In the first chapter, we said that the richness of a system relies mainly on its ecosystem. For example, the OS of a computer, such as Windows, Mac OS, or Linux, can be used not only for the graphical interface but also for the wide range of applications that you can install. This is quite similar to the embedded world, where a large choice of boards might confuse you quickly; you need to choose a CPU, OS, supported applications, programming languages that can be used on it, documentations, and so on. The list can be quite long depending on your final project.

A good criterion to look out for in a board is its expansion capability: the feature where one can add some more functionality to a board, such as plugins to software. In this sense, our board has a lot of features to propose. In the BeagleBone world, these add-ons are called capes.

Here's a definition of capes according to the creators of BeagleBone: