Using Yocto Project with BeagleBone Black is intended to be training material for newbies using Yocto Project. For this purpose, the hardware used is BeagleBone.
The book is written keeping reader engagement a top priority. By the end of the first chapter, you will have a working Yocto Project build running on BeagleBone and ready for further experimentation on the host side. Initially, we used existing examples and projects created by Yocto Project scripts to avoid any duplication, save time, and get things functional quickly while performing rigorous changes to learn about multiple scenarios. We won't use graphical tools, even if they are available, in order to avoid making things misleading as well as to avoid a shallow understanding. Also, sometimes, they sometime create confusion by overriding user customizations.
By the end of the book, you will have the necessary skill set, exposure, and experience required to grab any professional grade project based on Yocto Project and BeagleBone.
Chapter 1, Welcome to Yocto Project and BeagleBone Black, enables the user to boot up BeagleBone with images built using Yocto Project through the use of simple instructions.
Chapter 2, What's BitBake All About?, provides a basic introduction to the BitBake tool.
Chapter 3, Creating the helloworld Recipe, talks about a helloworld recipe available in poky. In this chapter, we will use this recipe for the introduction of the basic elements of a recipe.
Chapter 4, Adding Multimedia to Your Board, explores the most common elements encountered in Yocto Project recipes. We will describe each of these elements and their usage.
Chapter 5, Creating and Exploring Layers, teaches you how to override functionalities of recipe files available in the existing layers. We will also look at various techniques used in different scenarios, along with the pros and cons of such techniques.
Chapter 6, Your First Console Game, helps with creating recipes for some of the popular console-based games—for example, MyMan.
Chapter 7, Turning BeagleBone into a Home Surveillance System, teaches you how to create an advanced project using BeagleBone and Yocto Project. We will create a home surveillance solution using a webcam attached to the BeagleBone USB port.
Chapter 8, BeagleBone as a Wi-Fi Access Point, guides you to create an advanced Project using BeagleBone and Yocto Project. We will turn our BeagleBone into a Wi-Fi access point by attaching a USB dongle.
We will use Python in the book. Any reasonably powerful computer running Ubuntu 12.04 or 14.04 will be suitable. You will need to download and install the following software in your computer:
Python version 2.7 or higher, excluding Python 3.x
This book is ideal for system developers with the knowledge and working experience of embedded systems. Knowledge of BeagleBone Black and similar embedded boards is assumed, while no knowledge of the Yocto Project build system is necessary.
In this book, you will find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "We have seen the SRC_URI variable in our recipe."
A block of code is set as follows:
do_<taskname>() {
:
}Any command-line input or output is written as follows:
# cp /usr/src/asterisk-addons/configs/cdr_mysql.conf.sample /etc/asterisk/cdr_mysql.conf
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: "Choose Save setup as dfl to avoid reconfiguring every time and choose Exit to go to minicom."
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Most of the implementation code is kept at https://github.com/YoctoForBeaglebone/ and can be pulled directly from there. If you have something to add, feel free to add it. While adding something to any repository, kindly avoid pushing directly to the repository and use Git pull request mechanism supported by GitHub.
We also provide you with a PDF file that has color images of the screenshots/diagrams used in this book. The color images will help you better understand the changes in the output. You can download this file from http://www.packtpub.com/sites/default/files/downloads/1234OT_ColorImages.pdf.
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