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BeagleBone By Example
BeagleBone By Example

BeagleBone By Example: Learn how to build physical computing systems using BeagleBone Black and Python

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BeagleBone By Example

Chapter 2. Circuit Fundamentals and GPIO

In this chapter, we will be learning the basics of setting up an external electronic circuit that you can interface with the BeagleBone board using the general-purpose input/output (GPIO) pins available on it. The chapter will focus on making the reader understand how to wire electronic circuits with an explanation of how they work followed by using the GPIOs available on the BeagleBone board for their operation.

For readers who are from an electronics background, most of what is covered in the first three topics will be familiar but still I suggest you skim through the topics to brush up the basics. Since the book is written in such a way that readers without prior knowledge of electronics also get to understand and work on the projects, these topics have to be included in the chapter.

The contents of the chapter are divided into the following topics:

  • Prerequisites
  • Fundamentals of electrical and electronic circuits
  • Use of BreadBoards
  • Switches...

Prerequisites

This topic will cover what parts you need to get started with BeagleBone Black online. You can buy these parts from your favorite online store or from any of your local stores. individual electronic components such as resistors, transistors, LEDs, and so on are connected with a power source element such as a battery or other power supply source using conductive wires through which current flows through these electronic components, it forms an electronic circuit:

Prerequisites

We will see how to make our first simple electric circuit using an LED followed by connecting a switch to it in the Switches and LEDs section of this chapter.

Usage of breadboards

In this section, you will learn about what breadboards are, why they are called so, and how to use them. Once you are done with it, you should have a basic understanding of how breadboards work and be able to start using it to build basic circuits on a breadboard.

A breadboard is composed of electrical connections in rows and columns. Each column is electrically connected to each point on the row, you can see the black column line, that has connectivity. You can use wires to connect any column with another. There are larger rows on the top and bottom which are usually used for power supply positive and negative, in other words, VCC (power) and GND (ground) signals. You can use these to easily connect any column to VCC or GND or use it for any other purpose as per your wish as there is no restriction, it's just like any other row:

Usage of breadboards

You can learn how to use a Breadboard by connecting the circuit given in the previous section to test it by setting up the same circuit...

Switches and LEDs

Switches are one of the the elementary components in electronic circuits:

Switches and LEDs

All they do is make or break a circuit, meaning it either opens a connection or closes it between two terminals. The two states of a switch are as shown in the following figure:

Switches and LEDs

There are a lot of different types of switches. But there are two most commonly used ones in our circuits that we will discuss in this section, which are the momentary switch and the toggle switch. Before we discuss the different types of switches, as mentioned during the introduction of this chapter, let's see what LEDs are and how to create a basic circuit using them, as during the explanation of the switch operations, it will be useful for better understanding.

To create your first simple circuit, take a battery, resistor, and LED with wires to connect them as shown in the following figure. By doing this, you can understand what an LED is. LED stands for light emitting diode, which is nothing but an electronic component...

GPIOs

As we discussed in Chapter 1, Getting Started with BeagleBone, BeagleBone boards have GPIO pin headers on either side of the board. In this section, we will be discussing what these GPIOs are and how we can use them to interface external electronic components to the board.

The following figure shows the GPIOs available and the pin mapping of each of them. This pin mapping or, in general, the names assigned to these pins will be helpful for us while accessing them from the software running on the operating system. You will see this in detail at the end of the chapter, when we will be accessing the GPIO from python:

GPIOs

So, these GPIOs are ports which can act either as input or output from our definition from software running on the operating system. There are several methods to define these pins as input and output, as well as to change the state of these pins when defined as outputs and read the state when defined as inputs. In this book, as we will be using python as the primary programming...

Adding libraries to Python

To make it easy to work with GPIOs on BeagleBone boards using Python programming language, we will be installing the Adafruit-BeagleBone-IO-Python library. The following steps will walk you through how to do it:

  1. Log in to your BeagleBone board.

    As we did in the previous chapter, the first thing you need to do is boot the BeagleBone board from the microSD card and log in to it via SSH:

    Adding libraries to Python

  2. Update the repositories.

    Your next step will be to update the software dependency repositories in Debian running on the BeagleBone board before we start installing the other dependencies that are not installed and the libraries.

    You can use the apt-get update command to do this:

    Adding libraries to Python
  3. Install the dependencies.

    In this step, we will be installing certain software packages that are necessary for the library to work with the BeagleBone board. The command that you need to execute is as follows:

    sudo apt-get install build-essential python-dev python-setuptools python-pip python-smbus –y
    

    The...

Prerequisites


This topic will cover what parts you need to get started with BeagleBone Black online. You can buy these parts from your favorite online store or from any of your local stores. individual electronic components such as resistors, transistors, LEDs, and so on are connected with a power source element such as a battery or other power supply source using conductive wires through which current flows through these electronic components, it forms an electronic circuit:

We will see how to make our first simple electric circuit using an LED followed by connecting a switch to it in the Switches and LEDs section of this chapter.

Usage of breadboards


In this section, you will learn about what breadboards are, why they are called so, and how to use them. Once you are done with it, you should have a basic understanding of how breadboards work and be able to start using it to build basic circuits on a breadboard.

A breadboard is composed of electrical connections in rows and columns. Each column is electrically connected to each point on the row, you can see the black column line, that has connectivity. You can use wires to connect any column with another. There are larger rows on the top and bottom which are usually used for power supply positive and negative, in other words, VCC (power) and GND (ground) signals. You can use these to easily connect any column to VCC or GND or use it for any other purpose as per your wish as there is no restriction, it's just like any other row:

You can learn how to use a Breadboard by connecting the circuit given in the previous section to test it by setting up the same circuit on breadboard...

Switches and LEDs


Switches are one of the the elementary components in electronic circuits:

All they do is make or break a circuit, meaning it either opens a connection or closes it between two terminals. The two states of a switch are as shown in the following figure:

There are a lot of different types of switches. But there are two most commonly used ones in our circuits that we will discuss in this section, which are the momentary switch and the toggle switch. Before we discuss the different types of switches, as mentioned during the introduction of this chapter, let's see what LEDs are and how to create a basic circuit using them, as during the explanation of the switch operations, it will be useful for better understanding.

To create your first simple circuit, take a battery, resistor, and LED with wires to connect them as shown in the following figure. By doing this, you can understand what an LED is. LED stands for light emitting diode, which is nothing but an electronic component that...

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Key benefits

  • Get to grips with the fundamentals of BeagleBone
  • Leverage Python scripts to program BeagleBone for your requirements
  • Build four exciting projects, from home automation to a tele-controlled robot

Description

BeagleBone is a low cost, community-supported development platform to develop a variety of electronic projects. This book will introduce you to BeagleBone and get you building fun, cool, and innovative projects with it. Start with the specifications of BeagleBone Black and its operating systems, then get to grips with the GPIOs available in BeagleBone Black. Work through four types of exciting projects: building real-time physical computing systems, home automation, image processing for a security system, and building your own tele-controlled robot and learn the fundamentals of a variety of projects in a single book. By the end of this book, you will be able to write code for BeagleBone in order to operate hardware and impart decision-making capabilities with the help of efficient coding in Python.

Who is this book for?

This book is intended for hobbyists and consumers who wish to create impressive projects using BeagleBone. You must be familiar with Python programming.

What you will learn

  • * Program on BeagleBone Black using Python
  • * Interface sensors and actuators to BeagleBone Black
  • * Build your own real-time physical computing systems
  • * Connect physical computing systems to cloud servers
  • * Build your own home automation and home security system
  • * Build your own tele-controlled robot with real-time video streaming
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Publication date : Aug 31, 2016
Length: 262 pages
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Language : English
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Table of Contents

11 Chapters
1. Getting Started with BeagleBone Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
2. Circuit Fundamentals and GPIO Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
3. Introduction to Physical Computing Systems Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
4. Real-time Physical Computing Systems Using BeagleBone Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
5. Connecting Physical Computing Systems to the Internet Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
6. Home Automation Using BeagleBone Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
7. Working with Images Using Computer Vision Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
8. Home Security Systems Using BeagleBone Black Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
9. Exploring Robotics Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
10. Building Your Own Robot Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Index Chevron down icon Chevron up icon

Customer reviews

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Christopher Rush Sep 09, 2016
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon 5
I am the Technical Reviewer for this book by PACKT Publishing.This book gives the readers a nice introduction to the Open Source Hardware platform that is the BeagleBone. It shows users how to get their board setup and running with the latest operating system. It then takes users further into the real-world of how to program simple electronic circuits using the many GPIO pins on the BBB. The programming language for the examples are in Python, which is popular amongst hobbyists over the native BoneScript language. The book guides you through making things easier in day to day life by connecting real-world objects to the Internet of Things, automating processing and analysing imagery with advanced computer vision in OpenCV. The latter half of the book introduces the topic of Robotics in particular driving simple motors.Overall this a great introduction to using the BeagleBone platform, with a wide range of examples from home automation, computer vision and robotics. After completing the book you will have learned the basic skills to go an create your own desired projects with the powerful Open-source platform that is the BeagleBone.
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