The Beaglebone Black - a quick description

Just for the record, there was a previous Beaglebone (720 Mhz and $89). There is also a larger Beagleboard.

Here is what you get

• $45.00 price tag
• 1 Ghz ARM processor (Texas Instruments AM3359 ARM Cortex-A8)
• 512M RAM
• 2G of onboard flash
• 10/100 ethernet
• USB 2.0 (one for host, one for device)
• A two core 200 Mhz programmable reatime unit (PRU).
• Video (HDMI)
• GPIO (65 pins).
• 8 pins can be configured as PWM outputs.
• 7 channel 12 bit ADC converter (125ns conversions).
• power LED.
• 4 user programmable LED's
• Ships with Angstrom linux on board and ready to run
• micro SD card slot.
• SPI and i2c interfaces.
• Consumes 250 mA (can power via USB)
• 3.4 by 2.1 inch board size.

The Beaglebone Black that I am now fiddling with shipped with "Angstrom Linux". It has ssh, python 2.7, perl 5.14.2, bash 4.2.10, awk, no tcl (thank heaven). Vi runs vim 7.2.446. It has tar, git, gcc 4.7.3. Gnu make 3.82, gdb, and of all things, even gimp.

Ruby was easy to install as a package later. The "opkg" package system has many things that can be added.

root@beaglebone:~# uname -a
Linux beaglebone 3.8.6 #1 SMP Sat Apr 13 09:10:52 CEST 2013 armv7l GNU/Linux