BeagleBone Black Wireless Board Gets WiFi and Bluetooth 4.1 LE, Drops Ethernet

The BeagleBone Black is still one of the most popular development boards around, but in a world going more and more wireless, it only comes with a wired Ethernet interface. Seeed Studio BeagleBone Green Wireless and Neuromeka BeagleBone Air already provided BeagleBone compatible boards with WiFi and Bluetooth LE, as well as Zigbee for the latter, but now BeagleBoard.org themselves have launched BeagleBone Black Wireless with WiFi and Bluetooth 4.1 LE based on Octavo Systems OSD3358 System-in-Package with Texas Instrument Sitara AM3358 processor, 512 MB RAM, TI LDO and PMIC, and many passive components. BeagleBone Black Wireless specifications: SoC – Texas Instruments Sitara AM3358 Cortex A8 @ 1 GHz with PowerVR SGX530 GPU System Memory – 512 MB DDR3L Storage – 4GB eMMC flash + micro SD slot USB – 1x mini USB client port for power & communication, 1x USB host port Connectivity – 802.11 b/g/n WiFi + Bluetooth […]

Google Research PRUDAQ is a 40MSPS ADC Data Acquisition (DAQ) Cape for BeagleBone Black & Green

Engineers at Google Research wanted to measure the strength of a carrier signals without having to use a bulky oscilloscope or DAQ (Data Acquisition) system,  so they looked into several makers boards to achieve this task, eventually decided to go with BeagleBone Black / Green, and created their own PRUDAQ cape capable of sampling 40 million samples per second, and open source it all. PRUDAQ cape specifications: Dual-channel simultaneously-sampled 10-bit ADC (Analog Devices AD9201) Up to 20MSPS per channel (40MSPS total) theoretical 0-2V input voltage range (DC coupled) 4:1 analog switches in front of each channel provide a total of 8 single-ended analog inputs. (See here for differential input) SMA jacks for direct access to the 2 ADC channels Flexible clock options: External input via SMA jack Internal on-board 10MHz oscillator Programmable clock from BeagleBone GPIO pins Powered via BeagleBone headers – no external power needed Fully exposed BeagleBone headers […]

The Eclipse Foundation Releases Open Source Smart Home & IoT Gateway Frameworks, MQTT & oneM2M Implementations

The Eclipse Internet of Things (IoT) Working Group has released – or soon will be releasing – four open source projects for the Internet of Things with Eclipse SmartHome 0.8 framework, Eclipse Kura 2.0 IoT gateway framework, Eclipse Paho 1.2 MQTT & MQTT-SN clients, and Eclipse OM2M 1.0 implementation of oneM2M standard. Eclipse SmartHome 0.8 Eclipse SmartHome is a framework for smart home solutions that runs on embedded devices, including Raspberry Pi, BeagleBone Black or Intel Edison development boards. The latest SmartHome 0.8 release includes a new REST API and corresponding “Paper UI” administration interface, support for new devices including Sonos speakers, LIFX bulbs, Belkin WeMo devices, digitalSTROM systems, EnOcean devices (via a new OSGi EnOcean Base Driver) and others, as well as a new rule engine supporting templates for beginners, JavaScript for automation rules and graphical rule editors. You can find more details on Eclipse SmartHome page, and/or download SmartHome 0.8, […]

$44.90 BeagleBone Green Wireless Board Adds 802.11n WiFi & Bluetooth 4.1 LE and More USB Ports

After BeagleBone Air, there’s now another BeagleBone Black derived board with WiFi and Bluetooth, as BeagleBone Green gets a wireless version with WiFi 802.11n, Bluetooth 4.1 LE, and four USB ports. BeagleBone Green Wireless Specifications The Ethernet port is also gone, but most of the other specifications remain the same as seen from the comparison table below. BeagleBone Black BeagleBone Green BeagleBone Green Wireless SoC Texas Instruments Sitara AM3358 ARM Cortex-A8 processor @ 1GHz with NEON, PowerVR SGX530 GPU, PRU… System Memory 512MB DDR3 RAM Storage 4GB eMMC flash + micro SD slot USB 1x USB client, 1x USB 2.0 host 1 USB client, 4x USB 2.0 host ports Network Connectivity 10/100M Ethernet Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n & Bluetooth 4.1 LE Video Output HDMI N/A Expansion Headers 2×46 pin headers 2×46-pin headers and 2x Grove connectors Debugging 6-pin serial header and unpopulated 20-pin JTAG header Dimensions 86.3 x 53.4 cm Price […]

OSD3358 SiP Integrates TI Sitara AM3358 SoC, Memory, PMIC, LDO and Passive Components into a Single BGA System-in-Package

Octavo Systems has created a BeagleBone Black reference design that’s exactly like the original board, except for one detail: It’s based on the company’s OSD3358 system-in-package (SiP) that combine Texas Instruments AM3358 Cortex A8 processor with up to 1GB RAM, TI LDO and PMIC, and over 140 passive components into a single 400-ball BGA package. The only three other main components on the reference design are the eMMC flash, Ethernet transceiver and HDMI framer. Key specs of OSD3358 SiP: Texas Instruments AM335x (AM3358 or AM3352) Cortex A8 processor @ 1 GHz 256MB, 512 MB or 1GB DDR3 memory Texas Instruments TPS62217C PMIC Texas Instruments TL5209 LDO Over 140 passive components Package – 400 1.27mm pitch BGA – 27 x 27 mm package size Temperature Range – Base version: 0 to 85°C; Industrial version: -40° to 85° C Some of the advantages of a SiP package over using multiple chips include faster […]

BeagleBone Air is a BeagleBone Black & Green Compatible Development Board with WiFi, Bluetooth LE, and Zigbee Connectivity

So far, if you wanted to add wireless connectivity to BeagleBone Black or BeagleBone Green, you’d either use a USB dongle, or a wireless CAPE, but Neuromeka, a Korean company  has recently launched BeagleBone Air “IoT gateway” board, fully compatible with the two aforementioned boards (minus HDMI output), but adding on-board WiFi, Bluetooth LE, and Zigbee connectivity. BeagleBone Air specifications: SoC – Texas Instruments Sitara AM3358BZCZ100 Cortex A8 @ 1 GHz with NEON + PowerVR SGX530 GPU System Memory – 512 MB DDR3L @ 800 MHz Storage – 4GB eMMC + micro SD slot USB HS USB 2.0 client port (micro USB) HS USB 2.0 host poty (USB type -A) HS USB 2.0 host port on expansion header Connectivity 10/100M Ethernet (RJ45) WiFi 802.11 b/g/n via Realtek RTL8188US with SMA connector for antenna Bluetooth 4.0 LE via TI CC2541 with SMA connector for antenna Zigbee via TI CC2531 with SMA […]

LabVIEW Now Supports Raspberry Pi 2 & 3, BeagleBone Black with LINX 3.0 Release

LabView is a system-design platform and development environment with a graphical programming syntax that “makes it simple to visualize, create, and code engineering systems”.  It’s often used with National Instruments hardware such as myRIO, but LabView Makerclub has also developed LINX to bring support to Arduino and chipKIT, and with the latest LINX 3.0, support for BeagleBone Black, and Raspberry Pi boards has been added. You’ll need Labview 2014 (Windows only) or greater to work with LINX 3.0, as well as one of the supported development boards. Complete Labview 2014 + board kits are also sold with the  BeagleBone Black Physical Computing Kit and Raspberry Pi 2 Physical Computing Kit both going for $89 on Digilent. LabView files are save in VI format, and the same file can be used on Arduino, BeagleBone Black, and Raspberry Pi board with minor modifications (e.g. GPIO pin number) as shown in the blink […]

DIGIO-128 Board Adds 128 GPIOs to Your Development Board

If you run out of GPIOs on your board, the easy way is to add an I2C GPIO expander, but those are normally limited to 8 or 16-channels, so  Land Boards decided to create a board with 8 IO expanders making it a 128 channel IO expander that works on Raspberry Pi, BeagleBone Black, Arduino, and basically any boards with an I2C hardware or software implementation. DIGIO-128 board specifications: 8x Microchip MCP23017 16-bit I/O expander for up to 128 GPIOs Communication Interface – I2C host interface with 100/400 KHZ operation; 4-pin host interface connector (Ground, Power, Clock, Data) 8x 20-pin 2.54mm pitch connectors with 16 I/Os, 2x VCC, and 2 ground 2x 4-pin interrupt connectors Data Storage – Microchip 24LC024 2K EEPROM with board info. 3.3V or 5V operation Dimensions – 95 x 95 mm You can find out to use the board in the Wiki for code for Raspberry […]

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