Seeed Studio has refreshed its BeagleBone single-board laptop lineup with the BeagleBone Inexperienced Eco, a tweaked model of the BeagleBone Inexperienced developed in partnership with BeagleBoard.org — now boasting improved vitality effectivity.
“The Seeed Studio BeagleBone Inexperienced Eco, developed by Seeed Studio in partnership with and accepted by the BeagleBoard.org Basis, is an open-source single-board laptop (SBC) constructed across the Texas Devices AM3358 SoC [System on Chip],” Seeed’s Carla Guo explains of the brand new board. “Designed for versatility, it combines excessive efficiency, sturdy safety, wealthy connectivity, and superior options, making it a wonderful alternative for builders, college students, hobbyists, and innovators alike.”
Seeed Studio has refreshed the basic BeagleBone Inexperienced, providing a brand new “Eco” model with gigabit Ethernet, USB 2.0, and improved energy effectivity. (📷: Seeed Studio)
Seeed has been experimenting with the BeagleBone platform for a while, although we’ve not seen a brand new design since the BeagleBone Inexperienced Gateway again in 2020. Whereas that supplied expanded community connectivity, the brand new BeagleBone Inexperienced Eco has a distinct focus: vitality effectivity.
The BeagleBone Inexperienced Eco is constructed across the similar Texas Devices AM3358 system-on-chip as the usual BeagleBone Inexperienced, with a single-core Arm Cortex-A8 processor with NEON extensions and a 3D graphics accelerator plus the dual-core 32-bit PRU-ICSS coprocessor system. There’s been a shift in storage, although: the 4GB eMMC has been boosted to a extra beneficiant 16GB whereas the on-board 4kB EEPROM is now 32kB, with the RAM left alone at 512MB of DDR3L operating at 800MHz.
The largest change, although, is the substitute of the sooner TI TPS65217C energy administration chip within the authentic BeagleBone Inexperienced with the TI TPS6521403, plus a swapout of the TL5209DR 3.3V low drop-out regulator for a triple-step setup of TPS62A01DRL 3.3V buck converter, TPS74501PDRV 1.8V always-on low drop-out regulator, and a TPS2117DRL energy multiplexer. All collectively, meaning a lift in energy effectivity — although, on the time of writing, Seeed had not shared measurements nor precisely how a lot of an enchancment patrons can anticipate from the redesign.
The corporate has launched full schematics for the redesigned board, although no board design recordsdata. (📷: Seeed Studio)
Elsewhere on the board, the USB 1.1 connectivity has been upgraded to USB 2.0 for each Shopper and Host operations, and the Quick Ethernet port is now gigabit succesful — although nonetheless able to operating at 100Mb/s and 10Mb/s when required. The 2 46-pin BeagleBone Cape headers are current and proper, together with the Inexperienced variant’s I2C and UART Grove connectors for solderless enlargement — whereas the 4 standing LEDs have now been break up into one devoted energy LED and 4 user-programmable LEDs, and the bodily energy button has been eliminated leaving solely reset and boot-select/user-defined buttons. The ultimate distinction: the brand new mannequin is round 5g (round 0.18oz) lighter than its predecessor, and is now rated to an industrial temperature vary of -40–85°F (-40–185°F).
The brand new BeagleBone Inexperienced Eco is now out there to order on the Seeed Studio retailer, priced at $42 — a slight low cost over its non-Eco predecessor. The shop web page additionally features a schematic for the design.
