Learning BeagleBone Python Programming

Chapter 6. Program Output

In this chapter, you will learn different ways of providing output from your BeagleBone programs. We will cover the following topics:

• LED displays
  • LED bar graphs
  • 7-segment displays
  • LED matrixes
• SMTP
  • E-mail
  • Text messages
• Character LCDs

LED displays

One of the simplest forms of hardware output that we can add to a program is an LED attached to a GPIO pin. We've already blinked LEDs, but not in a way that conveyed any sort of meaningful information; so first things first, we'll need something to communicate to the user. Here's a simple program that uses Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP) to login to your email account and retrieve the number of unread messages in your inbox. Save it as a new file called email_counter.py, either ...