Introduction

The basics of physical computing typically require understanding and shaping input and output on your hardware. We will begin with taking a look at the old chestnut, manipulating LEDs, an experience you're likely to have some familiarity with if you have read the last chapter, or if you're an Arduino or Raspberry Pi user. Next, we'll play a bit with buttons because who doesn't like to push a button? Then, it gets more interesting as we add sensors to the mix. After this, we'll give you some basic recipes for locomotion that use some motors. Finally, we'll wind it up with the ingredients and steps for setting up a connection between your BBB and an Arduino board.

We'll march across the BBB, draft the large army of pins that the board has at our disposal, the GPIOs, ADCs, PWMs, and UARTs, a phalanx that makes the Raspberry Pi look feeble. All of these acronyms may seem impenetrable; however, throughout the course of this book we will steadily...