30 BeagleBone Black Projects for the Evil Genius 1st Edition

The book has excellent program examples, detailed technical specifications of the device, and is an excellent technical guide.

I have several other BeagleBone books and they give good introductory info, and have a few projects. This book on the other hand has many more projects that cover a wide range of various sensors. The schematics and code segments are easy to understand.

I like the book in general. Like almost all of the books of this series, there simply isn't enough "EVIL" in it for my genius. Why don't these things have computer controlled water squirt guns or a favorite project from an old electronics magazine was a circuit that made a randomly generated noise at random intervals. I put that thing in the air vent of my roommates bedroom and he search for it for days before coming to me and saying "What have you done?" Hee hee. Priceless.Anyway, that being said, the book carries you through quite a range of projects. It does a good job of discussing what you are doing and why. It is definitely for the more novice of us, as it starts with opening the box of the BeagleBone Black (BBB) and powering it up. But, that is fine. We all have to start somewhere. Why not start with a sound moral guidance like "Evil Genius".A minor issue I have is that the book builds upon itself. What I mean by this is that as the projects go along, they rely on you having done the projects before. The project will say you need to install "X" software and perform "Y" task, but that task may have a dependency on the requirement tasks from projects before. For instance, you can't just jump in and do Project 18 without having setup your python environment in Project 15. Minor, but a bit of a pain.I've also found a couple of typos that actually matter, but I have not found (with Google search and reading the book) a forum in which to report them. (ex. Page 64, Project 15 - He has you run "Opkg update && opkg install python-pip python-setuptools python smbus". There are two mistakes with this. One: I'm sure his word processor capitalized the first word of the paragraph, but UNIX is case sensitive. "Opkg" and "opkg" are not the same and it will not run. Two: He is missing a hyphen. The package name is "python-smbus", not two separate packages "python" and "smbus".These are not major mistakes, so I only took one star (I don't know, they may be major if you don't know shell, but I do and I caught them right away. As this book assumes you are a beginner, this might be a bigger issue for most.) I wish that when you bought a hard copy of a book you automatically got the ebook version because that way you would always have a copy that was up to date when they made corrections. Further more, every tech book author should include a way to contact them. There are just too many reasons why.Overall it is a very enjoyable look into the BBB and the projects are fun and useful. It's worth the price. Enjoy.UPDATE: One more note, the book says you can download all of the code from github, but the site doesn't have the files. There is only a README.md file. I hope the author gets those files there soon. I don't like typing enough to type all of these projects in manually.

Great book. Loved the projects. I got some great bits of code for a project I am working on.

I was severely disappointed in this book because I prefer to program the BBB in C or C++ and this book only covers Java. Shame, it could have been a very useful tool.

Two stars is a bit harsh, but I'm grading it on appearnce as much as content. An experienced hacker would likely have no trouble following the projects descriptions, but I think a nwebie might be a bit frsutrated. The reason is that many books of this ilk that are targeted at beginner to moderate experimenters have fairly crisp, usually multi-color illustrations that are fairly easy to follow. This book is strictly gray-scale and it can be difficult to follow some of the diagrams (as opposed to say the Make books which are generally crisp color). So there's a bit of a paradox here, the apperance/presentation is geared more towrads the experienced hobbyist, while the content is geared more towards the beginner. An impeadance mismtach, as it wrere,

More great projects

If you are looking for inspiration as to what to do with your BeagleBone Black, then this is the book for you. The projects are thoroughly described in a step-by-step manner and the Appendix includes part codes for CPC, MCM, Sparkfun and Adafruit. All the source code for the projects is available on Github, making it easy to download it directly onto the BBB.As well as the usual doing things with LEDs, including matrix displays, the projects also include more exciting things like: a GPS tracker, a robot rover, a foam dart gun sentinel, as well as various security type projects for the would-be Evil Genius to use to protect their lair.As with all project books, its not just about the projects themselves. along the way, you will learn a lot about connecting electronics to a BBB and how to go about programming this great device.I have to declare an interest here in that I introduced Chris to the TAB team. But I am very glad I did. This is an excellent book and I look forward to seeing more books from Chris.