The Use of BeagleBone Black Board in Engineering Design and Development

The BeagleBone Black (BBB) board is a low cost, powerful expandable computer launched by a community of developers sponsored by Texas Instruments in the early 2013. It is the newest product in the Beagle family. This board features a powerful TI Sitara™ ARM Cortex™-A8 processor which runs at 1 GHz. And a 2 GB on-board flash memory acts as the “hard drive” for the board to host a Linux operating system and other software development tools. The size of the board is small enough to fit in a mint tin box. It can be used for a variety of projects from high school fair projects to prototypes of very complex embedded systems. With a user-friendly, browser-based Bonescript programming environment called Cloud9, a learner can easily program the BBB board to rapidly prototype electronic systems that interface with real-world applications. Afterwards, as the knowledge of users develops, the board provides more complicated interfaces including C/C++ functions to access digital and analog pins aboard the ARM Cortex A8 microprocessor. The full power and capability of the BBB board may be programmed in the underlying onboard Linux operating system, such as Angstrom or Ubuntu. Moreover, the Beagle community provides a useful repository of example projects, forums and hardware/software documentation. This paper presents our work of employing the BBB board in designing engineering senior projects, and uses a case study of robot car with voice recognition senior project to compares it with Raspberry Pi and Arduino in educating engineering students to construct embedded systems. Our primary experiences demonstrate that the BBB board is an easy-to-use and cost-effective development kit which can be employed by college-level engineering students for their capstone design projects

mTOR and GSK-3 shape the CD4+ T-cell stimulatory and differentiation capacity of myeloid DCs after exposure to LPS

Prolonged inhibition of the kinase, mammalian target of rapamycin (mTOR), during myeloid dendritic cell (DC) generation confers resistance to maturation. Recently, however, mTOR inhibition immediately before Toll-like receptor ligation has been found to exert proinflammatory effects on myeloid cells, notably enhanced IL-12p40/p70 production. We show, for the first time, that mouse or human DCs generated under mTOR inhibition exhibit markedly enhanced IL-12p70 production after lipopolysaccharide (LPS) stimulation, despite impaired costimulatory molecule expression and poor T-cell stimulatory ability. Consistent with this finding, we reveal that increased IL-12p40 production occurs predominantly in CD86lo immature DCs. High IL-12p40/p70 production by CD86lo DC resulted from failed down-regulation of glycogen synthase kinase-3 (GSK-3) activity and could not be ascribed to enhanced Akt function. Despite high IL-12p70 secretion, rapamycin-conditioned, LPS-stimulated DCs remained poor T-cell stimulators, failing to enhance allogeneic Th1 cell responses. We also report that inhibition of GSK-3 impedes the ability of LPS-stimulated DCs to induce forkhead box p3 in CD4+CD25− T cells, as does the absence of IL-12p40/p70. Thus, GSK-3 activity in DC is regulated via signaling linked to mTOR and modulates their capacity both to produce IL-12p40/p70 and induce forkhead box p3 in CD4+ T cells under inflammatory conditions