Beaglebone Black, like a Pi

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Soldato
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Being as the Pi thread is in here I thought I'd bring this up. Anyone else heard about/got one of the new Beaglebone Black boards?
I heard about it last week and preordered one which arrived this morning, considering it is only £2-3 more than a Pi it is (for me) significantly better.
Firstly the CPU is a whole generation newer being a Cortex-A8 to the ARM11 on the Pi (BBB has NEON instructions, is dual issue superscalar so executes twice as many instructions at the same clock speed).
It also comes with 2GB built in NAND and ships with a version of Linux on there (there is also a microsd slot that can be booted off instead). Out of the box you can connect it via USB to your PC and interact with it via a built in webserver, it includes the Cloud9 IDE for doing javascript programming with samples to have you flashing the leds and similar straight away.
External connections are more limited than the Pi, audio and video out is only via the micro hdmi connecter and there is only one normal USB port (the one I mentioned before is a mini usb in device mode).
Having connected it up to a monitor and keyboard/mouse it boots into a Linux GUI that unlike the Pi experience is actually usable, it ships with normal versions of Firefox and Chromium on there that work and the GUI in general is far more responsive.
Another bonus is the ethernet support is directly connected to the CPU rather than USB like the Pi.

If you're a hardware hacking kind of person the sheer number of digital and analog (12 bit) GPIO pins is awesome.

I'm not saying it's better than the Pi, that's going to depend on what you want to do with it, but given how popular the Pi thread is I thought some people here might be interested to know about this as well.
 
I do a lot of work with the BeagleBones and they're cracking little dev boards. They're no media players but if you want to do some work with industrial type IO then you can't get better.

Mainline Linux support is also fairly decent and is improving at a reasonable rate.
 
I currently own and use the original Beaglebone a lot. I own 2 raspberry Pi's. I will be adding a couple of BBB's to my collection.
 
Probably end up getting one of these at some point, not got the media capabilities of the Pi but then that isn't really all that great anyway, and for everything else it looks more usable.

Might even be able to convince my boss to expense it if I say I'll do a work related demo on it :p
 
I think the Pi has really helped open up the linux world to a much larger target audience. great bit of kit! not heard of this one but the pi is usable as a media dev. so id personally opt for that.
 
The BBB cannot be overclocked as far as I am aware, and the no gigabit comes from keeping the costs down. I'm unsure if this board could even support gigabit throughput.

I believe some of the Freescale iMX boards are gigabit so you should take a look at those.
 
what's the speed like when compared to a pi?

I'm running a OG 256mb Pi at the moment as a server/gateway to my equipment at home and its certainly sluggish.
 
Oh, just had a quick looksee at the cubieboard and the fact it does 4K output is intersting. I was looking for something where I could showcase my photos on 4K screen where video is not important.
 
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