New BeagleBone textbook: Bad to the Bone: Crafting Electronic Systems with #BeagleBone and #BeagleBoneBlack
http://t.co/nMcYM5kIbZ
Superb Text On Cheap Powerful Physical Computing, May 30, 2013
By Ira Laefsky “Ira Laefsky” (Philadelphia, PA)
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This review is from: Bad to the Bone: Crafting Electronics Systems with Beaglebone and BeagleBone Black (Paperback)
This is a superb textbook on an open low-cost physical computing platform for those whose progress has gone beyond simple Led blinks on the Arduino. The Beaglebone Black the latest incarnation of this powerful physical computing development platform is fully Open (allowing you to reproduce the board for commercial products as well as to see source code); it costs roughly $45.0; has a diverse set of I/O ports including Analog to Digital Conversion; is more suited to electronic experimentation (without expansion) than the Raspberry Pi; and it has a diverse set of “Capes”, daughterboards similar to :Shields on the Arduino. The authors have exactly the right stuff to deliver an intermediate text on physical computing. Steve Barret is a lifelong teacher, with vast experience as a Professor of Electronic Engineering at the Air Force Academy and the University of Wyoming. Jason Kridner is a senior engineer and open product evangelist at Texas Instruments, who started and leads the Beagleboard (dot) Org community. This is a comprehensive and excellent textbook for those who have gone beyond “Beginning Arduino” skills. At almost 400 pages in heft it covers everything from a simple “Hello World” example in “Bonescript”, a simple physical computing language based on Javascript and Node.js, to developing robots and much more sophisticated embedded physical computing platforms and systems.
This is a superb comprehensive text to move beyond the simplest work in physical computing. There is much to serve the needs of beginners and experts who are new at this particular platform; but I would recommend it most to those who have gone beyond simple LED blinking and traffic light simulations with Arduino and Raspberry Pi. For the intermediate physical and embedded computing experimenter their is much methodology on designing and specifying physical computing systems. I would select it most for the intermediate designer because it rely’s for the most part on schematics rather than wire by wire photographs, and gives some taste of design with UML without a comprehensive introduction to real-time State, Sequence and Class diagrams.
This is a must have to advance anyone’s knowledge in physical computing, electronics and embedded systems. It is also the first and most comprehensive text introducing the powerful Linux-based Beaglebone and Beaglebone Black. I highly recommend it. I do hope that the author’s publish an index to this comprehensive text online to enable us to get additional access to its storehouse of knowledge.
–Ira Laefsky MS Engineering and MBA, Information Technology Consultant and Human Computer Interaction Researcher, also a Maker at the Hive 76 Philadelphia hackerspace and formerly a Senior Consulant on the Staff of Arthur D. Little, Inc. and Digital Equipment Corporation