Beaglebone Media Center

A practical guide to transforming your BeagleBone into a fully functional media center

About This Book

• Develop practical skills that are required to create media center applications using BeagleBone
• Use the provided design toolbox that will act as a bridge between your ideas and the final project, empowering you to build your own projects
• Easy and clear instructions and explanations on to set up a usable home multimedia server

Who This Book Is For

Whether you are a hobbyist or a professional, this book will get you fully equipped to resolve the most commonly occurring media-related challenges. If you want to expand your horizons beyond lighting an LED and push the limits of your board, this is just the book for you. Working knowledge of BeagleBone is assumed.

What You Will Learn

• Retrieve all your media from your home or anywhere in the world
• Configure access control permissions for your users
• Create your own tablet using a display device to watch and listen to media, play games, and more
• Share your media with friends through social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter without compromising security
• Set up your server in no time and access it through your computer or any connected devices
• Create your personal hosting services in your home or office
• Set up a proof-of-concept quickly to impress your boss with your ideas
• Integrate Adafruit's bicolor LED pixel matrix with your BeagleBone board to make the LEDs dance to your music

In Detail

Every new embedded board that comes into existence gives us the power to access highly technological objects that can be shaped according to our desires and ideas. BeagleBone is one such low power, open source, single-board computer with all the functionality of a basic computer.

This book begins with a quick installation of MediaDrop, a versatile media content manager, showing you how to manage your music, video, and podcasts. You will learn how to configure access permissions for your users and select the way you would want them to retrieve your shared media. Next, you'll get to grips with how to use existing ready-to-use modules or video devices in your own projects. As you continue your journey, you will learn how to build your personal media player. Toward the end of the book, you will create an interesting project using BeagleBone, that is, an 8 x 8 LED matrix that will groove to your music.

By the end of the book, you will be armed with all the knowledge required to interface and configure all media center components using BeagleBone.