7. Expanding the Hardware Horizon

We’ve developed an excellent set of the fundamentals of a BeagleBone Black so far. At this point, you know how to log in, move around in the Linux environment, write basic software, and upgrade the operating system. Now it is time for us to delve deeper into how to use some of these capabilities. It is time to communicate with the expansion headers by doing more than just blinking a pair of LEDs.

In Chapter 5, “A Little Deeper into Development,” we wrote a basic program to blink back and forth on a pair of lights, much like a railroad crossing. This signal is a good warning, but doesn’t really give any kind of meaningful information. What if we wanted to present a number to the user via the outputs? The binary ...

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