The BeagleBoard.org® BeagleBone® Blue, developed in a close partnership between BEAGLEBOARD.ORG® and the UC SAN DIEGO COORDINATED ROBOTICS LAB, combines the essential features for low-cost, community-supported embedded applications of the BeagleBoard.org® BeagleBone® Black Wireless (dropping the HDMI, stackable headers, and 5V barrel jack) and all of the features of the BeagleBoard.org® Robotics Cape into a compact, lightweight, single-board solution.
In short, from the Black Wireless, key features it incorporates include:
AM335x 1GHz ARM® Cortex-A8 processor,
512MB DDR3 RAM,
4GB 8-bit eMMC on-board flash storage,
NEON floating-point accelerator,
2x PRU 32-bit microcontrollers,
USB2 client for power & communications, USB2 host, and
built-in combo wireless module providing both WiFi (802.11 b/g/n, 2.4GHz) and Bluetooth (4.1 and BLE), complete with LEDs indicating status.
From the Robotics Cape, it incorporates:
built-in 2-cell LiPo support with balanced charging and convenient LED power gauge,
9-18V charger input,
4 DC motor outputs,
8 PWM outputs for servos and ESCs (with the board performing PWM generation on coprocessors, not bogging down the ARM),
4 quadrature encoder inputs (with the board performing high-speed encoder counting on coprocessors, not bogging down the ARM),
built-in 9-axis IMU (3-axis gyroscope + 3-axis accelerometer + 3-axis magnetometer) plus barometer,
easy-connect JST interfaces for all of the essential busses: I2C, SPI, UART, CAN, GPIOs, GPS, DSM2 radio, power, ADC, and
user-programmable LEDs and buttons.
Like the Black Wireless, the Blue incorporates a SIP developed by OCTAVO SYSTEMS integrating many high-speed components (processor, processor power supply, memory, many passives), thus significantly simplifying the board layout. Also like the Black and Black Wireless, the EE-CAD files for the Blue are freely available, in AUTODESK EAGLE, thereby facilitating the rapid design of derivative boards with a different selection of components (though in most desktop-sized robotic applications this should prove to be entirely unnecessary, given the rich selection of supported easy-to-use features on the Blue!).
