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. 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.
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:
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.