BeagleBoard

BeagleBoard

When you want more horsepower and capabilities, check out the BeagleBoard single-board computer. The BeagleBoard is a fanless low-power computer with the expandability of a desktop PC. BeagleBoards can make ordinary devices like routers, firewalls, thin clients, and compact desktop PCs and servers. They can make less-ordinary things like self-driving vehicles, submarines, digital camera controllers, robots, fancy audio processors, media servers, and audio book readers. It has enough power and flexibility to make it a first-rate, highly adaptable general purpose computing platform.
The original BeagleBoard was developed by a small team at Texas Instruments and first released in 2008. It is powered by Texas Instrument's high-performance OMAP3530 system-on-a-chip (SoC). This incorporates an ARM Cortex-A8 600 MHz CPU, and 2D and 3D video with OpenGL support. It includes 256 MB of NAND Flash memory for storage, and 128 MB low-power DDR RAM. The BeagleBoard has S-Video, HDMI (High-Definition Multimedia Interface), USB, RS-232 serial port, two stereo 3.5 mm ports, a SD/MMC slot (storage cards), DVI-D, and a JTAG port (for debugging).
It also includes factory software loaded into read-only memory, and you have to install whatever operating system and applications you want to use. All of this is packed onto a board about three inches square, requiring only 2 watts power consumption. You get all this for $149.
There are two new models, the BeagleBone and the BeagleBoard-xM. The BeagleBone is smaller and less expensive at $89. It comes with on-chip Ethernet, 256 MB DDR2 RAM, and a microSD slot. It includes a 2GB microSD card loaded with the Ångström mobile embedded Linux distribution. This runs either from the command line, or you can use the Opie or GPE handheld/smartphone graphical interfaces. The BeagleBone-xM is the high-powered everything-board with a 1 GHz CPU, 512 MB LPDDR RAM, a 4-port USB hub, and a camera port for $149. The BeagleBone and BeagleBoard-xM have no NAND, and so they must boot from a microSD card. Get some extra microSD cards for easy experimentation with different operating systems.
What about the software? Anything you can do in Linux you can do on a BeagleBoard; you don't have to learn a special language like on the Arduino. It should run any Linux, or any operating system, that runs on ARM. The BeagleBoard has not inspired masses of books like the Arduino, but the Resources page contains a wealth of useful links to all kinds of references, from gnarly engineering specs to help for beginners.