Ananthan's Blog

For a long time I was searching for a good tutorial for BeagleBoneBlack. Since the community is little less for the BBB it was a little hard to get started. But I found a book which is very useful to get started (in my opinion). {every book is unique in its on way}. "Exploring BeagleBone Tools and Techniques for Building with Embedded Linux" by Derek Molloy. Here is link to his homepage where he listed almost all contents in the text. The book cover almost every basics you need to know to get started. (BBB, Electronics, Linux, Cross compilation, Git, Opencv, ...) Most of the other books and tutorials focus on the javascript tool (node). But I didn't feel so good with it. This book mainly focus programming the BBB using c which I feel good. You will find an e-book here .

Here is a sample code to read and show an image after converting it into grey scale. Program reads a picture file called boy.jpg in the current folder and displays it. After 1 second it will change to grey scale. Use this command to compile the program. g++ first.cpp `pkg-config --cflags opencv` `pkg-config --libs opencv` where first.cpp is the file name.

Finally start working properly. Need a better voltage regulator and a better battery pack! Voltage spikes when BeagleBoneBlack starts. After a while the BBB will shutdown due to voltage fluctuations... :-( WiFi module in BBB is drawing so much current . Now the robot can be controlled wireless and can move forward, backward, left and right using keyboard. Need much more work... :-) NB: Voltage issue resolved using LM2596 DC-DC Buck Converter. I have included a camera and a light source for the robot. But its not connected in the video. A laptop battery is placed at the rear end of the robot. It's not the power source. It is just added for giving enough weight to avoid skidding. Otherwise it will drift a lot. NB: There was a problem with wireless connection. It will drop at odd times. Solved using a script that will reconnect if connection is lost.