Four square, unpopulated purple PCBs sit in front of a tube of soldering flux on a light grey work surface. The PCBs are only 1"x1".

BeagleStamp Makes Soldering Linux Into Your Projects Easier

May 4, 2023 by Navarre Bartz 44 Comments

There are a lot of things you can do with today’s powerful microcontrollers, but sometimes you really need a full embedded Linux setup. [Dylan Brophy] wanted to make it easier to add Linux to his own projects and designed the BeagleStamp.

Squeezed onto a 1″ square, the BeagleStamp puts the power of a PocketBeagle into an easy to solder module you can add to a project without all that tedious mucking about with individually soldering all the components of a tiny Linux computer every time. As a bonus, the 4 layer connections are constrained to the stamp as well, so you can use lower layer count boards in your project and have your Linux too.

The first run of boards was delivered with many of the pins unplated, but [Brophy] plans to work around it for the time being so he can spot any other bugs before the next board revision. Might we suggest a future version using RISC-V?

This BeagleBone’s Got AI

March 6, 2019 by Brian Benchoff 17 Comments

There are a lot of BeagleBones, from Blue, to White, Green, Black, and we think there’s a purple one in there for some reason. The diversity of BeagleBones is due to the openness of the design, and is the biggest advantage over the ‘bone’s main competitor, the Raspberry Pi.

Now, there’s a new BeagleBone, and this time the color is AI. The BeagleBoard foundation has just unveiled the BeagleBone AI, and it is going to be the most powerful BeagleBone ever developed.

Unlike the BeagleBone Blue, Black, or the PocketBeagle, the BeagleBone AI uses the TI AM5729 processor, a dual-core ARM Cortex-A15 running at 1.5 GHz. It’s not a BeagleBone unless it has those nifty real-time programmable units, and yes, this one has four. This is the BeagleBone AI, so something else has to be different, and it comes with four Embedded Vision Engines (EVEs), a TIC66x DSP, and support for machine learning with pre-installed tools.

Of especially interesting note, this board features USB C connectors, Gigabit Ethernet, onboard WiFi, 1 GB of RAM, and 16 GB of eMMC Flash. The massive block of pin headers remains the same.

If this feature set sounds somewhat familiar to the Beagle family, you’re right. The BeagleBoard X-15 — the alpha wolf of the BeagleBone family — also comes with DSP, and Cortex-A15 cores running at 1.5 GHz. The use case for the X-15 was a little puzzling, as it was too big to really be a portable or embeddable system, but didn’t have the power of the likes of an Nvidia Jetson or what have you. The BeagleBone AI is essentially a minified version of the X-15, albeit slightly less capable in terms of RAM and Flash.

Introducing The BeagleBone Blue

January 11, 2016 by Brian Benchoff 37 Comments

The BeagleBone is a board that doesn’t get a lot of attention in a world of $5 Raspberry Pis, $8 single board computers based on router chipsets, and a dizzying array of Kickstarter projects promising Android and Linux on tiny credit card-sized single board computers. That doesn’t mean the BeagleBone still isn’t evolving, as evidenced by the recent announcement of the BeagleBone Blue.

The BeagleBone Blue is the latest board in the BeagleBone family, introduced last week at CES. The Blue is the result of a collaboration between UCSD Engineering and TI, and with that comes a BeagleBone built for one specific purpose: robotics and autonomous vehicles. With a suite of sensors very useful for robotics and a supported software stack ideal for robots and drones, the BeagleBone Blue is the perfect board for all kinds of robots.

On board the BeagleBone Blue is a 2 cell LiPo charger with cell balancing and a 6-16 V charger input. The board also comes with eight 6V servo outputs, four DC motor outputs and inputs for four quadrature encoders. Sensors include a nine axis IMU and barometer. Unlike all previous BeagleBones, the BeagleBone Blue also comes with wireless networking: 802.11bgn, Bluetooth 4.0 and BLE. USB 2.0 client and host ports are also included.

Like all of the recent BeagleBoards, including the recently released BeagleBone Green, the Blue uses the same AM3358 1 GHz ARM Cortex 8 CPU, features 512 MB of DDR3 RAM, 4GB of on board Flash, and features the main selling point of the BeagleBoard, two 32-bit programmable real-time units (PRUs) running at 200 MHz. The PRUs are what give the BeagleBone the ability to blink pins and control peripherals faster than any other single board Linux computer, and are extremely useful in robotics, the Blue’s target use.

Right now, the BeagleBone Blue isn’t available, although we do know you’ll be able to buy one this summer. Information on pricing and availability – as well as a few demos – will come in February.