Seeed Studio Surprises with a New BeagleBone Green Eco, Upgraded and Tweaked for Energy Efficiency

Seeed Studio has refreshed its BeagleBone single-board computer lineup with the BeagleBone Green Eco, a tweaked version of the BeagleBone Green developed in partnership with BeagleBoard.org — now boasting improved energy efficiency.

"The Seeed Studio BeagleBone Green Eco, developed by Seeed Studio in partnership with and approved by the BeagleBoard.org Foundation, is an open-source single-board computer (SBC) built around the Texas Instruments AM3358 SoC [System on Chip]," Seeed's Carla Guo explains of the new board. "Designed for versatility, it combines high performance, robust security, rich connectivity, and advanced features, making it an excellent choice for developers, students, hobbyists, and innovators alike."

Seeed has been experimenting with the BeagleBone platform for some time, though we haven't seen a new design since the BeagleBone Green Gateway back in 2020. While that offered expanded network connectivity, the new BeagleBone Green Eco has a different focus: energy efficiency.

The BeagleBone Green Eco is built around the same Texas Instruments AM3358 system-on-chip as the standard BeagleBone Green, 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, though: the 4GB eMMC has been boosted to a more generous 16GB while the on-board 4kB EEPROM is now 32kB, with the RAM left alone at 512MB of DDR3L running at 800MHz.

The biggest change, though, is the replacement of the earlier TI TPS65217C power management chip in the original BeagleBone Green 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 power multiplexer. All together, that means a boost in power efficiency — though, at the time of writing, Seeed had not shared measurements nor exactly how much of an improvement buyers can expect from the redesign.

Elsewhere on the board, the USB 1.1 connectivity has been upgraded to USB 2.0 for both Client and Host operations, and the Fast Ethernet port is now gigabit capable — though still capable of running at 100Mb/s and 10Mb/s when required. The two 46-pin BeagleBone Cape headers are present and correct, along with the Green variant's I2C and UART Grove connectors for solderless expansion — while the four status LEDs have now been split into one dedicated power LED and four user-programmable LEDs, and the physical power button has been removed leaving only reset and boot-select/user-defined buttons. The final difference: the new model is around 5g (around 0.18oz) lighter than its predecessor, and is now rated to an industrial temperature range of -40–85°F (-40–185°F).

The new BeagleBone Green Eco is now available to order on the Seeed Studio store, priced at $42 — a slight discount over its non-Eco predecessor. The store page also includes a schematic for the design.