Juha Lumme - BeagleBone Home Automation

Juha Lumme is an engineer with over 10 years' experience in the telecommunications field in various roles. He has been developing platform software for mobile phones and also working on the telecommunication networks side. Embedded systems are his passion, and a hobby he is working on in free time as well.

He is passionate about Linux and open source software in general. The open hardware movement in the recent years is also close to his heart, and he hopes we can all soon hack and build our dreams in a world free of patent abuse.

When not working on his computer, he loves traveling and riding mountain roads on his motorbike around Kanto prefecture in Japan.

First and foremost I would like to thank Rika for her patience and understanding during those nights of writing and coding; this book would not have been possible without her support. I would also like to thank all the people who contributed to this book by reviewing, giving advice, and/or other help. In no particular order, my gratitude goes to Shaon Basu, Raymond Boswel, Dr. Philip Polstra, Akash Poojary, Ritika Singh, Rohit Kumar Singh, Sharvari Tawde, and all the people at Packt Publishing who have contributed to this, some of whom I might not have had direct dealing with.

Raymond Boswel hails from sunny South Africa. He has an Engineering degree in Electronics from the University of Pretoria and won the award for best project in the Microelectronics department. Currently, Raymond works for a telecommunications company in the Systems Engineering department, where he is exposed to both frontend and backend server technologies and is fast becoming a jack of all trades.

When Raymond is not slaving away at his day job, he enjoys being active outdoors. His particular interests include soccer, surfing, slacklining, and dancing.

I would like to thank my family and friends; without you, life would be very dull indeed!

Dr. Philip Polstra (known to his friends as Dr. Phil) is an internationally recognized hardware hacker. His work has been presented at numerous conferences around the globe including repeat performances at DEFCON, Black hat, 44CON, Maker Faire, and other top conferences. Dr. Polstra is a well-known expert on USB forensics and has published several articles on this topic.

Recently, Dr. Polstra has developed a penetration testing Linux distribution known as The Deck for the BeagleBone and BeagleBoard family of small computer boards. He has also developed a new way of doing penetration testing with multiple low-power devices including an aerial hacking drone. This work is described in his book Hacking and Penetration Testing With Low Power Devices , which is slated for summer 2014 release.

Dr. Polstra has recently developed degree programs in digital forensics and ethical hacking at the university where he serves as a professor and Hacker in Residence. In addition to teaching, he provides training and performs penetration tests on a consulting basis. When not working, he has been known to fly, build aircrafts, and tinker with electronics. His latest happenings can be found on his blog: http://polstra.org. You can also follow him at @ppolstra on Twitter.

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Preface

This book is written by an embedded systems enthusiast for other like-minded souls. It is meant for makers, inventors, hackers, and generally for people who like to create new things by themselves. Together, we will start a journey into embedded systems, with the aim of setting up a home automation solution, using BeagleBone Black as our platform.

We will start with the very basics that you need to know in order to connect to BeagleBone from your home computer and work on it. After that, we will very quickly start connecting different electronic components and different types of sensors to start providing our BeagleBone platform with capabilities to interact with and sense the world around it.

The approach in this book will be very practical, and the chapters will contain electronic schematics, wiring diagrams, and the necessary operation code written in Python. All the examples will give you a deeper understanding of that specific area, and we will provide some additional pointers and ideas so you can feel comfortable experimenting with it by yourself with a clear sense of direction.