While the Raspberry Pi is great for educating kids about computing, can it brew a mean beer? The BeagleBone Black can. Trevor Hubbard, an engineer at Texas Instruments, uses the new, next-gen board to control heat exchangers and monitors to handle beer temperature remotely.
The board itself is quite cool. It runs a AM335x 1GHz ARM Cortex-A8 processor with graphics accelerator and has two 46-pin headers for IO, making it ideal for monitoring and robotics. The board itself costs $45 and is available now.
It can run Android and Ubuntu linux and connects to the Internet via Ethernet or a USB Wi-Fi dongle. Interestingly, the entire board is open source, allowing you to download and tweak the design to suit your needs.
The company was founded by Jason Kridner and Gerald Coley, two TI engineers. The headers allow for multiple styles of input and output including serial connectivity, timers, and digital I/O. While not as inherently simple as the Raspberry Pi, it’s still a formidable board.
Hubbard, who recorded a video about his project, shows how he can control his beer temperature remotely using a BeagleBoard, the Internet, and a taste for bubbly hops. There is, I’d wager, not much more a man could ask for.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=eUFf-EAVWZ4]
