BeagleBoard

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URL = http://beagleboard.org/

Description

1.

"Other open source projects like the BeagleBoard, which is shepherded by Texas Instruments, are trying to win Arduino fans over.

The Beagleboard is a low-power, single-board computer, whose latest version is based on the same 1-GHz ARM Cortex A8 processor that drives the most sophisticated smartphones today. That gives it far more processing power than the Arduino. Yet the BeagleBoard hasn’t hit the same kind of chord with hardware hackers that the Arduino has.

“The BeagleBoard is not for a novice,” says Phil Torrone, senior editor at Make magazine and creative director at Adafruit, a company that sells DIY electronics and kits. “With an Arduino, you can get an LED light blinking in minutes.”

Fundamentally, BeagleBoard and Arduino are two different systems: The former is a single-board computer, while the Arduino is just an 8-bit microcontroller. The BeagleBoard-xM includes a 1-GHz processor, on-board ethernet, five USB 2.0 ports and 512 MB of memory.

What they do have in common is that both represent possibilities: the potential to use your technical and creative skills to make a concept come alive. (http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/07/hardware-hobbyists-arduino/)


2.

"BeagleBoard.org has created a number of products since its conception a few years ago, from the initial 'BeagleBoard' single board computer, through to the enhanced 'BeagleBoard-xM' with more performance and connectivity, and its most recent and expandable platform, the 'BeagleBone'. All of these have set out to achieve a goal of bringing high performance ARM-based processing technology to a wide 'community' of developers and users, in low-cost 'open' platforms, giving access to as much of the system-on-chip features as possible. The recent launch of the 'BeagleBone' was a great testament to this vibrant 'community', key to Beagleboard.org, which enabled a wealth of advanced platform and application software to be immediately available, and a large amount of hardware expertise providing feedback and ready to start building add-ons and clones. This was exactly what was hoped for when the project was initially conceived by a couple of engineers discussing at the coffee machine about how their technology could be made more widely accessible. The community continues to grow each day, with more and more exciting and innovative uses for these low-cost, open platforms revealed on the various mailing lists and chat rooms - from 'football playing robots' to 'media servers', the list, expertise and imagination seems endless!" (http://oshug.org/event/18)


More Information

  1. Arduino and other Product Hacking initiatives
  2. http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/06/beagleboard/