Video: Get to grips with the BeagleBone

We're all for BeagleBoards here on Gadget Master and this is one I meant to flag before - Texas Instrument's system has a little brother: the BeagleBone, powered by the company's Sitara ARM Cortex-A8 processor.

"It builds in the most loved features of the BeagleBoard but has shrunk the size and price while adding more I/O connections," boasts TI in the video below. The RRP is $89.

To get started, simply plug it into your PC (Windows MacOs or Linux) and you can begin development... It will appear as a Flash drive and you will be able to extract the files to get you going.

Features of the hardware spec highlighted by BeagleBoard.org include:
    * Board size: 3.4" x 2.1"
    * Shipped with 2GB microSD card with the Angstrom Distribution with node.js and Cloud9 IDE
    * Single cable development environment with built-in FTDI-based serial/JTAG and on-board hub to give the same cable simultaneous access to a USB device port on the target processor
    * Industry standard 3.3V I/Os on the expansion headers with easy-to-use 0.1" spacing
    * On-chip Ethernet, not off of USB
    * Easier to clone thanks to larger pitch on BGA devices (0.8mm vs. 0.4mm), no package-on-package memories, standard DDR2 vs. LPDDR, integrated USB PHYs and more.

What is the BeagleBone capable of doing? They are glad you asked...

At over 1.5 billion Dhrystone operations per second and vector floating point arithmetic operations, the BeagleBone 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 OpenCV, OpenNI and other image collection and analysis software to recognize the objects around your robot and the gestures you might make to control it. Through HDMI, VGA or 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 BeagleBoards to create massive video walls. If what you are into is building 3D printers, then the BeagleBone has the extensive PWM capabilities, the on-chip Ethernet and the 3D rendering and manipulation capabilities all help you eliminate both your underpowered microcontroller-based controller board as well as that PC from your basement.

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