Welcome to my second book produced by the good folks at Packt Publishing LLC. This book is somewhat different from my other book in that, instead of one large project this book is a collection of several small, medium, and large projects. While the name of the book is called Getting Started with Electronics Projects, I convinced the folks at Packt to let me write a book with several projects for the electronics hacker and experimenter groups.
The first few projects do not even involve a BeagleBone, something which had my reviewers shaking their heads at first. So what follows is a brief taste of what you can look forward to, in this book.
Before we go any further I should explain who this book is for.
If you are a software person who has never heated up a soldering iron before, you might want to practice a bit before attempting the more difficult assembly (electronics assembly, not assembly language programming) projects.
If you are a hardware guy, who just wants it to work out of the box, then I suggest you download the image and burn yourself a microSD card. If you feel adventurous, you can always play with the code sections. If you succeed in giving the Kernel a heart attack( also known as Kernel Panic), no worries. Just burn the image again.
The book is divided into eight chapters and seven different projects. The first four don’t involve a BeagleBone at all.
(For more resources related to this topic, see here.)
Chapter 1 – Introduction – Our First Project
This chapter is for the hardware guys and the adventurous programmers. In this chapter, you will build your own infrared flashlight. If you can use a soldering iron and a solder sucker you can build this project.
IR flashlight
Chapter 2 – Infrared Beacon
In this chapter, we continue with the theme of infrared devices, by building a somewhat more challenging project from a construction prospective. Files for the PCB are available for download from the Packt site, if you bought the book of course.
What this beacon does is flash two infrared LED’s on and off at a rate that can be selected by the builder. The beacon is only visible when viewed through night-vision goggles or on a black-and-white video camera.
IR beacon
While it may not be obvious from the preceding image, the case is actually made from ABS water pipe I purchased from a local hardware store. I like ABS pipe because it is so easy to work with.
Chapter 3 – Motion Alarm
Once again we will be using ABS pipe to construct a cool project. This time we will be building a motion sensor. Most alarm sensors use some sort of Passive Infrared (PIR) sensor or a millimetre wave radar to detect motion. This project uses a simple (cheap) mercury switch to detect motion. How you reset the alarm is a carefully guarded secret, so you will have to by the book to learn the secret!
Motion sensor
Notice the ring at the right end of the tube? That is so you can hang it up like a Christmas ornament!
As with the last chapter, the PCB files are available for download from the Packt site.
Chapter 4 – Sound Card-based Oscilloscope
This chapter uses a USB soundcard connected to a PC, because the software I found appears to only run on a PC. If you can find a MAC version of the software, go for it. This project will work for MAC or Linux users too.
By the way, I tested all of the software in this chapter on a Pentium 4 class machine running Windows XP, so here is an opportunity to recycle/repurpose that old PC you were going to junk!
Soundblaster oscilloscope
The title of the chapter is somewhat misleading, because the project also includes plans for building a sound card-based audio signal generator. There are a number of commercial and freeware versions of software that take advantage of this hardware.
Soundblaster software on PC
There are a number of commercial software packages that have a freeware version available for download. The preceding screenshot shows one of the better ones I found running under Windows XP.
Chapter 5 – Calibrated RF Source
In this chapter we will be building a clean calibrated RF signal source. In addition to being of use to ham radio enthusiasts, it will also be used the chapters that follow.
Clean 50MHzsignal
This is the first project that actually makes use of the BeagleBone Black. The BeagleBone is used to control a digitally controlled step attenuator. This allows us to output a calibrated signal level from our 50MHz source. In addition to its use in upcoming chapters, once again ham radio enthusiasts will no doubt find a clean RF source with a calibrated output which is selectable in .5dB steps.
GUI running on BeagleBone Black
Chapter 6 – RF Power Meter – Hardware
In this chapter we will be building and RF power meter capable of measuring RF power from 40MHz to over 6GHz. The circuit is based on the Linear Technology LTC5582 RMS power detector. The beauty of this device is that it outputs a DC voltage proportional to the RMS power it detects. There is no need for conversion as there is with other detectors.
RMS power is the AC power measured by your digital voltmeter when you have it set to AC.
RF detector mounter on protoboard
The connector near the notch in the protoboard allows the BeagleBone to both read the RF power and control the step attenuator mentioned earlier.
Chapter 7 – RF Power Meter – Software
In this chapter we will be building a development system based on Ubuntu and using a docking station available from https://specialcomp.com/beaglebone/index.htm
This could be considered the “deluxe” version. It is also possible to complete the next two chapters using the debug port on the BeagleBone and a communications program like PuTTY.
BeagleBone development system
This configuration also contains the hardware to build a combination wired and wireless alarm system. More on that is in the following chapter.
Chapter 8 – Creating a ZigBee Network of Sensors
This is the longest and by far the most complex chapter in the book. In this chapter we will learn how to configure XBee modules from Digi International Inc. using the XCTU Windows application. We will then build a standalone wireless alarm system.
This alarm system will be based on hardware developed and presented in my previous book:
http://www.packtpub.com/building-a-home-security-system-with-beaglebone/book
If you purchased my previous book and build any of the alarm system hardware, you can also use it in this chapter to convert your wired alarm system to wireless!
The following image is of the XBee module mounted on top of the alarm boards. Each wireless remote module has two alarm zone inputs and four isolated alarm outputs.
Completed wireless alarm remote module
Summary
This book will hopefully have something of interest to a large variety of electronics enthusiasts, from hams to hackers.
I would say that, as long as you have at least intermediate programming and construction skills, you should have no problem completing the projects in this book. All the projects use through-hole parts to make assembly easier.
Resources for Article:
Further resources on this subject:
- Building robots that can walk [article]
- Beagle Boards [article]
- Protecting GPG Keys in BeagleBone [article]