Embedded World 2023: Exploring the BeaglePlay & BeagleConnect

BeagleBoard has been a well-known open hardware development platform for a long time, and it's an exciting time for them as they introduce two new products - the BeaglePlay and the BeagleConnect Freedom. We had the chance to sit down with BeagleBoard founder Jason Kridner at Embedded World 2023 to discuss what makes these two new boards so exciting and why open hardware is so important to BeagleBoard.

We also got the chance to get up close with both new boards, along with seeing just a small selection of the hundreds of compatible mikroBUS Click add on boards.

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[maciej.wolosewicz]

Quite nice and feature-rich. But there is always a fly in the ointment. In this case, it's a limited number of exposed GPIOs. Too much I2C, too little GPIO, PWM, and ADC. With these limitations, it may be hard to build ex. drone or other RC/autonomous, stuff with additional interfaced electronics (too bad because of impressive connectivity options!). In this case, the M4F isn't so important as well, because most of the digital busses can be handled in Linux without a problem. How to drive real-time stuff using M4F if you can't connect it? mikroBUS? Expensive boards and not-so-useful for more complex devices. Why not Arduino or RPi standard, where there are thousands of capes? Maybe there is a way to use alternate functions for all these I2C pins but still, hard to make your own well-suited cape. Anyway! Good job! And for complainers like me, we can still get Beaglebone Blue, Black, PocketBeagle, or other boards for the projects I've mentioned.