BeagleBone Black – a single board computer

This topic will give you brief information about single board computers to make you understand what they are and where BeagleBone boards fit inside this category.

Have you ever wondered how your smartphones, smart TVs, and set-top boxes work?

All these devices run custom firmware developed for specific applications based on the different Linux and Unix kernels. When you hear the word Linux and if you are familiar with Linux, you will get in your mind that it's nothing but an operating system, just like Windows or Mac OS X that runs on desktops and server computers. But in the recent years the Linux kernel is being used in most of the embedded systems including consumer electronics such as your smartphones, smart TVs, set-top boxes, and much more. Most people know Android and iOS as an operating system on their smart phones. But only a few know that, both these operating systems are based on Linux and Unix kernels.

Did you ever question how they would develop such devices? There should be a development board right? What are they?

This is where Linux Development boards like our BeagleBone boards are used.

By adding peripherals such as touch screens, GSM modules, microphones, and speakers to these single board computers and writing the software that is the operating system with graphical user interface to make them interact with the physical world, we have so many smart devices now that people use every day.

Nowadays you have proximity sensors, accelerometers, gyroscopes, cameras, IR blasters, and much more on your smartphones. These sensors and transmitters are connected to the CPU on your phone through the Input Output ports on the CPU, and there is a small piece of software that is running to communicate with these electronics when the whole operating system is running in the smartphone to get the readings from these sensors in real-time. Like the autorotation of screen on the latest smartphones. There is a small piece of software that is reading the data from accelerometer and gyroscope sensors on the phone and based on the orientation of the phone it turns the graphical display.

So, all these Linux development boards are tools and base boards using which you can build awesome real world smart devices or we can call them physical computing systems as they interact with the physical world and respond with an output.