HI has extensive experience with both the BeagleBone family of devices including the ubiquitous BeagleBone Black and Pocket Beagle (PB). This prototype device family is an amazing start to a commercialization process of a final design. Its complete open source methodology, reference designs and hardware clarity.
The new BeagleBone Blue and BeagleBone AI offer additional peripherals and processing power to extend the fully Open Source platform into other new and exciting projects at the prototype stage.
Entirely open source (both hardware and software) the BeagleBone platform is supported by strong Texas Instruments documentation. This platform is a stepping stone to commercialization that leverages many of the speed to market advantages of the Raspberry Pi but in a more open environment that lends itself to complete customization options.
This high level of integration of the chipset suite increases performance while lowering system power consumption and cost. This is clear in the prototype device platforms for sale, as well as for customization and commercialization of the design into your exact needs.
The BeagleBone platform is supported by embedded Linux®.
Beagle Bone Black
The BeagleBone Black (BBB) is a compact (only 3.4in x 2.1in), cost-effective, and powerful platform for developing high-performance applications including Internet of Things (IoT) gateways and routers, data acquisition, imaging, medical and industrial control.
At the heart of the BBB is the Texas Instruments Sitara AM3358 processor with an ARM® Cortex A8 core. This processor is a highly integrated System on a Chip (SoC) with core speeds up to 1.0GHz, a flash controller (4GB), DDR3 RAM controller (512MB), and a suite of peripherals Ethernet, USB, HDMI, UART directly accessible.
PocketBeagle
The PocketBeagle (PB) is used as the heart of many systems managing sensor data acquisition and communication. While we often design custom circuitry based on the open source Pocket Beagle schematic, we have found applications to use the PocketBeagle directly with only secondary circuits supplementals with a second connected circuit board.
The PB has numerous interfaces, UART, CAN, SPI, USB, I2C, Analog inputs, thereby allowing HI enormous flexibility in choosing the best sensors for the application.
BeagleBone Blue
BeagleBone® Blue is an all-in-one Linux-based computer for robotics and devices with needs for motor, encoder, and servo connections. At 3.5" x 2.15", this board hosts the Octavo OSD3358 microprocessor together with wifi/Bluetooth, IMU/barometer, power regulation, and state-of-charge LEDs for a 2-cell LiPo, H-Bridges, and discrete connectors for 4 DC motors+encoders, 8 servos as mentioned. THis device also makes available commonly-needed buses and general-purpose IO commonly needed in connected, embedded applications.
Actively supported by a strong community, code samples provide a leg up in devices that need to do more than just record data.
BeagleBone AI
Based on the Texas Instruments AM5729, the Beagle Bone AI provides access to this powerful System on a Chip. This device utilizes the longstanding BeagleBone® Black header and mechanical compatibility - simplifying development with existing prototype jigs. The TI C66x digital-signal-processor (DSP) cores and embedded-vision-engine (EVE) cores supported through an optimized TIDL machine learning OpenCL API with pre-installed tools.
This device is targeted for everyday automation in industrial and commercial applications where vision-based machine learning or high powered processing is critical for prototype success.
Going from BeagleBone to Production
The BeagleBone Platform, (whether it be the Black, the Pocket, Green, Blue, AI, or whatever, is next) is an open-source hardware AND software platform.
Today you can PURCHASE BeagleBone boards like those shown above (which is what we do for rapid prototyping). But more importantly, your Hallsten Innovations development team can use those existing open-source schematics and firmware to spin a circuit board customized for a specific application. This re-spin methodology fits extremely well with our rapid prototyping model but offers none of the licensing/availability downsides of the hobbyists' favorite Raspberry Pi.
Hallsten Innovations has extensive experience with embedded operating systems and firmware. Our stock configurations of operating systems and firmware can be customized to meet your particular needs very quickly.
