Passionate open source developers and hobbyists can now realize their creative design ideas without being restricted by expensive hardware development tools, high power consumption or stifled design environments. Open platform innovators will have the expandability of desktop machines without the expense, bulk or noise as Digi-Key Corp. announces it is shipping the US$149 Beagle Board, a small but powerful fanless embedded development board. The pocket-size, USB-powered Beagle Board is based on Texas Instruments’ low power OMAP3530 applications processor, which features an ARM Cortex-A8, 2D/3D graphics engine and high-performance TMS320C64x+ digital signal processor (DSP) core. As the superset device of TI’s OMAP35x platform, the OMAP3530 device provides more than 1200 Dhrystone million instructions per second (MIPS) to run a full Linux operating system with desktop windows managers and office applications, and also integrates an OpenGL ES 2.0 compatible graphics engine to achieve photo-realistic, real-time pixel-shaded graphics for gaming and 3D user interface acceleration.
