The BeagleBone Black Primer

11. Interacting with Your World, Part 2: Feedback and Actuators

We’ve reviewed a lot of information about sensing the world around you and different ways to take data-based actions. Now we will look at how to take action in the physical world with actuators. At the beginning of Chapter 9, “Interacting with Your World, Part 1: Sensors,” you learned that a sensor is a type of transducer. For review, we established that a transducer is a device that takes energy as input and then outputs it as another form of energy. With sensors, you take a physical phenomena and transform it into some form of electrical signal. In an actuator, the energy flows in the other direction, taking an electrical signal and converting it to a physical phenomenon.

You’ve ...