Learning BeagleBone Python Programming

Table of Contents

Learning BeagleBone Python Programming

Credits

About the Author

About the Reviewers

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Why subscribe?

Free access for Packt account holders

Preface

What this book covers

What you need for this book

Who this book is for

Conventions

Reader feedback

Customer support

Errata

Piracy

Questions

1. Before We Begin

An overview of BeagleBone

General purpose input/output

Analog-to-digital converter

Pulse width modulation

Universal asynchronous receiver/transmitter

Serial peripheral interface

Inter-Integrated Circuit

Tools and additional hardware

The BeagleBone design

Board comparison

Helpful resources

Summary

2. Getting Started

Initial setup

Updating your Debian image

Connecting to your BeagleBone

The Cloud9 IDE

SSH

Connecting to the Internet

Ethernet

Network forwarding

Using the serial console

Updating your software

The PyBBIO library

The Adafruit_BBIO library

Summary

3. Digital Outputs

GPIO modules

Kernel drivers

Pin multiplexing

Interactive GPIO

Calculating resistor values for LEDs

Driving higher currents from GPIO pins

Blink

Taking advantage of the OS

Multiprocessing

Running at startup

Summary

4. PWM and ADC Subsystems

PWM

Fading an LED

Servo motors

ADC

Voltage divider

Voltage follower

Your first robot

Summary

5. User Input

Buttons

Pull-up/pull-down resistors

Polling

Interrupts

Potentiometers

Summary

6. Program Output

LED displays

LED bar graphs

7-segment displays

The LED matrix

SMTP

Character LCD

Summary

7. Serial Communication

Serial communication

UART

I2C

SPI

Summary

8. Interfacing with External Devices

Accelerometers

Hooking it up

Reading data

Writing a module

Using interrupts

Summary

9. Using the Network

TCP/IP

HTTP

IoT Services

Phant

dweet.io

Freeboard

Summary

10. A Practical Example

Weather station

Connecting to the Internet

Weather alerts

Summary

A. The BeagleBone Black Pinout

B. Disabling HDMI

Index

Learning BeagleBone Python Programming

Learning BeagleBone Python Programming

Copyright © 2015 Packt Publishing

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles or reviews.

Every effort has been made in the preparation of this book to ensure the accuracy of the information presented. However, the information contained in this book is sold without warranty, either express or implied. Neither the author, nor Packt Publishing, and its dealers and distributors will be held liable for any damages caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly by this book.

Packt Publishing has endeavored to provide trademark information about all of the companies and products mentioned in this book by the appropriate use of capitals. However, Packt Publishing cannot guarantee the accuracy of this information.

First published: July 2015

Production reference: 1080715

Published by Packt Publishing Ltd.

Livery Place

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Birmingham B3 2PB, UK.

ISBN 978-1-78439-970-2

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Credits

Author

Alexander Hiam

Reviewers

Pete Bachant

Hardik Vijaykumar Pandya

Acquisition Editor

Shaon Basu

Content Development Editor

Anand Singh

Technical Editor

Bharat Patil

Copy Editor

Merilyn Pereira

Project Coordinator

Vijay Kushlani

Proofreader

Safis Editing

Indexer

Rekha Nair

Production Coordinator

Aparna Bhagat

Cover Work

Aparna Bhagat

About the Author

Alexander Hiam is a freelance embedded systems designer. He has a bachelor's degree in computer science (embedded systems) from Marlboro College. He is the sole proprietor of Gray Cat Labs, where he has been doing contract software and hardware development since 2012.

Alex developed and actively maintains the PyBBIO Python library for BeagleBone. He has designed BeagleBone Capes professionally for clients, and he also actively contributes to the BeagleBone community by helping provide support on the mailing list and IRC channel and mentoring for the BeagleBoard.org organization during Google Summer of Code.

I'd like to thank my cat, Moondog, for being so patient with me while I worked on this book, as he was sure I should have been playing with him instead.

About the Reviewers

Pete Bachant is a mechanical engineering PhD student at the University of New Hampshire who enjoys writing Python and uses the BeagleBone to interact with motion control and data acquisition hardware.

Hardik Vijaykumar Pandya is an electrical engineering graduate from TU Delft in the Netherlands. He's been working on open source hardware and software for the last 7 years and has conducted state-wide workshops on them in different universities across Gujarat, India.

His projects have been selected for display at the national level and his work on hobby electronics has been lauded by the mayor of Ahmedabad a number of times. His work on optical shape and motion recognition using the Microsoft Kinect camera also won the best and most innovative project of the year award at Nirma University.

Nowadays, he reviews books on subjects related to electronics and manages his own business in the same domain. He does a lot of public speaking on the topics of getting started with electronics and entrepreneurship. He also writes articles at http://hardik.org and shares his views on Twitter. His Twitter handle is @hvpandya.

He can be reached for questions and queries at <hardik@hardik.org>.

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Preface

The BeagleBone Black is a powerful system that can be used in a huge number of cool projects and is a great platform to learn about embedded systems and embedded Linux, but it can be difficult for beginners to find the resources they need to get started with it. The goal of this book is to use the Python programming language to introduce you to many of the different hardware interfaces available on the BeagleBone Black, and to teach you how to use them to communicate with external hardware with the help of the PyBBIO and Adafruit_BBIO Python libraries. This book will take you through the system, from initial setup to creating complete programs, and each new concept along the way is introduced with practical and contextual examples.

What this book covers

Chapter 1, Before We Begin, introduces you to the BeagleBone Black and to each of its hardware interfaces that are used throughout the book.

Chapter 2, Getting Started, takes you through the initial steps to get your BeagleBone Black setup and ready to use, and briefly introduces you to the PyBBIO and Adafruit_BBIO Python libraries.

Chapter 3, Digital Outputs, goes more in depth into using the GPIO modules to generate digital outputs, and guides you through your first hardware interface programs to blink some LEDs.

Chapter 4, PWM and ADC Subsystems, describes in more detail the pulse width modulation and analog-to-digital converter subsystems, and guides you through using them to fade LEDs, control servo motors, measure light levels, and more. It also introduces some basic concepts for analog signal conditioning.

Chapter 5, User Input, presents some methods of using external hardware to interface with your BeagleBone programs, including potentiometers, buttons, and rotary encoders.

Chapter 6, Program Output, covers some methods of using external hardware to provide feedback to the user, from LED and LCD displays to sending e-mails and text messages.

Chapter 7, Serial Communication, describes in more depth the UART, I2C, and SPI serial subsystems and how they can be used to communicate with external digital devices.

Chapter 8, Interfacing with External Devices, walks you through the steps required to interface with a new digital device by writing a Python module to communicate with an accelerometer over I2C.

Chapter 9, Using the Network, shows you some ways of taking advantage of the BeagleBone Black's network connection to remotely control and monitor your applications.

Chapter 10, A Practical Example, walks you through using what you've learned to build a BeagleBone Black weather station with remote monitoring and automatic over/under temperature e-mail or text message alarms.

Appendix A, The BeagleBone Black Pinout, provides you with a visual description of the BeagleBone Black's expansion headers and the different ways each pin can be used.

Appendix B, Disabling HDMI, teaches you to disable the HDMI output.

What you need for this book

This book specifically targets the BeagleBone Black. It also assumes a Windows OS where setup steps are required to be run on a desktop or laptop PC, as in my experience Windows has been the main OS of folks who are just starting out with BeagleBone.

Who this book is for

If you are a Python programmer and have never had any experience with embedded Linux and hardware development, this book is for you. Some previous Linux experience will be helpful, but is not required.

Conventions

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, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, and user input are shown as follows: This will open the crontab file in nano, which is a command line text editor.

A block of code is set as follows:

def loop():

    print switch state:, digitalRead(SW_PIN)

    delay(250)

run(setup, loop)

Any command-line input or output is written as follows:

root@beaglebone:/var/lib/cloud9# ping -c 3 graycat.io PING graycat.io (198.100.47.208) 56(84) bytes of data.

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: Select Obtain IP address automatically and click on OK.

Note

Warnings or important notes appear in a box like this.

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