Preface

The BeagleBone Black is an embedded system that is able to run an embedded GNU/Linux distribution as well as a normal (and powerful) distribution, such as Debian or Ubuntu, and where the user can connect several external peripherals to it via two dedicated expansion connectors.

By having a powerful distribution capability with an easily expandable embedded board, the BeagleBone black system is a state-of-the-art device that allows you to build powerful and versatile monitoring and controlling applications.

Packed with real-world examples, this book will try to fill the gap by showing you how some peripherals can be connected to the BeagleBone Black, and how you can get access to them in order to develop your own monitoring and control systems.

After the introductory chapter about how to set up the board from scratch, we'll take a look at compilation and cross-compilation of both user space and kernel space applications with some basic debugging techniques. Next, we'll move to high-level applications, such as daemons, and high-level programming using scripting languages, such as PHP, Python, and Bash. Finally, we'll see how a system daemon works and how it can be implemented from scratch using several programming languages.

This book will also explain how several computer peripherals can be connected to the BeagleBone Black board. We'll present several kinds of devices, such as serial ports, USB host ports and devices, and SPI/I²C/1-Wire devices. For each peripheral, we'll see how it can be connected to the BeagleBone Black, and how the developer can get access to it from the user space, and in some circumstances we'll see some kernel code too.

The hardware is presented in a generic manner, so no BeagleBone Black capes are presented in this book! This is because each cape has tons of documentation on the Internet, and using a generic approach allows you to better understand how the hardware management works and how to replicate the examples on another GNU/Linux-based system with a little effort.

Accessing all peripherals and writing good monitoring and controlling programs can both be complex tasks; it's easy to make mistakes early in the development stage that leads to serious problems in production. Learning the best practices before starting your project will help you avoid these problems and ensure that your project will be a success.