I first noticed the BeagleBone in 2011. At the time, most of my projects involved the Arduino, so I was quite curious when I saw a board that looked a little bit like an Arduino but acted more like a full computer. It seemed a bit complicated, so I was initially skeptical that I would be able to get anything working with it. Nonetheless, I ordered a BeagleBone and eagerly anticipated its arrival.

When it arrived, I was first amused by its dimensions. It fit in the palm of my hand and could even be enclosed within an Altoids tin. In fact, it fit almost too perfectly inside the tin. The radius of the rounded corners seemed to indicate that it was designed for such an enclosure. I’d later learn that, indeed it was designed that way.

After a lot of Internet searching and brushing up on how to write scripts within Linux, I had the BeagleBone blinking an LED, a common first step with hardware development platforms. Soon thereafter, I was reading the state of buttons, pulling images from a webcam, printing text with a receipt printer, and connecting the board to the Internet.

My first big project with the BeagleBone was called the Descriptive Camera. It worked a lot like a regular camera: point it at a scene that you want to capture and then hit the shutter button. But that’s where the similarities with a camera end. Instead of saving a photograph, this prototype camera outputs a text description of the scene that you’ve captured. And it even spits it out of the front of the camera like a Polaroid print.

The Descriptive Camera didn’t use any fancy computer vision algorithms to convert the image into text. It actually used crowd sourcing. After hitting the shutter button, the photo would be uploaded to Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service, where you can pay people online to do small tasks like transcribing audio, identifying terms in a contract, or in this case, describe a photo. After the person submitted the text, it would be outputted by the camera’s printer.

The BeagleBone was the perfect platform for this endeavor. Making a project that brings together a USB webcam, an Internet connection, buttons, LEDs, and the receipt printer, all while enclosing it in a small box would have been very difficult with many of the other platforms out there. As a tool, the BeagleBone is so capable and flexible that I could have created this same exact project in so many different ways.

But I know from experience that having a tool that’s so versatile can make things hard when you’re just starting out. There’s no right way to do any single thing, so you can feel paralyzed before you’ve even begun.

My hope is that this book will get you through that initial phase. It will give you just enough of the basics in a few different realms so that you can start digging deeper on your own. Having a few different ways to do the same thing means you can settle on the way that you’re most comfortable with and focus on making your vision a reality.