Creating and running Python programs on the BeagleBone Black

Now that you can get around, and even edit programs, you can begin to use the BeagleBone Black to create programs so you can control your robotic projects.

Prepare for lift off

Now that you are ready to begin programming, you'll need to choose a language. There are many available, C, C++, Java, Python, Perl, and a great deal of other possibilities. I'm going to introduce you to Python for two reasons. First, it is a straightforward language that is intuitive and very easy to use. Second, much of the open source functionality in the robotics world is available in Python. We'll also cover a bit of C in this chapter as well, as some functionality is only available in C. But it makes most sense to start in Python. To work the examples in this section, you'll need a version of Python installed to complete this section. Fortunately the basic Ubuntu system has a version already installed, so you are ready to begin.

We are going to just cover...