Farnell, an Avnet company and global distributor of electronic components, products and solutions, is now selling from stock the new BeagleBone® AI-64 SBC board. This is the first 64-bit open hardware single board computer designed for building performance-optimised embedded applications and brings a complete artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning system to developers.
“We believe this board will capture the imaginations of designers and empower them to build complete and powerful AI systems,” said Christine Long, CEO of the BeagleBoard.org® Foundation. “At an extremely competitive price point, we are excited about the new applications that BeagleBone® AI-64 will enable for new and experienced users.”
BeagleBone® AI-64 SBC provides the convenience and expandability of the BeagleBone platform with all of the on-board peripherals required to start learning and building applications. The familiar BeagleBone cape headers provide industry-leading expansion possibilities with hundreds of open-source hardware examples and dozens of readily available off-the-shelf embedded expansion options. A simple web browser, power source and network connection are all that are needed to start building performance-optimised embedded applications.
“BeagleBone® AI-64 represents a major milestone for BeagleBoard.org, satisfying some of the most requested features from our developer community,” said Jason Kridner, BeagleBoard.org Foundation Board President. “With multiple SuperSpeed USB ports, familiar BeagleBone cape expansion headers, and desktop-capable performance, the general-purpose embedded applications for this board are endless, with eight TOPS neural-network performance accessible through familiar Python libraries to boot.”
BeagleBone® AI-64 builds on more than a decade of success in open hardware single board Linux computers. Harnessing the power of the Texas Instruments™ TDA4VM SoC with dual Arm Cortex-A72 cores, a programmable C7x DSP core, and deep learning, vision and multimedia accelerators, developers have access to faster analytics, more data storage options, more high-speed interfaces. This gives developers a vast amount of computing power in an easy-to-use platform and includes connectors to create applications such as autonomous robots and drones; smart buildings and factories; home security; retail automation; media servers; machine learning; machine vision and computer vision.
The new BeagleBone® AI-64 board feature set includes:
- Expandability – BeagleBone‘s cape header compatibility for expansion with existing add-on boards and ikroBUS™ Shuttle header provides access to hundreds of existing Click™ sensors and actuators.
- Memory – 4GB LPDDR4, 6GB eMMC flash with high-speed interface and a MicroSD card.
- High Speed Interfaces – 2 E-key PCIe connector to interface with WiFi/Bluetooth adapters, USB 3.0 Type-C SuperSpeed interface for power input and data, two USB 3.0 Type-A SuperSpeed interface and Gigabit Ethernet.
- Camera and Display Connectors – Mini DisplayPort interface, 2* 4-Lane CSI connector for camera options, and a 4-Lane DSI connector for popular display types.
- User Interfaces – Boot, Reset and Power buttons, Power indication LED and five User LEDs. A 5V DC input power, UART and JTAG 10pin Tag-Connect™ for debug is also included.
- TDA4VM Dual 64-bit Arm Cortex-A72, 2.0GHz processor – Featuring aC7x floating point, vector DSP, 80 GFLOPS, 256 GOPS, deep-learning MMA and up to 8 TOPS (8b) up to 1.0 GHz.
- Vision Processing Accelerators (VPAC) – With Image Signal Processor (ISP) and multiple vision assist accelerators
- Vision Assist Accelerators – DMPAC, Dual 64-bit Arm Cortex-A72 microprocessor subsystem at up to 2.0 GHz, six Arm Cortex-R5F MCUs at up to 1.0 GHz, memory subsystem with up to 8MB of on-chip L3 RAM with ECC and coherency and 12 multichannel audio serial port modules.
Romain Soreau, Head of Single Board Computing, Farnell said: “We are very pleased to announce our global in-stock availability of the new BeagleBone® AI-64 SBC board. Engineers and hobbyists alike can now eliminate barriers from prototype to production with this revolutionary board, which has been built on open-source Linux from BeagleBoard.org. BeagleBone® AI-64 board places a massive amount of computing power in the hands of developers in an easy-to-use, single-board computer.”
As a global distributor, Farnell provides customers with fast access to easy-to-use products for professional use with a broad range of core SBC platforms and toolkits from leading brands including Raspberry Pi, Intel (NUC range), Industrial Shields and more. Technical support is offered 24/5 to ensure engineers can take advantage of the latest technology innovations for experiments and new product design.
Farnell can support customers as they take ideas from specification through to production with end-to-end product development solutions offered via the Avnet ecosystem. Customers also benefit from free access to valuable online resources on the Farnell website, and engineering and maker community, element14.
The new BeagleBone® AI-64 SBC board is now available to order from stock at Farnell in EMEA, Newark in North America and element14 in APAC.