beaglebone-black - Flipbook - Page 24
Chapter 4
BeagleBone Black Overview
The BeagleBone Black is the latest addition to the BeagleBoard.org family and like its predecessors, is designed
to address the Open Source Community, early adopters, and anyone interested in a low cost ARM Cortex-A8
based processor.
It has been equipped with a minimum set of features to allow the user to experience the power of the processor
and is not intended as a full development platform as many of the features and interfaces supplied by the
processor are not accessible from the BeagleBone Black via onboard support of some interfaces. It is not a
complete product designed to do any particular function. It is a foundation for experimentation and learning
how to program the processor and to access the peripherals by the creation of your own software and hardware.
It also o昀昀ers access to many of the interfaces and allows for the use of add-on boards called capes, to add
many di昀昀erent combinations of features. A user may also develop their own board or add their own circuitry.
BeagleBone Black is manufactured and warranted by partners listed at https://beagleboard.org/logo for the
bene昀椀t of the community and its supporters.
Jason Kridner of Texas Instruments handles the community promotions and is the spokesman for BeagleBoard.org.
The board is designed by Gerald Coley of EmProDesign, a charter member of the BeagleBoard.org community.
The PCB layout up through PCB revision B was done by Circuitco and Circuitco is the sole funder of its development and transition to production. Later PCB revisions have been made by Embest, a subsidiary of Avent.
The Software is written and supported by the thousands of community members, including Jason Kridner,
employee of Texas Instruments, and Robert Nelson, employee of DigiKey.
4.1 BeagleBone Compatibility
The board is intended to be compatible with the original BeagleBone as much as possible. There are several
areas where there are di昀昀erences between the two designs. These di昀昀erences are listed below, along with the
reasons for the di昀昀erences.
• Sitara AM3358BZCZ100, 1GHZ, processor.
– Sorry, we just had to make it faster.
• 512MB DDR3L
– Cost reduction
– Performance boost
– Memory size increase
– Lower power
• No Serial port by default
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