Anyone looking for a tiny development board may be interested in the new hardware unveiled by BeagleBoard the form of their open source PocketBeagle which is now available to purchase priced at just $25.
The Raspberry Pi Zero sized PocketBeagle can be used in robotic applications, drones and 3D printers and is based on the Octavo Systems OSD3358 system-in-package (SiP), the same SiP that powers the credit card-sized BeagleBone Black Wireless, but is half the size.
PocketBeagle measures just 35mm x 56mm x 5mm and has been designed to live inside your project and enables you to define its interfaces.
The sky is no limit; PocketBeagle makes a great starting point for building something as advanced as a computer for a CubeSat and there are several BeagleBone® Black examples out there already today. Flying a bit lower, PocketBeagle® is a good target for flight controller software, such as ArduPilot, similar to what is done on BeagleBone® Blue but with the flexibility of choosing all your own sensors and interconnects.
Touching the ground, the combination of a 1-GHz Linux computer and 2 powerful 200-MHz hard-real-time shared-memory programmable real-time (PRU) microcontrollers makes driving robotic machines like 3D printers, CNC mills and laser cutters fast and simple with software such as Redeem, MachineKit or BeagleG as great starting points. If you’d like your ground-based machine to talk back to the cloud, the SPI, USB and UART expansion makes adding your own Ethernet, WiFi, Bluetooth and long-range wireless connectivity easy with Linux drivers and Node.JS or Python libraries to add smarts.
If what you want is just fun, add a SPI-based display and run off of a single-cell LiPo battery to create your own custom gaming device with the sensors, such as cameras and software like OpenCV or just simple accelerometers, of your own choice to go on an adventure of your own.
For more information on the new PocketBeagle jump over to the Github page below.
Source: GitHub