On Thu, Jun 19, 2014 at 11:55 AM, <[email protected]> wrote: > Currently self teaching myself to program. My question is, Where do I begin > and will my idea work with one of these boards? I run with a local fire > department and our County Dispatch centers Computer Aided Dispatch has a > downloadable app to auto print.
On what does this app run? iOS (iPhone)? Android? Linux? Windows? Do you have the source code to the app? Do you have the definition of the protocol the app uses? Is it public such that you can collaborate on it with the community? > What i want to do is intercept the printed > incident, collect the data, read a few lines from that data and have it sent > to the printer and LED Sign boards along with having audio. Connecting a printer over USB, an LED sign using GPIOs+PRUs, and using an HDMI adapter, USB adapter or audio cape to get audio output are all fairly well-repeated activities in the community. Each have multiple examples you can choose to explore and duplicate. Be patient, you have a lot to learn, but it is possible. To learn to program, I recommend: http://khanacademy.com/cs/programming https://developers.google.com/edu/python/ Using a BeagleBone Black can help in your learning process. When you plug the board into your computer, you can open the Cloud9 IDE from the browser on your computer, avoiding putting any code on your desktop. It gives you a command-line where you can execute individual commands without risking doing any damage to the contents of your desktop's hard drive. If you mess up the contents of the board's storage, you can simply reflash the board and start over again. The book "Embedded Linux Primer" is a good one for exploring Linux a bit deeper. You can also look at the other books at elinux.org/Beagleboard:BeagleBoneBlack#Books. Going back to intercepting your Computer Aided Dispatch, if it *is* and Android application, you can simply run Android on your BeagleBone Black and then add the additional services you need. If the protocol isn't defined, you might need to use some snooping tools to look at the data and figure it out, but I'd be surprised if the original developer won't provide you with the details. Bite the challenge off one-at-a-time and be sure to use version control (http://github.com) to save your work so you don't lose it. You can start with some learning exercises, doing some of the things that have been done by others on a BeagleBone Black before. However, to know you'll be successful, figuring out that protocol for the Dispatch data is probably the biggest risk and you might want to address it early to avoid any wasted time. -- For more options, visit http://beagleboard.org/discuss --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "BeagleBoard" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
