BeagleBone Green Gateway microcomputer

TheBeagleBone® Green Gateway Development Board is a commercial-grade single-board computer (SBC). The BeagleBone Green Gateway is a joint development of BeagleBoard and Seeed Studio and continues the Green line of models, being today's top-of-the-line version that combines all the communication features present in the BeagleBone Green (Ethernet 10 / 100M) and BeagleBone Green Wireless (Wi-Fi 802.11 b / g / n 2.4GHz + Bluetooth 4.1 LE). As a result, this device has all the necessary wired and wireless interfaces under one roof.

There are many expansion boards that provide additional functionality to this microcomputer, such as, for example, LCD monitors with a screen diagonal of 5 "and 7", motor controllers (Motor Bridge Cape), HDMI extenders (HDMI Cape).

With the most necessary communication interfaces on board, the BeagleBone® Green Gateway can be used in a variety of solutions and research projects. It will help with the processing and transmission of information from various sensors and IoT devices, it can be used to build a Smart Home control system, establish automation and control of production processes, and configure the operation of human-controlled interfaces and simple robots.

Composition and purpose of the main elements.

The front part contains all the main interfaces of this microcomputer. The design is made with the expectation of extensibility of the functionality with the help of expansion cards connected via two 46-pin connectors. The operating modes and active interfaces are visually visible thanks to special LEDs (WLAN Enable LED, Bluetooth Enable LED, USR0-3 + WLAN Active LEDs). The board also has built-in 2.4GHz antennas and control buttons.

The interface of this microcomputer consists of the following elements: Micro-USB for power and communication, 2 USB 2.0 hosts, Grove I2C and Grove UART connectors, 2 x 46-pin GPIO connector, Ethernet 10/100 Mbit, wireless connection - Wi-Fi 802.11b/g/n 2.4 GHz and Bluetooth 4.1 Low Energy and DC12V power connector.

On the rear side there is a memory card slot (Micro SD Card Slot), components of the built-in eMMC non-volatile memory and a JTAG interface for debugging and programming the processor.

One of the main advantages of this microcomputer, besides its price, is its small size. With dimensions of 89mm x 54.6mm x 19.6mm, it can be easily integrated into compact control systems.

With a powerful Sitara™ AM3358 Arm® Cortex® A8 processor from Texas Instruments, based on a 1000 MHz 32-bit RISC ARM Cortex-8 processor, as well as a 3D graphics accelerator (PowerVR SGX™) designed to support display effects and equipped with 2 controller area networks (CAN) dual-core programmable real-time units (PRUs), the BeagleBone® Green Gateway is an excellent solution for image processing, graphics processing and data from industrial interface peripherals such as EtherCAT and PROFIBUS.

Since the Sitara AM3358 chip is equipped with two 32-bit low-latency microcontrollers that can operate independently of the ARM Cortex-A8 processor, a characteristic feature of this device is the ability to use a subsystem of programmable real-time modules (PRUs) for real-time applications - real-time data acquisition, access to sensor readings and process control using control signals that come after processing data from sensors and sensors, i.e. the ability to work with processes that have time-critical requirements.

BeagleBone® Green Gateway specifications

The BeagleBone® Green Gateway is an Open Source device, which means that it meets such requirements for software and hardware as free distribution, accessible source code, and modifiability. Thanks to all this, the community of users and developers using this platform is steadily growing, and the availability of an extensive data library and active discussion on the forum allows any enthusiast to join and quickly start working with these devices.

The device supports high-level operating systems (HLOS), and SDKs are available for developers, provided free of charge by TI. Supported software: Debian, Android, Ubuntu, Cloud9 IDE on Node.js with BoneScript library, etc.

The manufacturer positions the Seeed Studio BeagleBone® Green Gateway as a low-cost, yet productive device that can boot the Linux operating system in less than 10 seconds and in less than 5 minutes after that give you the opportunity to start developing with only a USB cable connection.

Wiki for developers: https://wiki.seeedstudio.com/BeagleBone-Green-Gateway/#features.

Included in the package:

1. Seeed Studio BeagleBone® Green Gateway x1
2. Micro USB cable x1
3. User manual x1