Chapter 1. Getting Started with BeagleBone

If you are reading this book right now, it means that you have taken your first step to get started with your BeagleBone board to build real-time physical computing systems using your BeagleBone board and Python programming language. This chapter will teach you how to set up your BeagleBone board for the first time and write your first few Python codes on it.

By end of this book, you would have learned the basics of interfacing electronics to BeagleBone boards and coding it using Python which will allow you to build almost anything from a home automation system to a robot through examples given in this book.

Firstly, in this chapter, you will learn how to set up your BeagleBone board for the first time with a new operating system, followed by usage of some basic Linux Shell commands that will help you out while we work on the Shell Terminal to write and execute python codes and do much more like installing different libraries and software on your BeagleBone board. Once you get familiar with usage of the Linux terminal, you will write your first code on python that will run on your BeagleBone board. Once you are comfortable with that, we will modify the code to make it do something more in the next chapters. Most of the time, we will be using the freely available open-source codes and libraries available on the Internet to write programs on top of it and using it to make the program work for our requirement instead of entirely writing a code from scratch to build our embedded systems using BeagleBone board. The contents of this chapter are divided into the following sections:

• Prerequisites
• About the single board computer - BeagleBone board
• Know your BeagleBone board
• Setting up your BeagleBone board
• Working on Linux Shell
• Coding on Python in BeagleBone board