Do you remember our little report for the Raspberry Pi? As big fans of the open source community we decided to dig up some interesting information about another Single-Board Computer (SBC), the famous BeagleBone.
To begin with, the Beagle family of computer products include BeagleBoard, BeagleBoard xM, the original BeagleBone and the BeagleBone Black.
Here’s an overview of the different release dates of BeagleBoard models:
| BeagleBoard models | Release dates |
|---|---|
| BeagleBoard | July 28, 2008 |
| BeagleBoard rev.C | May 13, 2009 |
| BeagleBoard-xM | September 14, 2010 |
| BeagleBone | October 31, 2011 |
| BeagleBone Black | April 23, 2013 |
| BeagleBone Black Rev C | mid-May 2014 |
| BeagleBone Green | Coming soon by Seeed Studio |
Digging for sales numbers for BeagleBone, we could only find numbers of board shipments for the BeagleBone Black. According to the official BeagleBone Black Wiki, board shipments of the BeagleBone Black have reached a total of 248,916 boards to date. This number is regularly updated by the BeagleBoard team on the wiki page. At some point, on December 2013, there was a shortage of BeagleBone Black devices, according to Octopart[^1]. By now, BeagleBone Black has outsold all of the other BeagleBone designs combined.
Here’s what it looks like:
Source: BeagleBone Black Wiki
Where are the Beagles barking?
The open source and Linux communities have a strong presence on the Web. What do they all have in common, is the desire to put processing power in the hands of the next generation of users.
After having left unleashed our own dogs in search of the strongest BeagleBone communities, we came up to the following conclusion: Beagles are barking a lot in the Web but their most active communities are the Beagleboard Community and the TI E2E Community.
Companies shipping products based on the BeagleBone
Looking for companies that are currently shipping products based on the BeagleBone, we got excited with the wide variety we came across: From robots, drones, autopilots, gadgets for pet owners, thermocyclers that can detect foodborne contaminants to screen consoles, wireless platforms for environmental monitoring and many more, we’re expecting to see even more interesting projects coming soon. In the list below, we didn’t include BeagleBone clones or capes (you can find a list of capes here).
So far, we’ve found 12 companies with concrete BeagleBone products we can link to. If you know more, help us complete the list by posting others in the comments.
Our next report will be on the Intel NUC, so stay tuned!
[^1]:Joong, Janine (2013-12-12). “Someone ate up the world supply of #BeagleBoneBlack”
Author: Eleni Natsi
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