Preface

The whole world is moving from desktop/computers to smartphones/embedded systems. We are at the door to Internet of Things (IoT). The number of Internet connected users crossed 3.2 billion in 2015, which is almost half of the total population. The number of connected devices has exceeded the number of humans already. IoT is going to bring a combination of solutions, mixing physical world and digital world. We will interact with the digital world in newer ways than keyboard and mouse. Everyday objects will have logic in them to do their work in a better way. Multiple things will work collectively in order to achieve better results. IoT will bring lot many possibilities and opportunities along.

IoT implementation needs power-efficient embedded system solutions. There has been an exponential rise in the demand of the embedded systems in the last few years. Therefore, there is a demand for embedded programming as well. Embedded development boards such as BeagleBone play a key role here. These boards provide opportunities to new programmers to get their hands on ARM-based embedded systems. BeagleBone comes as an ultra-small, cost-effective solution with a powerful hardware that runs Debian Linux. This book tries to explore the hardware and software capabilities of BeagleBone to create real-life electronics and IoT applications quickly.

Being an open source hardware board, BeagleBone is the perfect choice to study embedded systems. Board design files and in-depth datasheets are open for being studied. It comes with an Ethernet port that allows deploying the IoT projects without making any addition to the board. It provides plenty of GPIO, ADC, UART, I2C, and SPI pins that make it the right choice for electronic projects. One can install Debian, Ubuntu, Android, and many other Liunx distributions. By default, it comes with a full-fledged Debian Linux OS running on it. This gives you all the benefits of Linux kernel such as multitasking, multiuser, and extensive device drivers support. It also allows you to do programming in many languages, including C, C++, JavaScript, Python, Ruby, Perl, and so on. This book uses BeagleBone as a tool to write useful applications on the embedded systems. Starting with the basics to set up BeagleBone and Cloud9 IDE, this book covers interfacing with various electronic components via simple programs. The electronics theory related to these components is explained in detail before using them in a program. Then, the book covers some real-life IoT applications.

This book is divided in two parts: the first part is covers programs in JavaScript and the second part of this book provides electronics projects and IoT applications in Python. Most of the physicial computing theories and concepts are covered in the JavaScript part. Programs are explained in the explanation section, immediately after it's source code. Troubleshooting steps are given wherever needed. Some programs have an execution section, which explains how a program works internally. Programming language conventions and error handling are loosely followed to make programs short and easy to understand. The language that is to be covered first is a tough choice. I choose JavaScript as it is energy-efficient, event-driven architecture. It is more suited as an IoT solution. Only sending the important information reduces the processing that is to be done on the Thing connected to the Internet. Javascript is a natural language of web. It comes preinstalled in the BeagleBone along with Node and Cloud9. You can start Javascript programming immediately after connecting BeagleBone. Let's start the journey of programming the BeagleBone.