Seeed Studio's New BeagleBone Green Gateway Adds Wired Ethernet, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth
Swapping two of the USB ports from the Wireless model for a 10/100 Ethernet port the BeagleBone Green Wireless is heavy on the connectivity.
Seeed Studio has announced another twist on its BeagleBone Green single-board computer, an in-house variant of the BeagleBone Black: the BeagleBone Green Gateway, with added Ethernet connectivity alongside Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.
A joint project between BeagleBoard.org and Seeed Studio, the BeagleBone Green family builds on BeagleBoard.org's original BeagleBone Black single-board computer range. The original BeagleBone Green was followed by the BeagleBone Green Wireless, with added Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity; now, the BeagleBone Green Gateway throws wired Ethernet into the mix.
"Based on the open-source hardware design of BeagleBone Black, the newest Seeed Studio BeagleBone Green Gateway has added Ethernet connectivity to the previous design of Seeed Studio BeagleBone Green Wireless, making it equipped with Wi-Fi + Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) + 10/100 Ethernet connectivity," the company writes of its latest design. "The Seeed Studio BeagleBone Green Gateway is fully compatible with Seeed Studio BeagleBone® Green Wireless."
The core of the SBC is a Texas Instruments Sitara AM3358 Arm Cortex-A8 processor running at 1GHz with two 32-bit programmable real-time units (PRUs) running at 200MHz as coprocessors. There's 4kB of EEPROM, 512GB of DDR3 memory, and 4GB eMMC flash storage on-board. Two USB 2.0 ports provide Host connectivity, with a micro USB for power and communication. Two 46-pin headers offer general-purpose input/output (GPIO) connectivity and expansion via BeagleBone Capes, while Seeed's Grove connectors can be found at the far end - one offering I2C and the other offering UART.
It's the connectivity that makes the BeagleBone Green Gateway stand out, however: As well as the same 2.4GHz 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.1/Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) radio as the BeagleBone Green Wireless, the board includes a full-size wired 10/100 Ethernet port next to the USB ports - the reason for the board dropping from four USB ports in the previous design to two this time around.
More information on the board, including links to getting-started guides, can be found on the Seeed Studio shop where it is up for pre-order ahead of a late June delivery date at $59.90 before volume discounts.