BeagleBoard.org founder and CTO Jason Kridner explains how the new PocketBeagle 2 extends the long-running BeagleBoard family of low-cost, open hardware single-board computers for education, prototyping and embedded products. Built around a Texas Instruments AM62x / AM6254 quad-core Arm Cortex-A53 SoC with Linux support, PocketBeagle 2 keeps the ultra-compact form factor while adding pre-soldered headers, LiPo charging, debug UART, USB-C and optional eMMC, making it a practical building block for IoT, robotics and edge AI projects worldwide https://www.beagleboard.org/boards/pocketbeagle-2
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The conversation looks back at how BeagleBoard.org grew out of Jason’s work at Texas Instruments, shipping millions of heterogeneous ARM+DSP platforms into media players and early mobile devices. He connects that heritage to today’s boards: fully documented open hardware, long-term available TI silicon, and a Debian-based software stack alongside Yocto/OpenEmbedded flows that let developers control everything from bootloader to user space in modern embedded Linux systems
From there the discussion dives into early edge-like workloads on DaVinci and OMAP3: ARM9 and Cortex-A8 paired with C64x+ DSPs, NEON SIMD and soft codecs powering Archos media players, the PMA400 and devices running MontaVista Linux with an app-store model long before smartphones were mainstream. Jason recalls hackers like Mans Rullgard and Vladimir Pentelich using FFmpeg and hand-tuned NEON to exceed TI’s own performance estimates, showing how open-source communities pushed multimedia and machine-vision capability far beyond what the original datasheets suggested in that era’s history.
Jason then links those experiences to today’s regulatory and security landscape, including the EU Cyber Resilience–style requirements that force vendors to track mainline kernels and keep users updated with security fixes over long lifecycles. He argues that open build systems such as OpenEmbedded and Yocto, combined with transparent schematics and full data sheets, make it realistic for small teams and educators to maintain secure embedded products instead of being locked into stale, proprietary Linux distributions on opaque devices. This is part of BeagleBoard.org’s broader mission of “knowledge preservation” for how modern computing systems are actually built and shipped into real-world devices.
Closing the loop to current trends, Jason talks about edge AI on platforms like BeagleY-AI, which combines a TI AM67A vision processor, 4 TOPS neural accelerators, C7x DSPs, a 3D GPU and H.264/H.265 offload in a Pi-like form factor for human–machine interfaces and embedded inference at the edge. He imagines AI assistants that not only propose embedded code but compile, deploy and test it on real hardware, making it even more important that engineers understand the underlying SoCs and toolchains. Filmed at Embedded World North America in Anaheim, this interview captures both the history of ARM+DSP multimedia and the trajectory toward affordable open hardware for the next generation of edge AI developers shaping the future.
I’m publishing about 90+ videos from Embedded World North America 2025, I upload about 4 videos per day at 5AM/11AM/5PM/11PM CET/EST. Join https://www.youtube.com/charbax/join for Early Access to all 90 videos (once they’re all queued in next few days) Check out all my Embedded World North America videos in my Embedded World playlist here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7xXqJFxvYvjgUpdNMBkGzEWU6YVxR8Ga
This video was filmed using the DJI Pocket 3 ($669 at https://amzn.to/4aMpKIC
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