Beagle Bone Board – Black

Beagle Bone Board – Black

The Beagle Bone Board – Black is a low-cost credit-card-sized development platform with good support from a fast growing community. The Beagle Bone Black differs slightly from the regular version by providing you with an on board micro HDMI port, 512 MB of DDR3L DRAM, 4 GB on board flash memory, an AM 3358 processor at 1 GHz, and making J-TAG optional with a user supplied header. Ultimately, the Beagle Bone Black is still perfect for physical computing and smaller embedded applications.

With plenty of I/O and processing power for real-time analysis provided by the TI Sitara™ AM3358 ARM® Cortex™-A8 processor, BeagleBone Black can be complemented with cape plug-in boards which augment Black’s functionality. They’re called capes because Underdog is a beagle and he wears a cape. Makes sense, right?

At over 3 million Dhrystone operations per second and vector floating point arithmetic operations, Beagle Bone Black is capable of not just interfacing to all of your robotics motor drivers, location or pressure sensors and 2D or 3D cameras, but also running Open CV, Open NI and other image collection and analysis software to recognize the objects around your robot and the gestures you might make to control it. Through onboard micro HDMI or VGA and LCD expansion boards, it is capable of decoding and displaying multiple video formats utilizing a completely open source software stack and synchronizing playback over Ethernet or USB with other Beagle Boards to create massive video walls. If what you are into is building 3D printers, then Beagle Bone Black has the extensive PWM capabilities, the on-chip Ethernet and the 3D rendering and manipulation capabilities all help you eliminate both your under powered micro-controller-based controller board as well as that PC from your basement.

Note: These are Beagle Bone Black Compliant boards made by Element 14. Though these may not be made by the good folks at Beagle Board, each BBB is officially recognized by them and are identical in both form and function.