The BeagleBone Black Wireless is a low-cost, credit-card-sized development platform with good support from a fast-growing community. Replacing the 10/100 Ethernet port with onboard 802.11 b/g/n 2.4GHz WiFi and Bluetooth, the BeagleBone Black computer now comes with built-in wireless networking capability. BeagleBone Black Wireless is the easiest to use and modify IoT Linux computer of its size. Ultimately, the BeagleBone Black Wireless is still perfect for physical computing and smaller embedded applications.

With plenty of I/O and processing power for real-time analysis provided by the Octavo Systems OSD3358 1GHz ARM Cortex-A8 processor, BeagleBone Black Wireless can be complemented with cape plug-in boards, which augment Black’s functionality. They’re called capes because Underdog is a beagle, and he wears a cape. Makes sense, right?

At more than 3 million Dhrystone operations per second and vector floating point arithmetic operations, the BeagleBone Black Wireless is capable of not just interfacing to all of your robotics motor drivers, location or pressure sensors and 2D or 3D cameras, but also running OpenCV, OpenNI and other image collection and analysis software to recognize the objects around your robot and the gestures you might make to control it.

Like BeagleBone Black, the wireless version retains HDMI output, serial debug port, PC USB interface, USB 2.0 host, and reset and power buttons. This version adds two more status LEDs for WiFi and Bluetooth. Also retained is the 4GB of onboard eMMC memory with Debian Linux pre-installed, allowing BeagleBone Black Wireless to boot in around 10 seconds, and have you developing through your web browser in less than 5 minutes using just a single USB cable.