Beagle Bone Black: $
5 -- Raspberry Pi/Arduino alternative

   This caught my attention:

http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/154100-beaglebone-black-raspberry-pi-and-arduino-on-a-single-board-for-just-45/2  

Roughly, it is a faster version of a Raspberry Pi with an Arduino like  
GPIO. And for $
0 more than a Raspberry Pi.

I got my Raspberry Pi a week ago and I was blown away by the  
possibilities of just that. And previously amazed at the Arduino.  
Sensors and servos are so readily available and cheap that all kinds of  
control projects are doable. There is already a huge amount of open  
source code ready for the download. It's evolutionary and revolutionary  
for small players like myself (and some of you guys!).

   Jeff

  On 4/26/13 9:41 AM, Neon John wrote:


I bought a BB White for my project and ended up shelving it in favor of  
an Arduino Mega 2560 so as to have the I/O I wanted on-board. I wasn?t  
keen on spending a lot of time kernel hacking and managed to get by with  
rolling my own (minimal) clock and cooperative multitask scheduling  
routines. You can see some of the C source at

    http://www.iedu.com/Solar/LENR/Code.html  

I wish I?d known that you needed an SPI driver because I have C code  
here (written to talk to an X25650 EEPROM) that would have been fairly  
easy for you to rework to suit your needs.

--  
Morris Dovey
http://www.iedu.com  
http://www.facebook.com/MorrisDovey  

 On 4/26/2013 4:39 PM, Morris Dovey wrote:

<snip>

The scheduling is very cool.

RaspPi isn't bad for GPIO:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/m5l185qxq9w5mzk/raspberry-pi-gpio-cheat-sheet.jpg  

There is a lib that gives 8 PWM outs (shares a timer), I don't think you  
needed that though.

On the other hand, logging and WiFi and having memory to burn (and  
Python as a high level wrapper) is very cool and easy.

 On 4/24/2013 1:46 PM, j wrote:>   This caught my attention:
 >
 >  
http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/154100-beaglebone-black-raspberry-pi-and-arduino-on-a-single-board-for-just-45/2
 

 >

So, I hesitated and then bought a BBB.

It came loaded with Angstrom 3.8.6 and a few basics loaded on the eMMC.  
I needed to buy a power USB hub and a micro HDMI adapter. Otherwise  
getting to a desktop was painless. It boots into Gnome and has the  
basics installed.

It runs much snappier than the Pi, (but I had the Pi on a class 8 SD).  
The performance monitor on the BBB rarely shows 100% CPU, and the Pi  
often did. It has a lot more chips on the board than the Pi, so things  
like the ethernet aren't shared with the USB. All the needed hardware is  
there.

With that said, working on the Pi, installing software and updating the  
kernel is much easier on the Pi and Raspbian Wheezy. The Pi community  
and support is better thought out. And, the BBB is very new and there  
are some bugs and such.

I suppose if I moved to a different distro like Ubuntu this would be  
better, but Angstrom seems a better match for tinkering.

The GPIO is mind boggling. I haven't gone cape shopping yet. I'm looking  
for something simple.

Jeff

 >
 > Roughly, it is a faster version of a Raspberry Pi with an Arduino like
 > GPIO. And for $
0 more than a Raspberry Pi.
 >
 > I got my Raspberry Pi a week ago and I was blown away by the
 > possibilities of just that. And previously amazed at the Arduino.
 > Sensors and servos are so readily available and cheap that all kinds of
 > control projects are doable. There is already a huge amount of open
 > source code ready for the download. It's evolutionary and revolutionary
 > for small players like myself (and some of you guys!).
 >
 >    Jeff