BeagleBoard.org has collaborated with Seeed Studio to produce a new variant of BeagleBoard.org BeagleBone Black, designed for makers and developers. This new open hardware board is called the SeeedStudio BeagleBone Green. You must be thinking, so what’s different about this one and is it really colored green?
The SeeedStudio BeagleBone Green, like the BeagleBoard.org BeagleBone Black, runs on a Texas Instruments Sitara AM335x processor. The fundamental differences are:
• Two Grove connectors that make it easy to connect to Grove modules to sense orientation, location, distance, water, touch, sound, temperature, humidity, barometric pressure, heart rate, finger print and much more
• Replaced 5V barrel and miniUSB with a single microUSB connection, most common to power and connect to many common hobbyist and developer boards
• Removal of the microHDMI video output to save cost
The decision to create this board happened around a discussion by me and Eric Pan of Seeed Studio at the Open Hardware Summit 2014 in Rome[1], where I spoke about "The Power of the Right Message"[2] and Eric spoke about "Design from Manufacture"[3]. We discovered that the combination of BeagleBoard.org's open nature and Seeed Studio's ability to quickly take open designs to manufacturing could make for an excellent example of the value of both of our organizations. By connecting up easily to Seeed Studio's large number of Grove modules, users are able to experience first success in their physical programming quickly and be confident they can take their experiments to any level they desire without barriers.
SeeedStudio BeagleBone Green is available now for $39 from Seeed Bazaar on-line and Micro Center stores around the United States. For more information, visit http://beagleboard.org/green.
Let us know in the comments what projects you would use BeagleBone Green for!
[1] http://2014.oshwa.org/2014/11/04/all-open-hardware-summit-2014-videos-are-available/
