The open source IOIO board now supports the BeagleBone Black for those projects needing some extra I/O. For those not familiar with the IOIO, it adds extensive I/O capabilities to a variety of platforms, including Android, Mac, Windows, and now the BeagleBone. The IOIO connects to the host over USB or Bluetooth and exposes a high-level Java API for controlling its 46 I/O pins using a variety of hardware interfaces, such as digital I/O, analog input, PWM, UART, SPI, I2C, and capacitive sensing.
Here’s an example IOIO project. In the video, it’s actually a Raspberry Pi but we’ve confirmed that the BeagleBone Black works just the same. The Pi is connected to a IOIO board over USB. The Pi is periodically fetching weather data via a Java program running on the Pi. The java code is controlling the IOIO which is wired to a 32x32 LED matrix.
Guide to setting up a BeagleBone Black with a IOIO board
You can find more info on the IOIO at the IOIO Wiki. If you end up doing a BeagleBone project with the IOIO, feel free to post questions and visit the community at the ioio-users forum. Here’s a few other IOIO projects for inspiration.