Loving my Beaglebone Black so far! 
I’m building an automated sprinkler control system, and so far I’ve managed to teach myself enough about node.js and http://socket.io to get a bit of code that converses with weather underground to get the weather forecast and moidfy sprinkler on times based on forecast… And setup a small web server to allow me to control the sprinklers manually. All in the span of like 4 days.
Right now it’s just blinking the LEDs to test it… but hopefully this weekend I’ll have the time to build the actual physical parts and test it for real.
Would love to hear more about your project as it progresses… Thanks for posting!
Sure thing! The automated part uses the weather underground API to control 1st when to turn on the sprinklers (by getting sunrise) how long to keep the sprinklers on based on things like temperature, humidity, and chance/amount of rain (day of, the day before, and day after factor in).
I’m using a pair of water solenoids I found on Adafruit (it’s a drip/bubble system so the pressure isn’t very high) to do the off on part… Hopefully once I get it wired up it actually works. 
This is my first “big” project so I’m pretty excited.
I’ve been looking at doing a very similar project. Could you update on your progress?
@Sean_Lieder sure: I have the circuit wired up, and it works. Yay! Basically it’s using two Mosfets to control the solenoids (one for the front yard one for the back yard) with the Beaglebone as the control source for the gates on the Mosfets.
I’ve built a waterproof box to hold the solenoids for the outside, and the Beaglebone is inside on the other side of the wall.
Here’s the code if you’re interested (I’m new so don’t laugh! :P)
git://http://github.com/screamingcities/auto-sprinkler.git
The numbers I’m using as the watering constants will probably be adjusted as I see it working… (Also the backward currently isn’t running because I haven’t installed the sprinklers yet.)
The biggest pain points I’ve had so far were getting the bone to connect properly to a time server… It’s slightly different then a normal linux system it seems especially since it doesn’t have an internal clock. @Derek_Molloy has an excellent tutorial on that though.
It also took a while to get the Wifi up and running because Connman is annoying… Turns out though that the wifi dongle I got kind of sucks, and will be way too slow, so I’m just going to hard-wire it… It’s in the basement so looks aren’t that important.
Not sure what else to say… I guess maybe once I get the system fully up and running I’ll post some pictures and such.
If you have any questions or anything give me a shout- I’ll answer what I can.