Hacking_and_Penetration_Testing_with_Low_Power_Devices

18 CHAPTER 2 Meet the beagles
BEAGLEBONE
The BeagleBone was released on Halloween (31 October) 2011 (http://beagleboard.
org/Products/BeagleBone). Many people became interested in building custom
electronic devices based on microcontrollers after the release of the Arduino
Duemilanove in 2009 (http://arduino.cc). For those unfamiliar with the Arduino,
it is another open-source hardware project. A community quickly formed around this
board, which sold for less than US$35. Arduino brought microcontrollers within
reach of nontechnical people by providing them with a board that accepted plugin
expansion boards, known as shields, and an easy to use programming environment
with an extensive set of libraries. While you can do a lot with an Arduino featuring a
16 MHz 8-bit AVR microcontroller, some projects require more computing power.
This is where the BeagleBone comes in.
The BeagleBone can be thought of as an extremely high-powered Arduino-type
board. The Texas Instruments Cortex-A8 32-bit processor running at 720 MHz opens
many doors closed to the 16 MHz 8-bit processor found on the Arduino. In addition
to having added power for general computing and mathematics, the BeagleBone can
run a proper operating system (the Arduino has just enough power to run the one
program loaded into it). Like the Arduino, it is designed to be used with expansion
boards. The layout of expansion headers for each board is not the same. BeagleBone
expansion boards are called capes, partially because they often feature a cutout to
provide clearance around the Ethernet port, which makes them cape-shaped. The
BeagleBone appears in Figures 2.5 and 2.6.
FIGURE 2.5
BeagleBone as viewed from above.