The board SoC quality is very good. However, it can not compete with e.g. the CHIP SoC board [1], which costs just 9 USD + shipping with similar specs (I have two CHIP running 24/7 without any additional cooling, running rock solid -even in summer, at 35-40º C indoor-).
The only thing that would make me consider buying the BeagleBone Black Wireless is the two built-in microcontrollers ("PRU" processors [2]), for real-time I/O usage.
Unfortunately even though I 'bought' a CHIP some 6 months ago I have yet to actually receive it. It's very easy to source a BBB. Hopefully in the future thy become more available. Though I fear that will come with an increase in price.
I think their fulfillment process has been hit-or-miss. I ordered a CHIP in December 2015, received it in January 2016. However, my VGA adapter didn't arrive until late June. Part of the problem is their confusing order process; peripherals like the VGA adapter were being advertised as shipping in February/March, which was when I expected mine, but when I inquired about it via email I was told they had not even started physically building them yet, and I'd get mine "some time this year".
Still, for $20 total outlay I have something that is between the Raspberry Pi B+ and 2 in performance, with arguably better expansion (if you value GPIO over USB), and a few nice extras like a power/reset button and built in support for LiPo batteries. The downside is that it's based on an Allwinner chip, and that company is known for being open-source hostile. Supposedly they are trying to improve, but it does limit the range of operating systems available for the device.
I've experienced some serious fulfillment delays from them as well. Thanks for the reminder to get back in touch with them to see what's the hold up this time.
Funny story (I think): I happened to have brought a C.H.I.P. when I went back to europe for vacation. My father proudly showed me his new solar array and the log he had collected manually. After a bit of googling, sourcing a USB-serial adapter locally, and a few long nights I had the CHIP collecting this from the Growatt 3000's serial port and uploading it to pvoutput.org. It's still running 24/7.
EDIT: I have too many of the little SBC, but in my mind the CHIP is outstanding value for these little projects where in yesteryears one would have used a microcontroller.
For things that need more power, I like the ODROID C2.
Great application! I agree, you never know when you might need one for a project. My wife was recently complaining about why we don't have a house phone (nevermind that we both have cell phones). Anyway, I didn't want to pay for phone service. Took a rpi, installed asterisk, paired with a new google voice number, ordered a SIP phone -- and now we have a home phone with no monthly charge..
Can it be that those prices are imaginary until there's stock? It seems like a nice board (I have a old BBB, with ethernet, and it's solid), but the CHIP [1] gets you wifi and BT for $9...
But the CHIP uses an Allwinner CPU, and for those of us who like to support manufacturers that actually play nice with the open source community: the CHIP is a no-go.
The specific CPU in the CHIP appears to have mainline support, so it's less terrible than things like the "Banana Pi M2+" ( http://linux-sunxi.org/Sinovoip_Banana_Pi_M2%2B ), but I like to support CPU manufacturers who aren't Allwinner.
While the motives are nice, there is no way I am willing to reward a company like the one who makes the beaglebone black that effectively scams its customers by charging such a huge amount relative to other products.
The level of ignorance in that statement is stunning.
First, the Bill of Materials for the BeagleBone is publicly available. I'm quite sure the BeagleBone guys would welcome your help in finding parts that are significantly cheaper than what they have now.
Second, the BeagleBone comes with a bunch of very standard connectors that are optional or hobbyist installs on a lot of the other boards. Ethernet jack, 2 usb ports (one OTG), an actual power adapter jack that isn't USB, both big headers already installed, mini-HDMI already installed, uSD card holder installed and probably a couple others that I forgot. Those connectors are not cheap AND they often have to be installed by hand.
Third, most BeagleBone's come with everything you need. You don't need to buy a USB cable. You don't need to buy a flash card. You plug it in and it powers up and you can do stuff on it. RPi's used to make you buy both a cable and a uSD card--maybe that has changed.
Finally, the BeagleBone is actually quite a bit more powerful and has more peripherals than most of these other boards. The BeagleBone always came with a processor capable of running stock Linux even from it's release in April 2013--the RPi didn't get that until the RPi2 almost 2 years later. Quite a few things on the BBB hang directly off the chip and have their own functional modules that don't conflict with other things. On the BBB, for example, Ethernet is wired to the chip--it does not suck up USB bandwidth like the RPi. While you can plug in a USB audio stick on the BBB, most capes actually access the McASP block so that they get direct DMA and again don't clog the USB bus. I can do a lot more things simultaneously on the BBB than I can on the RPi before bogging it down.
If you can use the RPi for whatever it is you are doing--great! It's a nice product. But there are a lot of us quietly using a lot of BeagleBones because it is way more powerful and had these things from the start. RPi adopted these things later and, funnily enough, needed to increase their price when they did so.
It's no coincidence that the RPi3 and the BeagleBone Green are almost identical in price.
> RPi adopted these things later and, funnily enough, needed to increase their price when they did so.
This is my only nitpick with your post. While the Pi was in development, yes it was advertised as a "$25 computer", and once they finalized the design of the B version it ended up at $35. However, its price has not increased one penny since release, despite several revisions and huge leaps in performance and capability. Today we have the RPi 3, a quad core 64 bit computer that sells for the same price as the original single core, outdated-on-release board from 2012. If anything, that means the price has technically gone down, since you're getting so much more for the same amount.
Well, I'm not really qualified to talk about the BoM costs relative to the sale price because I don't do manufacturing, but the Beaglebone Black team claims they charge at margin based on the BoM: "Currently there is $0 margin on these boards [...]" [0]. I normally compare the BeagleBone Black to the Raspberry Pi in terms of cost: the initial Raspberry Pi cost $35, but came with no internal flash. So with 4GB of internal flash the BBB seemed like a reasonable deal at $50. If you're willing to go without HDMI, the Beaglebone Green is $39 [1]
The Allwinner CPUs are always extremely cheap, but I don't support the company because of what jerks they are to the open source community [2]
How is that a scam? They don't have a monopoly and it's not an essential item - so they should be able to charge whatever they want, and if people feel that the BeagleBone's features are worth the price then they will buy it. What's the problem?
Why do you consider charging a higher price as "scamming"? For example a SABRE Lite board is much more expensive and has a weaker processor than, say, a Raspberry Pi 3. Nevertheless it has advantages, for example it is much more open than an RPi3 and thus it is much easier to do bare-metal development on it, which is a reason why for example the seL4 developers use it as (one of the) build target(s) (cf. https://wiki.sel4.systems/FrequentlyAskedQuestions#On_what_h...)?
Used beaglebone since it's out years ago, it's a great piece of hardware and kind of kicked off the open-source-software plus open source 32-bit-CPU DIY hardware movement before everybody else.
Then clone was up everywhere, from RPI to Intel to many small shops in China etc, even Arduino started to add 32-bit CPU boards, price has remained to be low so far.
The only concern is that TI is not as active as before on its ARM-chip business, otherwise Beaglebones could have dominated the market instead of RPI series.
There were a not-insignificant number of companies who tried setting up build servers &c on PandaBoard & found the units failed fairly quick under any kind of sustained use. AFAIK BBB, although more limited, best I know remained reliable.
yes I have all sorts of beaglebone families, including pandaboard, there are so many SBCs to choose these days around $50-ish, and many of them have usb-based wifi onboard.
TI also was the first one to do mcu-wifi but it's so expensive it never got much market attraction, until ESP8266 came out which took the world by storm.
Interesting that Texas Instruments Raspberry (you know, TI is to BeagleBoard as Broadcom is to RPi) would use a 3rd party SoC. I guess it still uses a AM335x internally so it's a tossup for them.
Would have wished they had updated the AM335x to one of the beefier Sitaras, they are falling somewhat behind if only in clock rate.
it's not really a new SoC ... it's an AM335x die (the real SoC) packaged along with dram, the TI power controller chip along with all the decoupling caps ... what this means is that you can get away with a 4-layer board with components on just one side for a lot of applications and build it at home in a reflow oven
The BeagleBone was great when it first came out. Then the Raspberry Pi came out, and has a bigger community, higher performance, and lower price. Compared to the RPi 3, the BBBW seems like ... too little, too late?
I had the opposite experience with mine; My BeagleBone Black kept becoming soft-bricked while trying to run Debian (unable to boot, forcing me to reinstall the OS/loader or restore a backup), and I eventually found out it was because upstream Debian updates were incompatible with the board's funny hardware. One needs (or at least needed) to take special care not to update one's kernel.
Switched to a RPi2 after that headache. The BBB has been collecting dust ever since.
The BeagleBone does power management which the RPI doesn't. It's unfortunate that they didn't take this revision opportunity to boost the RAM and switch to USB3. IMHO.
> It's unfortunate that they didn't take this revision opportunity to boost the RAM and switch to USB3. IMHO.
Well, the RAM on the Bone is DDR3 while the RAM on the RPi3 is DDR2. I'll generally take the extra performance over an extra 512MB.
With respect to USB3, USB Type-C connectors are WAY more expensive than micro-B. We're talking like more than a dollar vs less than 10 cents. And USB Type-C cables are way more expensive, too. And you'd still only be doing USB 2.0 speeds anyhow.
I doubt Type-C USB is going to be making it into this space anytime soon.
You've conflated USB 3.0 with Type-C. Many many people ship USB3, many of them being fairly low cost wifi routers, but yes, they use USB 3.0 Type-A connectors, the big rectangular ones.
I'm also generally unconvinced the Type-C scaremongering is real. Difficulty now is high, costs are high, but it still doesn't seem as impervious a barrier as many people intone.
I guess it depends on what you are using them for. If I want a smartphone, yeah use the RPi, if you need something that can do reliable precise timing, no amount of extra ARM cores can replace the PRUs in the BB.
Yup. I've worked with a couple companies now that use BBB or derivatives thereof in shipped hardware. Mostly managing other hardware, e.x. battery packs. It's a cheap off the shelf solution, and with it being open source hardware it seems (I have not been part of the procurement process) that they're easier to source in bulk. The Raspi has always struck me as exclusively targetting the hobbyist market.
Not at all. IME, they tend to be more reliable and used in real world products. The Rpi (as much as I love it) is focused more at the hobby market. You can use the BB boards on professional settings as off the shelf hardware.
It needs a microSD for the stuff in the /boot partition (kernel+devicetree files+firmware blobs+bootloader), but everything else should be able to live on an external USB device.
USB+ethernet both use the same connection to the CPU, and it's a USB-OTG implementation basically hacked to act like a USB host, but it's possible to host the filesystem there.
> I have measured performance for my compute heavy use case. Four cores with Neon are way higher performance.
Um, sure, but if that's your benchmark, you'd want an ODROID-C2 instead, no?
The problem I have with the RPi3 is that it's rare that I am CPU bound (and there are better choices if I am), while I am far more often I/O bound. And the RPi I/O system (Still hanging Ethernet off the USB? Only one PWM pin? Really?) is sub-par.
However, to each their own. The level of choice is wonderful from the perspective of someone who had to fight making a board at $200 4 years ago that didn't even reach near the level of the initial RPi.
Yes, the ODROID is interesting, too.
If I want raw performance, I actually want some form of the Jetson.
Even adding a Teensy3 over USB or serial for the cases where I really need bit twiddling, the RPi3+Teensy3 system came out ahead for me. (Mainly, robotics control, some computer vision.)
The onboard camera/GPU integration of the Pi3 is great for me, too.
And if I want absolute-lowest-price, CHIP is still where it's at, unless I can stretch as low as the ESP8266, but then we're no longer in the same category.
So, anyway, I'm not particularly excited about yet another beaglebone that's two or three times too expensive for what it is, in singles. Others have differing needs/opinions.
They have different features. RPi still doesn't have any support for analog. The BeagleBone has had an ADC since the beginning. If you are using them for anything more than a basic computer these little things matter.
You can run programs with the vector processors in the vidcore with QPULib. https://github.com/mn416/QPULib Kind of apples and oranges, considering the PRU is more focussed on determinate timing.
Unfortunately its power usage is crazy bad. It draws about 7W when idle. Devices like the BeagleBone, Pi or even most consumer-grade wifi routers draw a fraction of that.
I haven't really examined it, though. Maybe there's also a binary blob loaded into the GPU itself or something (the Raspberry Pi does that, for example).
Hopefully they don't need to use a closed-source blob for the C2.
seriously? (seriously seriously)? It depends on if you're okay with the chinese having a backdoor, at the firmware level. (to the tune of '//gotroot!!' in the source code, and dropping to root.)
if you're okay with it, you have a LOT more options than if you aren't. perhaps if we start having dedicated routers and networks for the backdoored insecure stuff they'll start realizing that at the end of the day they're being pretty fucking obvious.
no comment on other governments stuff. if they're there, at least they aren't obvious.
I upvoted you in spite of your tone, because your statements are not undue.
The AllWinner stuff is concerning because they weren't exactly transparent about things.
However, the Octavo stuff looks like your bog-standard chips from BeagleBone/TI just all smashed onto the same substrate. You could decap the module and see if that's true.
I don't know if the threading makes it less than obvious, but I was simply answering this question:
>OT, sort of, but a while back I saw one of these... "Pi-like" boards that had two Ethernet ports. It also had significantly more horsepower.
I'm wondering what might be recommended choices at this point for someone looking for an inexpensive, wired MITM / Firewall platform.
There are a lot of very interesting, very cheap boards!
https://www.google.com/search?q=As+for+the+backdoor+in+Orang... (honestly, if it were invisible I wouldn't care. it's just sloppy. I also think all governments should collude and there should be like world peace ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ - meanwhile they should fear for their people, and have to nominally follow constitutions. I guess I can keep dreaming though.)
Not sure but I assume that the Octavo Systems OSD3358 uses the same parts as the BBB core processor/memory/misc. Which means at least you can load the same firmware as a BBB. Which leaves you with the same trust issues as a regular BBB. If that's not true then all bets are off.
Me I'd be more worried about the WiFi module, thought stopping to think, if the WiFi module driver isn't open source that's a worry too.
How is the software support for BeagleBone boards? Can I expect to get automatic kernel updates with security patches?
Traditionally a problem with many boards is that you have to choose between running a distro kernel with incomplete hardware support but timely security updates, and running a board specific kernel that can't be safely exposed to internet-connected environment.
I had a student try to do an independent study research project using the BBB a couple of years ago. The experience wasn't good. We had a lot of trouble getting the thing to run with anything except the one kernel version that it came with. Porting over features from kernel modules done on earlier minor versions was a huge pain and not at all straightforward.
Problem was to support capes (addon boards) especially dynamically and at runtime wasn't really supported in mainline. They had special cape manager patches to do it but it wasn't a good solution for upstream.
3 years later or so we finally have good overlay support for this in a mainline happy and now merged way. They paid to have this work done which is great, though sadly took a long time.
I forget the guys name that did it but he is clearly a champion of patience.
This is the perfect example of true Open Source Hardware. None of the other boards similarly spec'd development boards have been spinned into so many variants. Not to mention real world consumer products that are based off the Beaglebone Black schematic.
As a side note, "DDR3 8Gb 512M*16 1600 MHZ" is now on DRAMeXchange (you have to login to see it). It is hovering around five dollars per chip. I think the BeagleBone Black is one of the embedded systems where it is commonly used.
anyone know of any good resources, tutorials, books, etc. for putting the PRUs to good use? those seem to be the defining feature that separates the BBB from the other SBCs.
I can recommend "Exploring BeagleBone" by Derek Malloy which offers a very gentle introduction to the PRU with some mildly advanced examples.
Also, a shameless plug with more PRU code examples in case you are interested to use Rust rather than C for the glue code:
https://github.com/sbarral/prusst
I've been running a tor relay on the original beaglebone black for a couple years now and have been very satisfied. Would have LOVED the wifi model back then.
5GHz performance is vastly better in urban areas. There are 26 networks visible from my apartment (in a small 2-story apartment building), and the 2.4GHz WiFi spectrum effectively has only 3 channels (due to substantial overlap, only channels 1, 6, and 11 are normally used). So you're sharing a lot of bandwidth with your neighbors. 5GHz has much better spacing (so less interference) and more total bandwidth.
I like to see this stuff (seems like they should have had this earlier) but to me the real market shifting is less about performance and much more about preformance/watt and unit pricing. If you can push the boundaries on those two areas and still make it easy to hack then I think you have something that could push innovation to a new level. Still it is great to see this!
There are hardware design source files on https://github.com/beagleboard/beaglebone-black-wireless, including a PDF schematic: https://github.com/beagleboard/beaglebone-black-wireless/raw... which features a Texas Instruments WL1835MODGBMOCT WiFi/Bluetooth module: https://store.ti.com/WL1835MODGBMOCT.aspx