All about Beagle Bone Black

The BeagleBone Black (BBB) board is a low cost, open hardware and expandable computer
launched by a community of developers sponsored by Texas Instruments. The size of the board
is small enough to fit in a mint tin box. It can be used for a variety of projects from high school
fair projects to prototypes of very complex real-world embedded systems. BBB is the newest product in the Beagle family. 

This board features a powerful TI Sitara™ ARM Cortex™-A8 processor which runs at 1 GHz. And a 2 GB on-board flash memory acts as the “hard drive” for the board to host a Linux operating system and other software development tools. With a user-friendly, browser-based Bonescript programming environment called Cloud9,a learner can easily program the BBB board to rapidly prototype electronic systems that interface with real-world applications. 

As the knowledge of users develops, the board provides more complicated interfaces including C/C++ functions to access digital and analog pins aboard the ARM Cortex A8 microprocessor.  

The full power and capability of the BBB board can be programmed in the underlying onboard Linux operating system, such as Angstrom or Ubuntu.

Moreover, the Beagle community provides a useful repository of example projects, forums and
hardware/software documentation. The Beagle family currently consists of BeagleBoard, BeagleBoard–xM, the original
BeagleBone and the new BeagleBone Black. All have been designed by Gerald Coley, a
Hardware Applications Engineer from TI responsible for hardware design and manufacturing
issues. Gerald temporarily named his new designs as “Beagle”, as a movie “underdog” was showed in local theaters during the early Beagle line development period. 

Recently, an acronym highlights the important Beagle features: Bring your own peripherals, Entry level costs, ARM Cortex-A8 Superscalar processor, Graphics accelerated, Linux and open source community, Environment for innovators. Jason Kridner, another Software Applications Engineer also from TI is responsible for Beagle software. 

The BeagleBoard community with the support from TI ensures the BeagleBone project remains sustained. Its most important members are the users of the Beagle family. The goal of this community is for the entire community to openly share their application successes and encourage the next generation of STEM practitioners.