Book Image

Programming the BeagleBone

By : Yogesh Chavan, Amit Pandurang Karpe
Book Image

Programming the BeagleBone

By: Yogesh Chavan, Amit Pandurang Karpe

Overview of this book

The whole world is moving from desktop computers to smartphones and embedded systems. We are moving towards utilizing Internet of Things (IoT). An exponential rise in the demand for embedded systems and programming in the last few years is driving programmers to use embedded development boards such as Beaglebone. BeagleBone is an ultra-small, cost-effective computer that comes with a powerful hardware. It runs a full-fledged Debian Linux OS and provides numerous electronics solutions. BeagleBone is open source and comes with an Ethernet port, which allows you to deploy IoT projects without any additions to the board. It provides plenty of GPIO, Anlaog pins, and UART, I2C, SPI pins which makes it the right choice to perform electronics projects. This gives you all the benefits of Linux kernel such as multitasking, multiusers, and extensive device driver support. This allows you to do programming in many languages including high-level languages such as JavaScript and Python. This book aims to exploit the hardware and software capabilities of BeagleBone to create real-life electronics and IoT applications quickly. It is divided into two parts. The first part covers JavaScript programs. The second part provides electronics projects and IoT applications in Python. First, you will learn to use BeagleBone as tool to write useful applications on embedded systems. Starting with the basics needed to set up BeagleBone and the Cloud9 IDE, this book covers interfacing with various electronics components via simple programs. The electronics theory related to these components is then explained in depth before you use them in a program. Finally, the book helps you create some real-life IoT applications.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
Programming the BeagleBone
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgment
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
BeagleBone Capes
Index

A Program to check light intensity


In Chapter 5, Reading from Analog Sensors, we used a LDR (Light Dependent Resistor) to measure light intensity. Let's write a Python program to do the same.

Connect the LDR to P9_38 as shown in the diagram in Chapter 5. It includes a voltage divider to reduce the high magnitude of output voltage. Type the following program in Cloud9, save it as LDR.py and run. It will print the output voltage. If the LDR is exposed to bright sunlight, you may get the output message – Looks like a bright sunny day. If this is not possible, point a torch on the LDR surface. You should see voltage has increased. In case it detects a high voltage, it will print that it is a sunny day.

#!/usr/bin/python
import Adafruit_BBIO.ADC as ADC
from time import sleep

LDR = "P9_38"

ADC.setup()

while True:
    volts = ADC.read(LDR)* 1.8
    print "Voltage at input pin = " + str(volts)
    if (volts > 1.6):
        print "Looks like bright sunny day"
    sleep(1)

Explanation

This program...