My BeagleBone Arrives!

Well my BeagleBone just arrived today, and Im quite excited to begin working with it. (photo obtained here)

This development platform is made by Texas Instruments, and features a whole host of features. Quote from Adafruit website:

At over 1.5 billion Dhrystone operations per second and vector floating point arithmetic operations, the BeagleBone is capable of not just interfacing to all of your robotics motor drivers, location or pressure sensors and 2D or 3D cameras, but also running OpenCV, OpenNI and other image collection and analysis software to recognize the objects around your robot and the gestures you might make to control it. Through HDMI, VGA or LCD expansion boards, it is capable of decoding and displaying mutliple video formats utilizing a completely open source software stack and synchronizing playback over Ethernet or USB with other BeagleBoards to create massive video walls. If what you are into is building 3D printers, then the BeagleBone has the extensive PWM capabilities, the on-chip Ethernet and the 3D rendering and manipulation capabilities all help you eliminate both your underpowered microcontroller-based controller board as well as that PC from your basement.

• Board size: 3.4″ x 2.1″
• Shipped with 2GB microSD card with the Angstrom Distribution with node.js and Cloud9 IDE
• Single cable development environment with built-in FTDI-based serial/JTAG and on-board hub to give the same cable simultaneous access to a USB device port on the target processor
• Industry standard 3.3V I/Os on the expansion headers with easy-to-use 0.1″ spacing
• On-chip Ethernet, not off of USB
• 256MB of DDR2
• 700-MHz super-scalar ARM Cortex™-A8
• Easier to clone thanks to larger pitch on BGA devices (0.8mm vs. 0.4mm), no package-on-package memories, standard DDR2 vs. LPDDR, integrated USB PHYs and more.

So, this will be the development board for my OpenCV Smart Security System. I found a whole host of security projects out there dealing with the Beagle Board, but only one project with security systems. However, mine ads facial recognition, motion tracking, camera tracking, and a whole list of other features. 


As far as my RFID work is concerned, Ive made slow progress. However, I have experimented with some examples, and have an idea how the RedBee functions now. I'll have to write some code to see if I can run it independent from the computer (RedBee to Arduino communications). That way I'll have an idea of how to integrate this into my project.