All you need to know about the new board on the block, the BeagleBone Blue

By Nicole DiGiose

Watch out, Raspberry Pi! It looks like there’s some fresh hot competition on the horizon. The BeagleBoard.org Foundation has just released its latest single-board computer, the BeagleBoard Blue, and it aims to make building Linux-powered robots easier than ever.

The BeagleBone Blue aims to simplify robotics projects. Image source: BeagleBoard.

Although the popular Raspberry Pi is a favorite board among makers and students, the original BeagleBoard single-board computer predates it. Because it’s fully open hardware, the entire BeagleBoard family has a huge advantage over much of its competition, being that open hardware allows anyone to tinker with the design in order to build spin-off boards with the features that they need. The BeagleBoard Foundation designs and releases official boards, with the BeagleBoard Blue being the latest addition.

What’s more, the $79.95 BeagleBone Blue has easy-to-use features that can get your robotics projects up and running quickly.

“Unlike some other platforms that expect you to connect a keyboard, monitor, and mouse to program, we simply expect you to use your Wi-Fi network and browser,” co-founder of BeagleBoard, Jason Kridner, told Electronic Products. “We don’t rely on any services in the cloud as the development tools are directly hosted and served off of the board. By running Linux, you can log in while your robot is running and collect data or provide stimulus, without needed to do a lot of extra coding. At this price, we feel that we have a remarkably novel set of features.”

The BeagleBone Blue builds on the BeagleBone Black platform but adds features dedicated to motor control and sensing. Image source: Arrow.

Designed for robotics projects, the BeagleBone Blue builds on the BeagleBone Black platform but adds features dedicated to motor control and sensing. A battery-management circuit supports charging and discharging for self-contained builds, there are dedicated pulse-width and pulse-position modulated outputs for eight 6-V servo motors, or electronic speed controller control, and there are four dc motor drivers and inputs for four quadratic encoders. The board also packs a nine-axis inertial measurement unit and a barometer onboard, four analog-to-digital converter inputs for additional analog sensors, and support for the Controller Area Network (CAN) bus protocol. Integrated Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity and the expected BeagleBone features, such as numerous GPIO ports and both USB host and device ports, are also included.

“We chose robotics because we see robotics as the key to get kids interested in programming,” said Kridner. “Developing apps on phones and computers can be very intimidating and we want people to feel empowered.”

Built around an Octavo Systems OSD3358 system-in-package, the board features a 1-GHz Texas Instruments AM3358 ARM Cortex-A8 processor, 512 MB of RAM, and two dedicated 200-MHz 32-bit programmable real-time units (PRUs) for implementing custom peripherals. The BeagleBone Blue comes equipped with a pre-loaded Linux distribution with additional support for Debian, the robot operating system, and the Ardupilot autopilot and remote control platform.

To purchase the BeagleBoard Blue, visit beagleboard.org/blue.