Mission briefing

Now that you are up and running, you'll want your BeagleBone Black to start doing something. This requires you to either create your own programs, or edit an existing program. This chapter will provide a brief introduction into editing a file and programming.

Why is it awesome?

It is fun to build hardware, and you'll spend a good deal of time designing and building your robots, but without programming, your robots won't get very far. This chapter will introduce you to file editing and programming concepts, so you'll feel comfortable creating some of the fairly simple programs that we'll talk about through the book. You'll also know how to change programs that are already available, making your robot do even more amazing things.

Your objectives

In this chapter we will:

  • Introduce some of the basic Linux commands and show how to navigate around the filesystem on the BeagleBone Black
  • Show how to create, edit, and save files on the BeagleBone Black
  • Learn how to create and run Python programs on the BeagleBone Black
  • Introduce some of the basic programming constructs on the BeagleBone Black
  • Show how the C++ programming language is both similar and different so you can understand when you need to change C++ code files

Mission checklist

We're going to use the basic configuration that you created in Chapter 1, Getting Started with the BeagleBone Black. You can either accomplish the tasks in this chapter by connecting a keyboard, mouse, and monitor to the BeagleBone Black or by remotely logging into the BeagleBone Black using vncserver, or remotely logging using SSH. Any of these methods will work to complete the examples in this chapter.