The BeagleBone is the low-cost, high-expansion hardware-hacker focused BeagleBoard. It is a bare-bones BeagleBoard that acts as a USB or Ethernet connected expansion companion for your current BeagleBoard and BeagleBoard-xM or works stand-alone. The BeagleBone is small even by BeagleBoard standards and with the high-performance ARM capabilities you expect from a BeagleBoard, the BeagleBone brings full-featured Linux to places it has never gone before.

What is the BeagleBone capable of doing?

At over 1.5 billion Dhrystone operations per second and vector floating point arithmetic operations, the BeagleBone is capable of not just interfacing to all of your robotics motor drivers, location or pressure sensors and 2D or 3D cameras, but also running OpenCV, OpenNI and other image collection and analysis software to recognize the objects around your robot and the gestures you might make to control it.

Through HDMI, VGA or LCD expansion boards, it is capable of decoding and displaying mutliple video formats utilizing a completely open source software stack and synchronizing playback over Ethernet or USB with other BeagleBoards to create massive video walls. If what you are into is building 3D printers, then the BeagleBone has the extensive PWM capabilities, the on-chip Ethernet and the 3D rendering and manipulation capabilities all help you eliminate both your underpowered microcontroller-based controller board as well as that PC from your basement.

BeagleBone features:

•  >700-MHz superscalar ARM Cortex™-A8
• 256-MB DDR2 RAM
• 1-port USB 2.0 host
• Integrated 10/100 Ethernet
• microSD slot and microSD card with validation and demonstration image from the Angstrom Distribution
• USB 2.0 fl exible device port with ability to supply power
• On-board USB-to-serial/JTAG over shared USB device port
• 3.3-V 2× 46-pin peripheral with multiplexed LCD signals and battery-control expansion headers
• Board size: 8,6 × 5,4 cm.
• Temperature range: 0ºC to 70ºC

Some possible applications of the BeagleBone:

• Web services.
• 3-D gaming.
• 3-D UI.
• Linux kernel and driver development.
• Boot loaders and firmware.
• UI framework.
• ARM NEON codecs.
• Codec plug-ins for GStreamers.
• OpenGL applications.
• OpenMAX TM IL applications.
• Ubuntu TM , Android, MeeGo, WinCE, QNX, Angstrom, Symbian, Debian, Gentoo and others.
• Home media centers.
• In-vehicle entertainment.
• Robotics.
• Web kiosks.
• And many more...

What's in the box:

• BeagleBone
• uSD and adapter
• Datacable