Preface
Embedded computers have become very complex in the last few years and developers need to easily manage them by focusing on how to solve a problem without wasting time in finding good peripherals or learning how to manage them. The main challenge with experienced embedded programmers and engineers is really how long it takes to turn an idea into reality, and we show you exactly how to do it.
This book shows how to interact with external environments through specific peripherals used in the industry. We will use the latest Linux kernel release 4.x and Debian/Ubuntu distributions (with embedded distributions of OpenWrt and Yocto).
The book will present popular boards based on widely used and easily available CPUs on the components market and widely available from different professional boards makers. After a brief introduction of each boards, the book will show how to set up them in order to run a complete GNU/Linux distribution and then getting access to the system console. After that the book will present how to install a complete developing system on each board in order to be able to add developer's programs.
Readers will be able to take their first steps in programming the embedded platforms, using C, Bash and Python/PHP languages in order to get access to the external peripherals. More about using and programming device driver and accessing the peripherals will be covered to lay a strong foundation. The readers will learn how to read/write data from/to the external environment by using both C programs and a scripting language (Bash/Python) and how to configure a device driver for a specific hardware.
The hardware devices used in the book has been chosen in order to cover all possible connection type we can encounter working with an embedded board so you can find I2C, SPI, USB, 1-Wire, serial, digital and analog devices, etc.
The programming languages used in the book has been chosen according to the rule to find the quickest and easiest solution to solve the current problem, in particular you can find example codes in Bash, C, PHP, Python.
In such chapters were will need to use a daemon, a kernel module or to recompile the whole kernel I've added a short description about what the reader should do and where he/she can get more information regarding the used tools, however some basic skills in managing a GNU/Linux system or the kernel's modules or the kernel itself are required.
