Device Tree....

For beginners, Device Tree can be a bit difficult to wrap one's head around. However, in order to use BeagleBone Black in more interesting projects, an understanding is often critical. Basically, Device Tree is a data structure to describe the hardware that you add on to your board. With Device Tree, the details of a device are available to the board without needing to be hardcoded...