BeagleBone Blue is a board designed for robotics projects, and one of those projects is EduMIP self-balancing robot that was first designed around BeagleBone Black and a robotics cape, but so far was not available for sale. Renaissance Robotics is now selling the kit, without board, for $50.

The kit has been designed by UC San Diego Coordinated Robotics Lab in order to teach robotics to students, and it works with BeagleBone Blue, or BeagleBone Black with the Robotics Cape and an optional WiFi dongle.

Some of the subjects that can be learned with eduMIP include:

Dynamic modeling and feedback control (classical, state-space, adaptive, …) of unstable systems.

Robot motion planning and collision avoidance.

DC motor control via (built-in) H-bridges and encoder counters.

Attitude estimation via (built-in) IMU and barometer.

Communication via (built-in) WiFi (802.11b/g/n) and Bluetooth (4.1/BLE).

Charging, balancing, protection, and monitoring of 2-cell LiPo (included).

Multithreaded event-driven C programming in Debian Linux.

Multithreaded Graphical System Design for embedded applications.



eduMIP is compatible with Python, ROS, MATLAB & Simulink, and LabVIEW.

The CAD designs for the hardware are released under a Creative Commons CC-by-v4 License, while source code is released under a 3-Clause BSD License. There’s no link to those resources on Renaissance Robotics website, but you should find everything you need in that Hackster.io page.