BeagleBone Black is the bad boy of single board computers used by anyone who wants more power than Raspberry Pi and to get hands-on with prototyping area. The time from unboxing the board and up to the first application is counted in minutes, and beside its powerful features, this is one of the features that makes from this platform one of the most popular developed board in the community of makers.
You might not be able to do a lot of things from the first time with BBB, but Ben Martin show us in a comprehensive tutorial how to get analog input from the Black board. This is a good starting point for anyone aiming to enter in the electronics and Linux programming area with the BeagleBone board.
The BBB comes from another world than Arduino and between these two popular platforms is a long list of differences. The analog converter is one of these differences. For BBB the converter is based on 12 bits, while the Arduino offers an analog converter on 10 bits. Yes, this is great for Black because it can take values between 0 and 4096.
Working with analog inputs is a delicate task, and any user should avoid damaging the BBB board by taking care to not supply the analog pins with more than 1.8 Volts.
Read more: How to Setup the Arduino IDE with BeagleBone Black
Having the experience of Raspberry Pi and Arduino board, there is a wide range of examples where the Black can use its GPIO pins to sense the environment with sensors, control motors, LEDs, and more.
If your BeagleBone Black board is ready for the first application, you can find how to test the analog input and how to read the analog input from a BBB in the full version of the tutorial here.