IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine - April 2017 - 61

BEAGLEBONE BLACK
BeagleBone Black is one member of the community-supported BeagleBoard platforms (Figure 7). It is powered by a TI
Sitara AM3358 ARM Cortex-A8 processor running at 1 GHz,
with 4 GB of onboard flash memory, 512 MB of DDR3L
DRAM, and a 3-D graphics accelerator. It offers two 46-pin
headers, an Ethernet port, and many more connectivity
options. It supports the Debian, Android, and Ubuntu operating systems. It is an open-source board, as all of its schematics
and bills of materials are available on its maker's website [24].
BeagleBoard claims to be able to boot Linux in under 10 s
on BeagleBone Black. DIYers are exploring its capabilities
through such projects as Debrew (a coffee bot) [25], a smart
home energy monitoring and management system [26], and
many more that are available at Beagleboard.org[27].
The BeagleBoard community is about to add one more
feather to its cap with the launch of BeagleBoard-X15. It will
be the top performer among all the BeagleBoards and will be
powered with a TI AM5728 2 × 1.5-GHz ARM Cortex-A15,
with 2 GB of DDR3 RAM, 2 × 700-MHz C66 digital signal
processors, and additional connectivity options [28].

[37] on the same board [38]. It offers 76 fully available GPIO
pins, an integrated Wi-Fi module, an Ethernet module, LVDS +
Touch, and 1 GB of DDR3 RAM.
It is an innovative vision over existing frameworks, providing a boost to the DIY world and the IoT and is an excellent
tool for prototyping. Because UDOO is new to the market, its
support and tutorials are still building up, but people using it

PiNOCCiO
Pinoccio is a full-packed, open-source board to support the IoT
that was floated on a crowdfunding website and successfully
funded [29]. It comes with an Atmel ATmega256RFR2, 2.4 GHz
using 802.15.4, Wi-Fi, a rechargeable Li-Po battery (550 mAh),
17 digital I/O pins, an SPI and I2C port, an onboard temperature
sensor, and an RGB LED [30], [31] (Figure 8).
The single onboard controller chip houses a combination of
an AVR 8-b processor and a 2.4-GHz transceiver for supporting wireless personal area network communications (IEEE
802.15.4), that is, ZigBee, Bluetooth, ISA100.11a, body area
network, IrDA, Z-wave, and Mi-Wi [32]. It also supports wireless mesh networking without making use of the Internet. It
can work on full power continuously for 27 h, and the developers claim it can work for years if the board is put to sleep and
made to wake up when specific conditions are met [29]. Pinoccio is fully compatible with Arduino and can utilize its libraries
for IoT project development. In addition, the Pinoccio HQ IDE
provided by the makers gives a fully synced, real-time graphical user interface to monitor online/off-line Pinoccio boards,
check their battery levels, set up their pin modes, and write
scripts on them.
Although it is new to the market, people have started
working on it and coming up with interesting projects such as
Save the World, One Drop at a Time [33], and Music Controller [34]. More of these can be found at Hackster.io [35].

FIGURE 7. A BeagleBone Black platform. (Photo courtesy of
BeagleBone.)

UDOO QUAD
UDOO QUAD is an all-in-one, open hardware-based, singleboard computer with an ARM i.MX6 Freescale processor and
an ATMEL SAM3X8E ARM processor (Arduino Duecompatible section) for Android, Linux, and Google ADK
(Figure 9). It is, in general, a fusion of two worlds, as it combines the capabilities of both Raspberry Pi [36] and Arduino

FIGURE 8. Two Pinoccio boards. (Photo courtesy of Pinoccio.)

APRIL 2017

IEEE ConsumEr ElECtronICs magazInE

http://www.Hackster.io

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine - April 2017