BeagleV Catches Fire With The BeagleV-Fire

November 4, 2023 by Richard Baguley 34 Comments

A new BeagleBoard is on the way, full of FPGA hotness: the BeagleV-Fire has been announced. The new $150 Single-Board Computer (SBC) from the pioneering open source BeagleBoard company is built around a RISC-V chip that has FPGA features built in. The BeagleV-Fire is built around the snappily named Microchip PolarFire MPFS025T FCVG484E, a System on a Chip (SoC) that has five Reduced Instruction Set Coding Version 5 (RISC-V) cores and a big chunk of FPGA fabric built in. That means it combines the speed of RISC-V processors with the flexibility of Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA), a big pile of logic gates that can be reprogrammed.

The new BeagleV-Fire includes a sizeable chunk of FPGA to work with: the core chip includes 23 K logic elements and 68 Math blocks, plus 4 Serializer/Deserializer (SerDer) lanes that can throw about 12.7 Gbps of data into and out of the fabric. On the BeagleV-Fire, the main chip is supported by 16 GB of eMMC and 2 GB of LPDDR4 RAM, plus a micro SD slot for extra storage. Gigabit Ethernet is also included, plus USB-C power and a few serial connections for debugging. There is no WiFi built in, but there is an M.2 Key E connection were you could plug in an a wireless adapter if you need it.

Like most other BeagleBoards, the BeagleV-Fire has two headers with 92 pins, which offer access to pretty much every signal on the board, plus lots of analog to digital stuff that works with add-on boards (BeagleBoard refers to them as capes). Also present is the usual 22-pin CSI connector for attaching cameras and other devices.

Want one? They are available for immediate order on BeagleBoard.org or from the usual suspects. It looks like they are already in stock for next-day delivery. If this all sounds familiar, it’s probably because we’ve been posting about this particular board for awhile now, covering both the announcement and first tests. Continue reading “BeagleV Catches Fire With The BeagleV-Fire” →

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?

RISC-V Comes To The BeagleBoard Ecosystem With Upcoming Beagle V SBC

January 14, 2021 by Jenny List 54 Comments

The Beagle V, a RISC-V-based single board computer from a collaboration between BeagleBoard and Seeed Studios aims to be “The First Affordable RISC-V Computer Designed to Run Linux”. RISC-V is the open-source processor architecture that everyone is interested in because it bypasses proprietary silicon of manufacturers such as Intel or AMD, allowing companies to roll their own silicon processors without licensing fees for the core.

BeagleBoard has long been one of the major players in the Single-Board Computer arena so far dominated by the Raspberry Pi. The board, slightly larger than the company’s previous offerings, features a StarFive dual-core 64-bit RISC-V processor running at a 1.0 GHz clock speed. The spec sheet on their GitHub repo indicates 4 and 8 GB RAM options, built-in WiFi and Bluetooth, and hardware video support for decoding, two camera connectors, one DSI connector for an external display, as well as a full-sized HDMI port. Gigabit Ethernet, four USB-3 ports, an audio jack, and USB-C as the power supply are packed onto the edges of the board. GPIO is routed to a 2×20 pin header.

Seeed Studio pegs the cost of the board at $149 for the 8 GB RAM version, although currently you must apply and be selected to purchase a board in this early stage. It’s unclear if the price will remain unchanged after this first run; the product page notes a coupon code is necessary and the Seeed Studios article indicates this is an introductory price. However, the same article also lists the 4 GB RAM variant at $119. The BeagleBoard page shows a timeline of April 2021 for a “pilot run for community”.

It’s exciting to see RISC-V continue to make inroads. This is a powerful board based around the core, and if successful it will help further prove the viability of open source processing cores in increasingly mainstream products.

BeagleBone Deep Learning Video Demo

September 22, 2019 by Al Williams 10 Comments

BeagleBoard often gets eclipsed by Raspberry Pi. Where the Pi focuses on ease-of-use, the BeagleBone generally has more power for hardcore applications. With machine learning AI all the rage now, BeagleBoard now has the BeagleBone AI, a board with specific features aimed at machine learning. A recent video (see below) shows a demo of using TIDL (Texas Instruments Deep Learning Library). The video includes an example of streaming video to a browser and using predefined learning models to identify things picked up by a web camera.

The CPU onboard is the TI Sitara AM5729. That’s a dual Arm Cortex A15 running at 1.5 GHz. There are also two C66x floating-point DSP processors and two dual ARM Cortex M4 coprocessors. Still need more? You get four embedded vision engines, two dual-core real-time units, a 2D graphics accelerator, a 3D graphics accelerator, and a subsystem for encoding and decoding video and cryptography.

Continue reading “BeagleBone Deep Learning Video Demo” →

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.

Real-Time Audio For The PocketBeagle

February 25, 2018 by Brian Benchoff 11 Comments

The BeagleBone has long been a favorite for real-time I/O, and now with the release of the PocketBone — the tiny key fob-sized BeagleBone — there are ever increasing uses for this tiny little programmable real-time Linux module. The Bela Mini, just released, is the latest add-on cape to take advantage of the processing power of the micro-sized PocketBone.

The Bela Mini is a shrinkification of the original Bela, a cape add-on for the BeagleBone. The original breaks out eight analog inputs and eight analog outputs, both sixteen-bits deep. With the addition of powered speaker outputs, the Bela turns the BeagleBone into the perfect tiny audio-Linux-thing, with a special emphasis on Pure Data and other audio wizardry.

The Bela Mini does away with the powered speaker outputs, and instead replaces those ports with stereo audio in and stereo audio out on a three-pin connector. Compared to the original Bela, the Mini loses the eight sixteen-bit analog outputs, but still keeps the analog inputs.

There have been many attempts to add real-time audio to microcontrollers and Linux boards, but few examples have lived up to the hype. Most of the time, this comes down to the choice of microcontroller or module; an ATmega-based Arduino doesn’t have real analog outputs and instead relies on PWMing a digital signal. A Raspberry Pi-based Pure Data box does not have a real-time I/O. This is where the choice of the PocketBone shows its strength. The PocketBone uses the same chip as the BeagleBone, and with that comes the Programmable Real-Time Units (PRUs). This enables the Bela to interface with signals with a dedicated controller in real-time. It’s exactly what you want for audio applications.

Hands On With PocketBeagle

December 7, 2017 by Al Williams 31 Comments

[Ken Shirriff] is no stranger to the pages of Hackaday. His blog posts are always interesting, and the recent one talking about the PocketBeagle is no exception. If you are old enough to remember the days when a Unix workstation set you back tens of thousands of dollars, you won’t be able to help yourself marveling at a Linux computer with 45 I/O pins, 8 analog inputs, 512M of RAM, and a 1 GHz clock, that fits in your pocket and costs $25. What’s more the board’s CPU has two 200 MHz auxiliary CPUs onboard to handle I/O without having to worry about Linux overhead.

These last parts are significant, and although the Beagles have had this feature for years ([Ken] talked about it earlier), the access and communication methods for using these slave processors has become easier. [Ken] shows a small snippet of C code that outputs a 40 MHz square wave no matter what the Linux OS is doing. In this way you can use Linux for the parts of your application that are not that critical, and use the slave processors to handle real time processing.

Continue reading “Hands On With PocketBeagle” →