Overview
Geppetto™, the Design-to-Order (D2O) tool from Gumstix, has been used to design expansion boards that use Gumstix’ Computer-On-Modules (COM) such as the Overo™ COM and Single Board Computers (SBC) such as the Pepper 43C. While designing these boards, we thought, how cool would it be if we could design capes for the BeagleBone Black community. It immediately struck a resonant chord with Gumstix engineering team, since the BeagleBone Black platform was based on an AM3354 (Sitara™), an ARM Cortex-A8 microprocessor from Texas Instruments, the same processor family used in the Pepper 43C SBC.
Stacked Cape to Mono-cape
Gumstix is proud to announce that developers can now design their custom BeagleBone Black compatible cape in Geppetto’s intuitive, web-based D2O platform. Currently, developers are required to purchase multiple capes and stack them on top of each other, struggling for both space and pin breakout.
Some of the functionality on the add-on capes are sometimes unusable, since not all pins are propagated through. The engineering team at Gumstix decided to design a prototype BeagleBone Black compatible “mono-cape” solution in Geppetto. The elegantly-designed mono-cape is shown below and is available for developers to copy and design a BeagleBone Black compatible cape of their own, using Geppetto.
All Inclusive Cape – Wifi, GPS header, LEDs, USB
The mono-cape, so called since it is intended to be the only cape that can be connected to a BeagleBone Black, consists of the following modules:
- Texas Instruments’ WiLink8 (WiFi, Bluetooth 4.1 + BLE)
- 5-pin GPS header (to connect to an off-board GPS module)
- LEDs (for status indication)
- USB micro-B jack (for console port)
- Tactile switch (to turn on/off) and
- Male headers to connect to a BeagleBone Black.
Custom Software Included
For those power users out there, you must be thinking, well this cape must surely need custom software. You guessed right! Gumstix provides a custom Linux software image, depending on the connectivity modules that developers design on their cape. What this means is that when the board ships, it will come with a micro-SD card that contains a custom Linux image based on the specific modules on the cape. So, users are freed from having to custom their software image and can instead devote their precious time for doing their magic, i.e. application development using the newly designed cape, right out of the box.
For more information regarding BeagleBone Black cape, please visit Gumstix’ website for the BeagleBone Black. This cape would be a great tool for someone interested in exploring the functionality of the various Pre-GO PPP boards that we have in the Gumstix store.
To learn how the BeagleBone Black cape was designed in Geppetto, please view the video tutorial by Gumstix’ Uthra Krishnan.
A snapshot of the Geppetto D2O tool is provided below. To learn more about Geppetto, please visit Geppetto.
We hear you saying, “I have a few suggestions/thoughts that would be very cool!”. Sure, send us your suggestions to andreas@gumstix.com and we will be happy to take a look!
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