The BeagleBone is the latest of Texas Instrument's
BeagleBoard ARM based embedded development boards. They are essentially small, low power computers which generally run Linux based operating systems. To put it into perspective, your average Android phone is essentially the same thing, albeit a bit more powerful. The general purpose IO(GPIO) pins on the board can be used to read/write/drive the various devices(temperature sensors, pumps etc.) used in automating the brewing process. I currently use a
Netduino to drive several solid state relays which in turn control my lawn sprinklers, along with an application for monitoring the weather(precipitation).
While I have not done any work on any of the BeagleBoards, I have worked with the
RaspberryPI and the OXNAS based boards in
Pogoplug devices(had one setup as my security DVR at one point), which are comparable.
My .02, HTH