5 ms·

> Openness and flexibility tear-down limits on your imagination I'll take ten. In all seriousness, how do developers feel about this compared to larger commun

> Openness and flexibility tear-down limits on your imagination I'll take ten. In all seriousness, how do developers feel about this compared to larger communities around products like the Raspberry Pi? I've learned to follow the crowd when I'm using products for the best support.

Jorslu 9y ago
+1 Another thing I am curious about is why is there such a price difference? RPiZ - $5 PB - $25 https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/raspberry-pi-zero/ https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/raspberry-pi-zero/
- jarmitage 9y ago
  As far as I can suppose (although I don't actually have a source), RPiZ is sold at a loss and is made in much larger quantities than its competitors. I would be surprised if PocketBeagle isn't also sold at a loss, although at a different scale. Anyone else got thoughts/evidence on this?
  - pjc50 9y ago
    Neither company is large enough to sell at a loss (where would they get the money?), although the Pi is very close to selling at marginal cost.
    - jdkticom 9y ago
      Lots of discussion about that here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10631668 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10631668
  - jdkticom 9y ago
    It is definitely not sold at a loss. No maximum to the order quantity, just lead time if it is more than inventory.
- dbcurtis 9y ago
  I think the RPi CPU's are significantly less costly, and of course have higher volume production runs. Traditionally, the chips used in RPi have difficult-to-obtain low level documentation and therefore binary blobs for drivers. RPi foundation is willing to make that trade-off in favor of cost. The Beagle ecosystem has from the beginning been more of a traditional reference design "please buy our chips for your personalized version" sort of board.
  - agumonkey 9y ago
    yeah rpis are leftovers from old massproduced chips.. plus they lack lots of features
- leggomylibro 9y ago
  The Pi Zero can be extremely hard to find at $5 depending on where you live, though. Ditto for the Zero W at $10. They're pretty awesome, but every time I go looking for one it takes a few days. Still, it is sort of fun. Like hunting for a newly-launched console.
  - VectorLock 9y ago
    Microcenter but they were doing a '1 per customer' thing for a while.
    - khedoros1 9y ago
      There aren't many MicroCenters around, and they still do an escalating price scale. $10 for 1, $15 apiece for 2-5, $20 apiece after that.
      - mdip 9y ago
        I wonder if these are sold at Microcenter. They're about 15-20 miles from one here in Michigan, although it's not like that particular store is their Headquarters or anything. It is a shame there aren't more MicroCenter stores around, although I'm not sure really how they stay in business. It was logical that computing equipment would make the switch to being purchased primarily online[0]. Somehow MicroCenter competes well on price and very well on selection. That place is like a retail NewEgg, carrying all kinds of very specialized things. They've got everything from water cooling rigs (multiple brands), to oddities like shrink tubing, development boards, 3D printing supplies and every kind of upgrade for PCs you can think of. It's a place I avoid when I don't have an hour to sit around and a reasonable budget because I always leave there with more than I intended on purchasing but it's so nice that when I need an adapter to plug my one power supply cord into my two ports on my new graphics adapter, I can drive up the road. Small tangent, yeah, but this product would fit really well over there. [0] While I'm sure Apple stores do OK and full PCs probably sell OK in larger electronics chains, none of those chains carry anything resembling a reasonable selection of pieces/parts.
reaperducer 9y ago
I got burned pretty badly (in time, not money since it was ultra cheap) on the Onion Omega2 fiasco. The thing was released when it was alphaware, and all the support documentation was for the previous machine. It's matured a lot in the last few months, but that first half year was very rough. It took two or three firmware releases to even make it stable, and it's still a bugfest. (Can the support web site even work on iPhones yet? It used to be Windows+Chrome only.) Because of that, my next foray into ultra-low-cost computing will be Raspberry Pi. At least I know it's an established product and because of that it probably has a good community and documentation.
- seabird 9y ago
  "Good documentation" might be a bit of an overstatement. The second you get off the beaten path with a Raspberry Pi, things can get pretty hellish. Try bare metal C on just the second rendition, and weep before the non-existent documentation for the SoC they used. The official response to this issue (to paraphrase) was "it's fairly close to the previous version; you can figure it out." I don't want to know what sort of suffering you would have to go through trying to do bare-metal programming on an RPi 3.
  - khedoros1 9y ago
    There's at least a forum section dedicated to it, with a few posts containing collections of resources: https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewforum.php?f=72 https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewforum.php?f=72
    - seabird 9y ago
      That doesn't change the fact that the documentation you need isn't there, and that they have no plans to provide it. Can you figure it out? Sure. Am I going to pull my hair out doing trial and error trying to figure out the GPIO pinout for an SoC that they have no interest in providing documentation for when I can just buy a product with better documentation? Of course not.
- carussell 9y ago
matheweis 9y ago
I’ve become a huge fan of the NanoPi Neo series. The lower end models are < $10 and still moderately powerful, besides being quite a lot smaller than the Raspberry Pi’s
- Xeoncross 9y ago
  Looks pretty stable too: http://wiki.friendlyarm.com/wiki/index.php/NanoPi_NEO http://wiki.friendlyarm.com/wiki/index.php/NanoPi_NEO
  - agumonkey 9y ago
    Slightly more recent, smaller (pi zero like form) http://wiki.friendlyarm.com/wiki/index.php/NanoPi_Duo http://wiki.friendlyarm.com/wiki/index.php/NanoPi_Duo something like 9$ (shipping included)
    - iancarroll 9y ago
      I just got my NanoPi Duo and it’s pretty cool. With WiFi and its form factor it’s very useful. Though I kind of wish it used an H5; I can’t imagine it costs much more but it’s a much better SoC.
- subway 9y ago
  Check out the OrangePi Zero series too. They're comparable to the NanoPi Neo and NanoPi Neo Air in size and features, but seem to land in mainline u-boot and Linux a bit more quickly.
tyingq 9y ago
The Beaglebones, including this one, use the AM335X chip, which includes two PRU units on die. These are microcontrollers that have access to the same memory as the main ARM cores, and an API to share data. This allows for real-time-ish use cases that the Raspberry PI can't handle well. Low latency audio, driving large LED matrix boards, high speed input sampling, etc. So it's not quite the same market. $25 in this space is rock bottom pricing.
- lima 9y ago
  CNC machining and 3D printing is one use case where Beaglebones are very common. This LinuxCNC fork supports it natively: http://www.machinekit.io/ http://www.machinekit.io/
- j_s 9y ago
  > jarmitage: if you're interested in making ultra low latency (as low as 80us) embedded musical instruments, check out Bela http://bela.io http://bela.io > tyingq: The pair of PRUs in the Beaglebone black is a large part of it. source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15121720 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15121720 (Aug 2017)
xienze 9y ago
I started using the BB Black when it was first introduced and am quite surprised it didn't become more popular. At the time, the alternative was the RPi, and the BBB was way faster and had dedicated Ethernet (something the RPi still doesn't have -- its Ethernet controller hangs off the USB bus). To answer the question though, honestly I'm not sure how you can go wrong with it being a smaller community. You can largely take advice about the RPi and apply it to the BBB (or the PB, in this case). The hardware and software is all roughly similar, after all.
- khedoros1 9y ago
  It was more expensive and less heavily marketed as an educational device. And the BBB is much less focused on graphics; a huge part of the Pi community is focused solely on media centers and retro gaming emulation.
stuntkite 9y ago
Beagle has a pretty large community. They've been around longer than the Raspberry Pi. The RPi because of it's super low cost has proliferated greatly and enabled people to get in and try out stuff they wouldn't be able to before. Which has always been their goal, to build an educational tool. If you are just fiddling around and mostly are looking to have something that's a lot like your linux experience. Either will work and it might be easier to find a specific github project for what you're doing on the RPi, but that is barely my usual experience. Even something like running a MAME cab on an RPi3, you'll get set up quick with RetroPi, but some things you might want to play won't hack it on the little CPU in there. Any one of these is a great entry point, but it is definitely advisable to jump into your new project by seeing what people are using and picking the board. If your idea is even slightly left of mainstream you'll probably test out quite a few. More than likely, if you didn't have EE skills before you start, you'll hit some hard walls with esoteric choices like SPI vs I2C, or the best way to do wireless communication and not gobble your battery. Long and short, embedded projects don't quite silo like software. You might start out thinking about your Pi like buying a netbook, then four years later you're doing embedded C on a 16-bit proc to get where you're going. Even just a few years ago this would be totally inaccessible to anyone without very specific experience (usually a degree). Now for a dollar, anyone can fiddle and grow an idea and the tools have become amazing! But just because it runs an ubuntu flavor and has a familiar window manager, doesn't mean people didn't make real specific choices to get it into that tiny package and you'll have to figure out what you really need as you go.

Jorslu 9y ago

+1 Another thing I am curious about is why is there such a price difference? RPiZ - $5 PB - $25 https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/raspberry-pi-zero/ https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/raspberry-pi-zero/

jarmitage 9y ago
As far as I can suppose (although I don't actually have a source), RPiZ is sold at a loss and is made in much larger quantities than its competitors. I would be surprised if PocketBeagle isn't also sold at a loss, although at a different scale. Anyone else got thoughts/evidence on this?
- pjc50 9y ago
  Neither company is large enough to sell at a loss (where would they get the money?), although the Pi is very close to selling at marginal cost.
  - jdkticom 9y ago
    Lots of discussion about that here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10631668 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10631668
- jdkticom 9y ago
  It is definitely not sold at a loss. No maximum to the order quantity, just lead time if it is more than inventory.
dbcurtis 9y ago
I think the RPi CPU's are significantly less costly, and of course have higher volume production runs. Traditionally, the chips used in RPi have difficult-to-obtain low level documentation and therefore binary blobs for drivers. RPi foundation is willing to make that trade-off in favor of cost. The Beagle ecosystem has from the beginning been more of a traditional reference design "please buy our chips for your personalized version" sort of board.
- agumonkey 9y ago
  yeah rpis are leftovers from old massproduced chips.. plus they lack lots of features
leggomylibro 9y ago
The Pi Zero can be extremely hard to find at $5 depending on where you live, though. Ditto for the Zero W at $10. They're pretty awesome, but every time I go looking for one it takes a few days. Still, it is sort of fun. Like hunting for a newly-launched console.
- VectorLock 9y ago
  Microcenter but they were doing a '1 per customer' thing for a while.
  - khedoros1 9y ago
    There aren't many MicroCenters around, and they still do an escalating price scale. $10 for 1, $15 apiece for 2-5, $20 apiece after that.
    - mdip 9y ago
      I wonder if these are sold at Microcenter. They're about 15-20 miles from one here in Michigan, although it's not like that particular store is their Headquarters or anything. It is a shame there aren't more MicroCenter stores around, although I'm not sure really how they stay in business. It was logical that computing equipment would make the switch to being purchased primarily online[0]. Somehow MicroCenter competes well on price and very well on selection. That place is like a retail NewEgg, carrying all kinds of very specialized things. They've got everything from water cooling rigs (multiple brands), to oddities like shrink tubing, development boards, 3D printing supplies and every kind of upgrade for PCs you can think of. It's a place I avoid when I don't have an hour to sit around and a reasonable budget because I always leave there with more than I intended on purchasing but it's so nice that when I need an adapter to plug my one power supply cord into my two ports on my new graphics adapter, I can drive up the road. Small tangent, yeah, but this product would fit really well over there. [0] While I'm sure Apple stores do OK and full PCs probably sell OK in larger electronics chains, none of those chains carry anything resembling a reasonable selection of pieces/parts.

reaperducer 9y ago

I got burned pretty badly (in time, not money since it was ultra cheap) on the Onion Omega2 fiasco. The thing was released when it was alphaware, and all the support documentation was for the previous machine. It's matured a lot in the last few months, but that first half year was very rough. It took two or three firmware releases to even make it stable, and it's still a bugfest. (Can the support web site even work on iPhones yet? It used to be Windows+Chrome only.) Because of that, my next foray into ultra-low-cost computing will be Raspberry Pi. At least I know it's an established product and because of that it probably has a good community and documentation.

seabird 9y ago
"Good documentation" might be a bit of an overstatement. The second you get off the beaten path with a Raspberry Pi, things can get pretty hellish. Try bare metal C on just the second rendition, and weep before the non-existent documentation for the SoC they used. The official response to this issue (to paraphrase) was "it's fairly close to the previous version; you can figure it out." I don't want to know what sort of suffering you would have to go through trying to do bare-metal programming on an RPi 3.
- khedoros1 9y ago
  There's at least a forum section dedicated to it, with a few posts containing collections of resources: https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewforum.php?f=72 https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewforum.php?f=72
  - seabird 9y ago
    That doesn't change the fact that the documentation you need isn't there, and that they have no plans to provide it. Can you figure it out? Sure. Am I going to pull my hair out doing trial and error trying to figure out the GPIO pinout for an SoC that they have no interest in providing documentation for when I can just buy a product with better documentation? Of course not.
carussell 9y ago

matheweis 9y ago

I’ve become a huge fan of the NanoPi Neo series. The lower end models are < $10 and still moderately powerful, besides being quite a lot smaller than the Raspberry Pi’s

Xeoncross 9y ago
Looks pretty stable too: http://wiki.friendlyarm.com/wiki/index.php/NanoPi_NEO http://wiki.friendlyarm.com/wiki/index.php/NanoPi_NEO
- agumonkey 9y ago
  Slightly more recent, smaller (pi zero like form) http://wiki.friendlyarm.com/wiki/index.php/NanoPi_Duo http://wiki.friendlyarm.com/wiki/index.php/NanoPi_Duo something like 9$ (shipping included)
  - iancarroll 9y ago
    I just got my NanoPi Duo and it’s pretty cool. With WiFi and its form factor it’s very useful. Though I kind of wish it used an H5; I can’t imagine it costs much more but it’s a much better SoC.
subway 9y ago
Check out the OrangePi Zero series too. They're comparable to the NanoPi Neo and NanoPi Neo Air in size and features, but seem to land in mainline u-boot and Linux a bit more quickly.

tyingq 9y ago

The Beaglebones, including this one, use the AM335X chip, which includes two PRU units on die. These are microcontrollers that have access to the same memory as the main ARM cores, and an API to share data. This allows for real-time-ish use cases that the Raspberry PI can't handle well. Low latency audio, driving large LED matrix boards, high speed input sampling, etc. So it's not quite the same market. $25 in this space is rock bottom pricing.

lima 9y ago
CNC machining and 3D printing is one use case where Beaglebones are very common. This LinuxCNC fork supports it natively: http://www.machinekit.io/ http://www.machinekit.io/
j_s 9y ago
> jarmitage: if you're interested in making ultra low latency (as low as 80us) embedded musical instruments, check out Bela http://bela.io http://bela.io > tyingq: The pair of PRUs in the Beaglebone black is a large part of it. source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15121720 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15121720 (Aug 2017)

xienze 9y ago

I started using the BB Black when it was first introduced and am quite surprised it didn't become more popular. At the time, the alternative was the RPi, and the BBB was way faster and had dedicated Ethernet (something the RPi still doesn't have -- its Ethernet controller hangs off the USB bus). To answer the question though, honestly I'm not sure how you can go wrong with it being a smaller community. You can largely take advice about the RPi and apply it to the BBB (or the PB, in this case). The hardware and software is all roughly similar, after all.

khedoros1 9y ago
It was more expensive and less heavily marketed as an educational device. And the BBB is much less focused on graphics; a huge part of the Pi community is focused solely on media centers and retro gaming emulation.

stuntkite 9y ago

Beagle has a pretty large community. They've been around longer than the Raspberry Pi. The RPi because of it's super low cost has proliferated greatly and enabled people to get in and try out stuff they wouldn't be able to before. Which has always been their goal, to build an educational tool. If you are just fiddling around and mostly are looking to have something that's a lot like your linux experience. Either will work and it might be easier to find a specific github project for what you're doing on the RPi, but that is barely my usual experience. Even something like running a MAME cab on an RPi3, you'll get set up quick with RetroPi, but some things you might want to play won't hack it on the little CPU in there. Any one of these is a great entry point, but it is definitely advisable to jump into your new project by seeing what people are using and picking the board. If your idea is even slightly left of mainstream you'll probably test out quite a few. More than likely, if you didn't have EE skills before you start, you'll hit some hard walls with esoteric choices like SPI vs I2C, or the best way to do wireless communication and not gobble your battery. Long and short, embedded projects don't quite silo like software. You might start out thinking about your Pi like buying a netbook, then four years later you're doing embedded C on a 16-bit proc to get where you're going. Even just a few years ago this would be totally inaccessible to anyone without very specific experience (usually a degree). Now for a dollar, anyone can fiddle and grow an idea and the tools have become amazing! But just because it runs an ubuntu flavor and has a familiar window manager, doesn't mean people didn't make real specific choices to get it into that tiny package and you'll have to figure out what you really need as you go.