The BeagleBoard.org Foundation is working on what might be the most aggressively priced open-source hardware board yet. The BeagleConnect Zepto is a 3.37 x 2.54 cm (1.33 x 1.0 inches) board built around a Texas Instruments MSPM0L1117 Arm Cortex-M0+ microcontroller running at 32 MHz with 16 KB of SRAM and 128 KB of dual-bank flash, and the foundation intends to sell it for just $1 (€0.92). The MCU itself costs roughly $0.51 at volume, leaving virtually no margin for the foundation, but the goal is a price point sustainable for over a decade where silicon vendors, assemblers, and distributors all remain viable.
Despite its size, the Zepto packs in a surprising amount of connectivity. It features mikroBUS-compatible headers that open the door to roughly 2,000 Click add-on boards, up to two Qwiic/Grove connectors supporting I2C, UART, ADC, and GPIO, an 8-pin TAG-CONNECT JTAG interface for debugging, and boot and reset buttons alongside an RGB LED. One variant swaps a Qwiic connector for a USB-C port used for power delivery. Partial compatibility with Raspberry Pi HATs is also present, though limited to 12 pins on one header side.
What makes the Zepto particularly interesting for the open-source community is its software story. The board supports a Zephyr-based SDK with an MCUBOOT bootloader designed to be hard to brick, MicroPython running on top of Zephyr, and MicroBlocks via Zephyr and Arduino Core. Perhaps most notable is BeagleConnect Greybus for Zephyr, which lets Linux hosts control mikroBUS modules directly without writing additional microcontroller firmware. Connecting the Zepto to a BeaglePlay or BeagleBadge over Qwiic effectively gives this tiny board a bridge to full Linux environments. That software foundation has some meaningful upstream backing: TI has been contributing MSPM0 family peripheral drivers directly to the Zephyr main branch, with flash and SPI driver support landing as merged commits through early 2026, so the Zepto's RTOS ecosystem is not solely dependent on TI's own downstream SDK for driver coverage.
The hardware design files are already available as KiCad sources on GitHub, and prototypes exist today. The foundation is also considering variants using different MSPM0 chips, ranging from the MSPM0C1106 with 32 KB flash and 8 KB RAM up to the MSPM0G1519 with 512 KB flash, 128 KB RAM, and an 80 MHz clock. Board pricing for those variants has not been set. Jason Kridner has even been developing a gaming setup using BeagleBadge as the display and Zepto boards as controllers. The announcement post is an open call for contributors, and discussion is happening on the BeagleBoard forum.
