BeagleBone is an "opensource hardware" which is having a credit card sized foam factor. It was the first in its kind, which becomes famous for its small size, but having high capability. Unlike its ancestors such as BeagleBoard or BeagleBoard-xM, it has plenty of input-output pins which can be used by hackers and hardware lovers for interfacing linux with their favorite sensors without any kernel level modifications. Moreover, its arduino like design can be used to attach plenty of capes, which will add wings to itscapabilities even further.
Major features are as follows
- 256MB DDR2 RAM
- 3D graphics accelerator
- ARM Cortex-M3 for power management
- 2x PRU 32-bit RISC CPUs
- USB client: power, debug and device
- USB host
- Ethernet
- 2x 46 pin headers
Many opensource projects based on BeagleBone can be found under http://beagleboard.org/project. Getting Started page contains all the necessary informations and drivers for getting the board up out of the box in just few minutes. The SD Card which comes bundled with the pack contains Angstrom Linux Distribution, has all the necessary tools to begin development. This production version image can also be obtained from here. Apart from the Angstrom distribution users can easily switch to other distros like Ubuntu, ArchLinux or Android. More hacking tips on BeagleBone will be made available soon.
