Hi, I’m Jason Kridner of Texas Instruments
and one of the board members at the Open
Source Hardware Association as well as a
board member at the BeagleBoard.Org
Foundation. I wanted to give you a little
update on things going on with BeagleBoard.
Why this update in a little
YouTube video? Well, I’d expected to be
able to hang out and just chat with
folks face to face, but that’s not going to
happen this year. Instead, I’m going to
record this and hopefully encourage more
of you to do the same; to make a quick
recording of the latest going on with
your projects and share it back with the
rest of us. Please do that.
Join the Discord channel and join the
channels on Discord the #community-announcements
channel as well as the #show-n-tell channel. Paste a link to your video or maybe a blog post or
something else to kind of just let us
know what’s going on. I really want to try
to fill the gap and let you brag about
what’s going on with you and your projects.
For us, the thing I’d want to
brag about is making the world’s
greatest cheeseburger! If you want to
find out how the world’s greatest
cheeseburger is made, with 14 BeagleBones,
then check out beagleboard.org/creator. Another thing going on with the
BeagleBoard community, a little more
timely…
We’ve been chatting with the
folks over at Chai.
Back in 2014, they introduced a fully open
hardware qPCR, quantitative PCR, machine using
BeagleBone to increase access to
biotechnology. It looks for different–
You take DNA strands and you replicate them
and it it automates the process of
making a lot more comfortable or easy
for DIYers to do PCR and test for
different DNA sequences, like a virus.
The news here is that they are
getting pretty close to releasing a test
kit for the Open qPCR to test for for COVID-19.
That would allow these tools to be
used for environmental testing; things
like swabbing doorknobs,
seats, or different places in the
office or in the library. I think this
is super-important for us to
get out into the communities through
hackerspaces, schools, and libraries
and to make these widely available
community resources for folks. To that end big, BeagleBoard.Org
Foundation reached out to see
how we can help. Chai said that
they’re going to let us donate some boards
to try to get some more of these units
out there.
If you want to find out a
little bit more about what’s going on
with Chai Bio and coronavirus testing
visit chaibio.com/coronavirus.
One of the cool things is they just
submitted their the kit to be
certified for for open source
hardware!
At BeagleBoard, we’ve got four boards
currently certified: PocketBeagle,
BeagleBone Black Wireless, BeagleBone
Blue, and BeagleBone AI.
News on BeagleBone AI is that we’ve
just kicked off with some KiCAD
developers the migration of the design
from Allegro to KiCAD so that people
can use open source tools to edit the
design and collaborate and help
move that design forward. Of course you
can get your hands on boards
today.
Other cool things we’re doing with partners in open hardware– one
of our our favorite partners is Seeed
Studio. We’ve been working with them
on an upcoming BeagleBoard.org PocketBeagle Grove Kit. This is a great way
to learn
use sensors and actuators. It’s probably
the easiest way to get started with
Beagle that we’re putting together.
I’m really excited about the
possibilities that Kit–
essentially everything you need to put
together some some musical instruments.
It works with Python. It’s
just a really nice solution for getting
started with with Beagle.
We’re kicking
off a number of other projects with
Seeed Studio. One of them being
a Cape for the Machinekit community.
We’ve reached out to the Machinekit
community to try to gather up
requirements that they need for good
open hardware solution to building 3D
printers and CNC machines. Check
that out and get involved
with the those open a hardware efforts.
To wrap up with
a call to action, right now one of the
easiest ways to get involved with
BeagleBoard is through the Google Summer
of Code efforts. Students are a
little less than a week out from
beginning to submit project proposals to
to us to examine
for Google Summer of Code. If you go
to BeagleBoard.org/GSoC, you can
get involved and help us mentor the
students and help them finish their
their project proposals.
they can have some cool stuff for the community.
Thanks very much for your time and
let us know what you’re up to!