About the Author

Charles A. Hamilton is the owner of HudsonWerks, a New York City-based DIY hardware and development shop for new products. Passionate about emerging technologies, open source hardware, and the maker movement, his background as a "technology creative", entrepreneur, and maker provides readers with a unique perspective.

Besides BeagleBone Black, Charles works frequently with other hardware platforms, including the Raspberry Pi, Arduino, and UDOO development boards, open source board architecture and PCB design, micromechatronics, and sensors. He is also an advocate and keen user of emerging low-cost manufacturing and design tools such as 3-D printers and laser cutters. Among other subjects, Charles keenly follows advances and design challenges in the arenas of IoT, space technologies, and next-generation health and wellness devices. He writes and blogs at http://www.hudsonwerks.com.

He is a former creative director at AT&T and product developer at a New York City-based new product development agency. Charles' development expertise spans devices in the consumer electronics, digital media, display, voice recognition, and telecommunication markets. He is also a proud papa to his 4-year-old son, Hudson.

I would first like to acknowledge the support of Jason Kridner, the Texas Instruments embedded applications Evangelist and founder of Beagleboard.org, without whom this book would never have achieved liftoff. Additionally, immeasurable thanks need to go to John Reaves of Learning Worlds and Masuo Kitano of Seiko Epson Corporation, who ignited the prototyping-and-build-something-crazy spark in me. Jonathan Hirschman of PCB:NG gave it a further push by showing us the way to cook up PCBs from scratch, literally. Finally, more than thanks are necessary to the two people that showed the greatest forbearance in seeing this project to its conclusion: my wife, Mary, and little boy, Hudson. Without their encouragement, patience, and love, this book would never have happened. For this, I am humbled and grateful.