Getting Started with Cubieboard Oliver M. Schinagl Author

Embedded platforms are interesting because they combine two fun fields. On one side, open source software, and on the other side, there is open source hardware. But a little further from that, we have electronics (AVR-microcontrollers), which can be very interesting and fun to work with. Cubieboard is a powerful single board computer similar to Raspberry Pi that supports multiple operating systems, such as Ubuntu and Debian.This book will teach you everything you need to know about project development using Cubieboard, even if you are not an embedded platform expert.The book starts by going over the most well-known Allwinner development boards and helps you to choose a board and additional required hardware. Next, the book briefly explains how to ’talk’ to the board. Then, things start to get interesting with the installation of a desktop OS onto an SD card and booting into a fully graphical desktop system.Following this, you will learn how to bootstrap a system from scratch. Using this bootstrapped installation, you will then be taught how to create a small home server and how to set up a few example servers with minimal effort.Next, the book covers how to update the kernel and the bootloader, as this is not as simple as installing a package, and later, the BSP is used to manually compile the bootloader and the kernel in the form of a hardware-pack.Concluding all this work, the last chapter gives an example of how to connect external peripherals such as an LED.