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

Airplane tracking with RTL-SDR


Before diving into some of the more challenging and arcane "upper atmosphere" options to use RTL-SDR, we will do a recipe that's a little easier and more down to Earth, namely tracking planes.

This recipe is derived from a variety of sources, including David Scheltema's tutorial on Make Magazine (http://makezine.com/projects/tracking-planes-with-rtl-sdr/), which is a Debian variation on an RPi version. It also comes via the posts of David Taylor of Edinburgh, Scotland (satsignal.eu/raspberry-pi/dump1090.html) and Drew Fustini of Chicago, Illinois (element14.com/community/community/designcenter/single-board-computers/blog/2014/04/07/sdr-and-sbc-cheap-thrills-with-radio-waves) for Angstrom on the BBB. Additionally, Adafruit has a lesson for the RPi, which either borrows from or is inspired by the references mentioned before. All of these miss some steps, however, to make it fly on the current BeagleBone Black Debian distros, be it Wheezy or Jessie.

Getting ready...