The BeagleBone Black, which was originally released in April of 2013, is a credit card size single board computer that features the Sitara AM335x Cortex-A8 processor running at 1GHZ with 512 Meg of RAM and 4 GB of eMMC memory. The current version of the BeagleBone Black is the Rev C version that was released in May of 2014.
The BeagleBone Black is a true open-source computing platform where both the hardware and software are open-source. All design material for the BeagleBone Black is easily accessible from the Beagleboard's Wiki page (http://elinux.org/Beagleboard:BeagleBoneBlack). This material allows you to build your own board either by using the design as is or by making modifications to the design. You can also choose to purchase the board, as I did, from outlets like Amazon.
The latest supported Linux image for the BeagleBone Black, as of the writing of this book, is Debian 8.4. This is the image that is used for all development in this chapter. You can find the...