In case you are curious, the GPU is PowerVR "Rogue" AXE-1-16M. Despite PowerVR generally having been a pain in the ass in the past, they apparently have had a change of heart finally and are trying to push drivers to mainline which is nice. Although it must be also said that afaik the drivers have not been merged yet, so ymmv with these devices
Beagleboard is the pioneer in SBC trend, it predates RPi, arguably RPi took the ideas from OLPC(one laptop per child) and Beagleboard and made what it is today. Even today, Beaglebone is quite popular for real products.<p>The kit looks cool to me, as a beagleboard and beaglebone user, I wonder when TI will embrace 'standard' wireless spec(e.g. LORA, 802.11AH etc) instead of keeping using its own sub 1Ghz proprietary wireless solution?<p>Beagleboard also has its Jetson like AI board, <a href="https://beagleboard.org/ai-64" rel="nofollow">https://beagleboard.org/ai-64</a>, but Jetson just dominated that market.
This looked pretty cool until I found a price: ~$100.<p>Lots of cool features, and it's a beagleboard, so there will be actual support/documentation/source. But I'm not sure $100 is "affordable" for the SoC you get and the small 2GB of RAM.
Hmm, this is 802.3cg which is 10Mbps single-pair, which doesn't seem to be compatible with the 802.3da multidrop iot stuff, and definitely not the 802.3bw 100Mbps single-pair being used in automotive.<p>Whyyyyyyyyy, IEEE, do we have so many single-pair singletons floating around out there, none of which work with each other?
The BeagleConnect seems lost in the announcement but interesting in its own right. It looks to me like a well packaged Arm M4 with wireless, reminiscent of the M5Stack modules using ESP32. The twist is that BeagleConnect uses Linux kernel drivers instead of the ubiquitous Arduino library contributed code, if I am interpreting this correctly?<p><i>BeagleConnect™ uses the collaboratively developed Linux kernel to contain the intelligence required to speak to these devices (sensors, actuators, and indicators), rather than relying on writing code on a microcontroller specific to these devices.</i><p><a href="https://docs.beagleboard.org/latest/boards/beagleconnect/freedom/docs.beagleboard.io/boards/beagleconnect/freedom/01-introduction.html" rel="nofollow">https://docs.beagleboard.org/latest/boards/beagleconnect/fre...</a>
Great to see SPE (ethernet) here, this is going to be an important IoT/industrial standard IMHO, and I'm not aware of any other hobbyist options. And also it seems they haven't chosen one of the seemingly proprietary/industrial/expensive connectors, which is great too.<p>And it has PoDL (PoE equivalent) too! Though at 5V/250mA, I think this is for the board to power sensors, not the board to receive power itself.
Kinda weird that I don't see <i>any</i> exposed gpio pins on the board? The SoC has "up to 170" gpio pins, and especially it has those fancy PRUSSes in there, so feels like huge missed opportunity to not expose any of that?
I wish a board like this came with a SODIMM slot or more memory, even if it meant a size-increase.<p>2GB is very limiting for an otherwise flexible platform. It will take some dedication of resources to get the quoted GPU modes, for one.<p>The utility increase per memory unit compared to the cost increase, with a base price of $100, really makes me scratch my head here.
It's interesting that TI has dumped the PRUSS from this part of the Sitara family and gone with a Cortex-M4 as the coprocessor instead. It's certainly a more comfortable development environment.<p>I also like the single-wire ethernet interface. That's going to be really useful looking forward.
Looks like an interesting open source SBC, with a wide variety of connectors for sensors and other devices/connectivity. At $99 it’s definitely not competing based on cpu/memory.<p>It’s in stock at all 3 distributors they link from the product site.
I've been thinking of picking one of these up to make a small hand held device for emails, maybe video calling. Does anyone have experience doing these sorts of projects with the beagle?