Book Image

BeagleBone Home Automation Blueprints

By : Rodolfo Giometti
Book Image

BeagleBone Home Automation Blueprints

By: Rodolfo Giometti

Overview of this book

BeagleBone is a microboard PC that runs Linux. It can connect to the Internet and can run OSes such as Android and Ubuntu. BeagleBone is used for a variety of different purposes and projects, from simple projects such as building a thermostat to more advanced ones such as home security systems. Packed with real-world examples, this book will provide you with examples of how to connect several sensors and an actuator to the BeagleBone Black. You’ll learn how to give access to them, in order to realize simple-to-complex monitoring and controlling systems that will help you take control of the house. You will also find software examples of implementing web interfaces using the classical PHP/HTML pair with JavaScript, using complex APIs to interact with a Google Docs account, WhatsApp, or Facebook. This guide is an invaluable tutorial if you are planning to use a BeagleBone Black in a home automation project.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
BeagleBone Home Automation Blueprints
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Setting up the hardware


As just said in the previous section, this time we have to connect a USB device and two serial devices. Regarding the USB device, the main problem is that it has a nonstandard USB connector, so we have to find a trick to solve the problem (see the following part); while for the serial devices, we have to find two free serial ports on the BeagleBone Black's expansion connectors.

Regarding this last issue, we should remember that the BeagleBone Black has six on-board serial ports that are disabled by default, except the /dev/ttyO0 device, which is coupled to the serial console. If we do log in into the system, we can easily verify it by using the following command:

root@BeagleBone:~# ls -l /dev/ttyO*
crw-rw---- 1 root tty 248, 0 Apr 23 20:20 /dev/ttyO0

To enable the other serial ports, we need to modify the kernel settings in order to enable the serial port that we wish to use. The choice of which ports to enable depends on the pins we'd like to use to connect our devices...