I watched a presentation recently on the BeagleConnect Freedom.
- Smart Home Automation: Join Your BeaglePlay® and BeagleConnect™ with Home Assistant
- Presentation Slides
The BeagleConnected is designed to be paired with the BeaglePlay. Both contain a TI CC1352P7 radio, which has the following characteristics:
- 48MHz ARM
- Thread, Zigbee, Matter
- Bluetooth 5.2 Low Energy
- SubG/2.4GHz SDR
- up to 1kM line-of-site range (Connect implementation)
The CC1352P7 might be a good alternative to Lora in industrial applications, where you need more bandwidth and flexibility and don’t want to mess with running a complex LoraWAN stack. Having Zephyr on this device is a game changer.
Beagle’s implementation uses Zephyr on the CC1352P7 and they are working toward a vision where local and remote mikroBUS boards are available in the Linux Industrial I/O subsystem and are automatically discovered and drivers loaded – similar to the BeagleBone capes. Hopefully, they can get all this into the mainline kernel. There are supposedly over 1400 mikroBUS click boards, 400+ host systems, and Linux drivers for about 250 click boards today. They are working on making it a standard ‘bus’ in the Linux kernel. The mikroBUS format is becoming the standard for IC evaluation boards.
The Linux bcfserial driver is used to communicate between the Play and Connect.
They are also working on using Greybus to abstract IO.
A lot of technology and ambitious ideas here!
Can’t wait to integrate some of this into Simple IoT!