The BeagleBone is small even by BeagleBoard standards and with the high-performance ARM capabilities you expect from a BeagleBoard, the BeagleBone brings full-featured Linux to places it has never gone before.
The Beaglebone - a low-cost high-performance 720MHz ARM A8 device with 256MB of DDR2 Memory. It has full support for 10/100 Ethernet, USB client support, JTAG debug via USB. It has 64 GPIOs, 7 x 12-bit ADCs, and support for canbus and LCDs. The pin layout is like the arduino where you can place "capes" on the board. The Beaglebone boots using the MicroSD card into embedded Linux (Angstrom). This is part of a module on Digital Electronics at the School of Electronic Engineering, Dublin City University, Ireland. www.eeng.dcu.ie/~molloyd/EE223/
What is the BeagleBone capable of doing?
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.
What are the detailed hardware specifications?
Keep coming back! These will be updated soon. Some additional details are in the latest BeagleBoard.org flyer.
[Sources] http://beagleboard.org/bone & DerekMolloyDCU
