Chapter 1. Getting Started with Intel Galileo
This book is about developing home automation examples using the Intel Galileo development board along with the existing home automation sensors and devices. In the book, a good review of Intel Galileo will be provided, which will teach you to develop native C/C++ applications for Intel Galileo.
After a good introduction to Intel Galileo, we will review home automation's history, concepts, technology, and current trends. When we have an understanding of home automation and the supporting technologies, we will develop some examples on two main concepts of home automation: energy management and security.
We will build some examples under energy management using electrical switches, light bulbs and switches, as well as temperature sensors. For security, we will use motion, water leak sensors, and a camera to create some examples. For all the examples, we will develop simple applications with C and C++.
Finally, when we are done building good and working examples, we will work on supporting software and technologies to create more user friendly home automation software.
In this chapter, we will take a look at the Intel Galileo development board, which will be the device that we will use to build all our applications; also, we will configure our host PC environment for software development.
The following are the prerequisites for this chapter:
- A Linux PC for development purposes. All our work has been done on an Ubuntu 12.04 host computer, for this chapter and others as well. (If you use newer versions of Ubuntu, you might encounter problems with some things in this chapter.)
- An Intel Galileo (Gen 2) development board with its power adapter.
- A USB-to-TTL serial UART converter cable; the suggested cable is TTL-232R-3V3 to connect to the Intel Galileo Gen 2 board and your host system. You can see an example of a USB-to-TTL serial UART cable at http://www.amazon.com/GearMo%C2%AE-3-3v-Header-like-TTL-232R-3V3/dp/B004LBXO2A. If you are going to use Intel Galileo Gen 1, you will need a 3.5 mm jack-to-UART cable. You can see the mentioned cable at http://www.amazon.com/Intel-Galileo-Gen-Serial-cable/dp/B00O170JKY/.
- An Ethernet cable connected to your modem or switch in order to connect Intel Galileo to the local network of your workplace.
- A microSD card. Intel Galileo supports microSD cards up to 32 GB storage.
