BeagleBoard BeagleBone

Over 10 years later, I can say that the original BeagleBone was far more reliable than the original Raspberry Pi. The Texa Instruments specifications & documents for the processor were far better as well. I've had several Raspberry Pis just randomly die, but every one of the Beagle Bones are still going. I've heard similar feedback from people with IOT startups. RPis work great until some just randomly die. Today I find the quality of the Raspberry Pi is dramatically improved, the tooling to help a beginner get started is amazing, and of course there's just simply a much larger user base that have likely resolved the problems you'll encounter. However the real magic of a Beagle bone is listed in this features: Arm Cortex-R5 subsystem for low-latency I/O and control There are many use cases such as robotics, where there is a need real time control and Beagle bones have this capability built in, whereas with Raspberry Pi you'll see people connecting an Arduino and a Raspberry Pi together to meet this requirement. Its kludgy, burns tons of time, and it also adds up cost wise. In any case if you're just starting out, and you ever get interested in these things, know that you'll likely end up with many of them over the years. RPi is great for beginners, but if I was deploying something into the field as an IOT startup etc, I still prefer a Beagle. My 2c

How can you know about them if you'll never buy one, and I presume you don't have any? I have all RPis minus the CMs, the Zeros and the 400, then I also have a bunch of Orange Pis and NanoPis, one old Hackberry A10, one Odroid C2 and a couple Beaglebones I just bought used and still have to find the use for (possibly network services because of eMMC better reliability compared to sdcard). I loved playing with all of them, including the RPis. I however stopped buying Raspberries (except maybe the Pico which I find a lot more interesting than the bigger ones) because of both their insane pricing and that "alternative"[0] boards can do whatever I need, and if something doesn't work, which happens rarely, I'm pretty sure it can be sorted out by searching and trial+error. [0] Industrial boards aside (PC104 et al.) which predate those boards by a decade at least, for people who were playing with stuff like the Foxboard LX832 [1] as soon as it was released (2006), the Raspberry Pi became later the alternative, not the other way around. Granted, the Etrax 100lx was slow as a dead sloth compared to the RPi1 BCM, RAM and storage were constrained, and no WiFi, but hey, it ran Linux! I sold them on Ebay long ago, but kept their super cool Tux shaped plastic case [2]. [1] https://www.acmesystems.it/FOXLX [2] https://www.acmesystems.it/oldtux

Should probably expand on this a bit. In 2014 we were involved in a project with a reasonably well-known power grid operator. They had been deploying expensive equipment to monitor the status of various devices at remote substations. They had soft requirements for uptime, which means they set a budget and got the most reliable equipment they could afford. The monitoring system was expected to work somewhere between 4 and 5 nines, but if it didn't no one was going to get fired. The equipment they had been deploying was more or less expensive overkill, offering 5 9's for about $50k per box. Multiply that by about 1600 and you get the idea for the budget. Someone in the organization hit on the idea of using redundant consumer-grade equipment and initially spec'd out some rack-mount x86 systems with beefy redundant power supplies and SSD storage. But then they heard about RasPi's and wanted to give them a try. Should you use a Raspberry Pi for that? The best way to answer that question was to try it out. The first 20 units were built out with a beefy, though small UPS and a decent enclosure. They were deployed alongside existing systems to see if they a) worked, b) gave the same data as the expensive system and c) were reliable. The answer was... some individual units did not hit the 4 9's reliability target. The ones that did, seemed to continue to be reliable up to at least 5 9's. But it was hard to determine which would fail without putting them in the field, waiti…

From 2014-2017, I used small Linux-capable SBCs running BSD as a "router on a stick" for my home network. At first I was running FreeBSD on a Rasberry Pi 2 (not the Model B version). There was some bug at the time that made Vim unusable over a serial terminal, so in spite of it always working and never requiring a reboot, I decided to look for another solution. The solution was OpenBSD running on a Beaglebone Green. It was actually easier to set up, just as stable, and the pf syntax was even simpler. Were I to go with a similar setup today, I'd prefer something that: - has multiple NICs - can be tuned to boot very fast - capable of rolling-back updates/changes - runs NSH[0] The 3rd point is something NSH could facilitate for the network configuration. For system-level changes, I suppose the best I could do on OpenBSD is use CARP between two OpenBSD systems, and switch between the two as I apply and test updates. [0] https://www.nmedia.net/nsh/

There's a possibly-DOA project called BeagleV to produce a modern 1 GHz-class board running a RISC V system. I'm sad that the beaglebone didn't "win" versus the raspberry pi. I have several Beaglebone Blacks and they're great little devices, even if the PRU is a little hard to use.

The PRUs were really hard to use. I think if they had invested in dev tools with a shallow learning curve, like Arduino support for the PRUs, they might have gained critical mass. The Beaglebone Black was pretty nice compared to contemporary Pi's for embedded work: way more GPIO pins, with female headers rather than male (lower chance of accidental short circuits; easier to just jam components or wires in there like it's a breadboard.)

In a world where TI had been able to get a foothold with hobbyists on the beaglebone, the world might be very different. TI doesn't hate small-volume sales like Broadcom. The hobbyist market has weirdly strong network effects: we saw this with Arduino, too, which was a lot more expensive than its competitors! I assume there is a measure of influencer marketing here that old-guard tech companies didn't grasp. 10 years ago, the beagleboard was a game changer, though. They are still making beaglebones and beagleboards, both of which are cool, but they are last-generation computers with lots of useful embedded SoC features, while the Pi is a computer first.

This is great data! I sliced it 2 different ways in Google Sheets -- by SD card and by Raspberry Pi board. Agreed that Amazon Basics is the surprising front-runner for the cards, although the IOPing results are shockingly bad for most cards except SanDisk Ultra 16 + 32. Might need to use Analytical Hierarchy Process to determine how each performance characteristic should be weighted. For boards, the top 3 in your tests by a wide margin are: 1) Orange Pi i96, 2) BeagleBone Black (2GB eMMC), 3) Raspberry Pi 4 Model B (Revision 1.1 – 2GB) https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ENHM6N38iHFd7dEYliaT...