Introduction
Whilst moving from my Arduino to my Beaglebone Black I found no working python libraries for interacting with the MAX31855 thermocouple amplifier. https://github.com/alexanderhiam/PyBBIO looked promising, but is broken for 3.8 linux kernels.
As such, I have written an extremely simplistic framework to get basic data out of the MAX31855. All of the concepts in the code come directly from here: https://github.com/adafruit/Adafruit-MAX31855-library
Full credit goes to the Adafruit team who created the BeagleBone IO Python Library that this project depends on.
https://github.com/adafruit/adafruit-beaglebone-io-python
NOTE: By default, users do not have access to /sys/class/gpio and any calls to GPIO.setup() will cause the creation of new objects under /sys/class/gpio that you also will not have access to. As such the only way to run GPIO code without root is to initialize the pins first and then recursively change permissions recursively (following links) throughout /sys/class/gpio. You must then avoid any new calls to GPIO.setup.
The alternative is to just run everything as root, but understandably this is a little disappointing.