13 ms·
BeagleBone Black Wireless
- ers35 10y agoSee also "A BeagleBone on a Chip" for discussion about the Octavo Systems OSD3358 system-in-package used on this board: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11697719 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11697719
- akanet 10y agoI'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.
- compuguy 10y agoHonestly, with it supporting only 2.4 ghz, its uses are limited.
- errantspark 10y agoWhat's wrong with 2.4Ghz?
- elcct 10y agoI find 5Ghz to be more reliable - perhaps because it is not as congested as 2.4
- wyager 10y ago5GHz 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.
- snovv_crash 10y ago5GHz also attenuates significantly through walls, so even if your neighbour is on the same channel you won't be getting as much interference.
- jwatte 10y agoThe 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?
- revelation 10y agoI 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.
- CaptSpify 10y agoWhat kind of OS do you typically use with the BB? I know the RPI has noobs/rasbian, but is there something comparable for the BB?
- fnj 10y agoPlain un-customized Debian is what it comes with. Debian and Ubuntu are both popular, but you can run almost any distro.
- ams6110 10y agoOr OpenBSD. http://www.tedunangst.com/flak/post/OpenBSD-on-BeagleBone-Black http://www.tedunangst.com/flak/post/OpenBSD-on-BeagleBone-Bl...
- petre 10y agoDebuan, Angstrom, Arch Linux ARM, also others. The Beaglebone is more suited platform for M2M applications. http://elinux.org/Beagleboard:BeagleBoneBlack http://elinux.org/Beagleboard:BeagleBoneBlack
- dublinben 10y agoThe BeagleBone Black has better Linux support out of the box, doesn't require non-free firmware to boot, and is itself an Open Source Hardware design.
- revelation 10y agoInteresting 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.
- Taniwha 10y agoit'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
- pasbesoin 10y agoOT, 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. P.S. It would be great if it also had decent on-board wireless for e.g. making a portable hardware firewall device.
- logicallee 10y agoseriously? (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.
- pasbesoin 10y agoYou got voted down (not by me), but I guess that is something to consider -- if/as a particular device is not completely open.
- errantspark 10y agoI'm curious to see this for myself, do you have a source?
- logicallee 10y agohttps://www.google.com/search?q=As+for+the+backdoor+in+Orange+Pi 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.)
- dbcurtis 10y agoI can't find any info on whether or not the WiFi driver is open source. Anyone know?
- kersny 10y agoThis? same family atleast: https://github.com/torvalds/linux/tree/master/drivers/net/wireless/ti/wl18xx https://github.com/torvalds/linux/tree/master/drivers/net/wi...
- mintplant 10y agoThe link at the bottom goes to https://beagleboard.org/wireless https://beagleboard.org/wireless which isn't working for me, but https://beagleboard.org/black-wireless https://beagleboard.org/black-wireless works. Mouser lists the price as $68.75 and element14 as $99.25; neither has any stock yet. There are hardware design source files on https://github.com/beagleboard/beaglebone-black-wireless https://github.com/beagleboard/beaglebone-black-wireless, including a PDF schematic: https://github.com/beagleboard/beaglebone-black-wireless/raw/master/BeagleBone_Black_Wireless_SCH.pdf https://github.com/beagleboard/beaglebone-black-wireless/raw... which features a Texas Instruments WL1835MODGBMOCT WiFi/Bluetooth module: https://store.ti.com/WL1835MODGBMOCT.aspx https://store.ti.com/WL1835MODGBMOCT.aspx
- faragon 10y agoThe 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. [1] https://getchip.com/ https://getchip.com/ [2] http://beagleboard.org/pru http://beagleboard.org/pru P.S. I'm not related to CHIP product, just a happy user :-)
- errantspark 10y agoUnfortunately 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.
- ausjke 10y agoUsed 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.
- joezydeco 10y agoDidn't anyone else out there have a PandaBoard? And TI was probably smart to exit OMAP for phones/tablets when they did. It's too hard to beat Apple/Samsung/Qualcomm in this space now. (The Sitara/AM335x on Beagle is just an OMAP without the video DSP)
- ausjke 10y agoyes 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.
- rektide 10y agoThere 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.
- stephenmm 10y agoI 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!
- yuhong 10y agoAs 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.
- stryk 10y agoanyone 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.
- binarycoffee 10y agoI 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 https://github.com/sbarral/prusst
- bschwindHN 10y agoI had this one bookmarked from awhile ago: http://www.righto.com/2016/08/pru-tips-understanding-beaglebones.html http://www.righto.com/2016/08/pru-tips-understanding-beagleb...
- jmgrosen 10y agoSee also the BeagleBone Green Wireless: https://beagleboard.org/green-wireless https://beagleboard.org/green-wireless
- monomyth 10y agoWhile it's awesome, where is Beaglebone Blue?
- fulafel 10y agoHow 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.
- cvwright 10y agoI 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.
- xythobuz 10y agoThis has definitely changed. I'm using the current mainline kernel and it includes proper configs for the BBB. Works pretty much hassle-free.
- lathiat 10y agoYeah this changed a lot in the last 12 months. 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.
- johnchristopher 10y agoWhy not both wifi and ethernet ?
- adityapatadia 10y agoIn case you need a library for BeagleBone, I have forked bonescript and written a better one: https://github.com/theoctal/octalbonescript https://github.com/theoctal/octalbonescript
- runeks 10y agoI would have absolutely loved this if it were 5 GHz wifi. 2.4 GHz wifi in my apartment is practically useless, with ~40 visible APs from my laptop. Are dual 5/2 GHz chips that much more expensive?
- mosselman 10y agoHow many cores does the CPU have? I can't really figure it out from the stats.
- cryptolect 10y agoWhat's unclear is how the BeagleBone Black Wireless compares to the SeeedStudio BeagleBone Green Wireless: https://beagleboard.org/blog/2016-07-07-seeedstudio-beaglebone-green-wireless/ https://beagleboard.org/blog/2016-07-07-seeedstudio-beaglebo... It looks like the Green wireless has more USB ports, but aside from that, I'm not sure why you'd choose the BBB Wireless vs BBG Wireless?
- programmer_man 10y agoProbably the HDMI port.
- vegabook 10y agodoes it now support 1080p ?
- Boothroid 10y agoNo FPGA onboard? (Stifles yawn)
- anujdeshpande 10y agoThis 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.