What this book covers

Chapter 1, Installing the Developing System, shows you how to use the BeagleBone Black's on-board operating system and how to (re)install and set up a complete developing system, based on the Debian distribution, starting from zero.

Chapter 2, Managing the System Console, shows you how a serial console works, and how you can use it in order to control/monitor the system activities (that is, monitoring the kernel messages, managing the bootloader, and so on). At the end of this chapter, a special section will introduce you to some bootloader commands.

Chapter 3, Compiling versus Cross-compiling, show you all the compiling steps in both kernel and user space to easily add a new driver that is not included in the standard BeagleBone Black's kernel and/or to recompile a user-space tool, which is not included in the Debian distribution.

Chapter 4, Quick Programming with Scripts, shows you how to install and use some common scripting languages in the BeagleBone Black board, and then how to solve a real problem by writing the solution in each language, in order to show you the differences between the usage of these languages.

Chapter 5, Device Drivers, shows you a possible implementation of a very simple driver (by writing a proper kernel module), in order to show you some basics of the Linux kernel's internals.

Chapter 6, Serial Ports and TTY Devices, discusses the serial ports, which is one of the most important peripheral classes a computer can have. We'll see how we can manage them in a Linux system in order to use a real serial device.

Chapter 7, Universal Serial Bus – USB, shows you how the USB bus works, the different types of USB devices and how they are supported in the BeagleBone Black's kernel. Simple management examples of real USB device and USB gadget are present.

Chapter 8, Inter-integrated Circuit – I²C, shows you how the I²C bus works, giving you a panoramic view, as wide as possible, of the most commonly used I²C devices; we'll discuss an EEPROM, a DAC, and an ADC.

Chapter 9, Serial Peripheral Interface – SPI, shows you how the SPI bus works by presenting you a simple temperature sensor management, as a quite complex device, such as a mini LCD display.

Chapter 10, 1-Wire Bus – W1, shows you how the 1-Wire bus works by showing you how to get access to a temperature sensor.

Chapter 11, Useful System Daemons, discusses the Unix daemon by showing you how an embedded computer developer can use existing daemons or new written ones in several programming languages.