5 ms·

What kinds of use-cases do people have in mind for this board? The 1GHz processor and 512MB RAM seem a bit like overkill for everything I can come up with. Alth

What kinds of use-cases do people have in mind for this board? The 1GHz processor and 512MB RAM seem a bit like overkill for everything I can come up with. Although I think I'd still consider hopping on it if it included wireless. I probably waste way more power at home by keeping the lights on, but I always get a bit frustrated with how much power some of these boards use. It adds up! My college professors probably drilled power management way too hard into my head.

adammunich 9y ago
It's basically perfect for building anything in the drone or industrial control space because you can use the same monolithic IC that's on there, on low-quality boards that don't need expensive impedance control or 8 layers. It's actually a pretty huge development as far as electronics go.
- thom_nic 9y ago
  Those benefits are mostly a feature of the Octavo SIP (I think!) Unfortunately in my case, I want to use it in a product with wired ethernet, so a PocketBeagle limited to a USB or SPI ethernet device because the it doesn't expose the pins for the AM335x's integrated MAC. Also, buying the Octavo chip alone in small quantities is much more expensive than the whole PocketBeagle :( I wish they made a PocketBeagle-Pro with all signals routed out through high-pitch headers, comparable to Olimex's AM3352-SOM.
shakna 9y ago
With so many IOs, why not just add WiFi? Something ESP-line should do the trick, with little power consumption.
- joezydeco 9y ago
  This particular board is a subset of the larger boards in the Beaglebone family. Boards like the Green include wifi, and the superset/parent board Black has USB host ports, HDMI output, and Ethernet connectors. The Black has open-sourced schematics that can easily be edited into your own project. The Beaglebone design philosophy (start with this design and expand on it) is slightly different than the Raspberry Pi one (shoehorn it into whatever you are doing)... which is exciting to embedded developers but confusing to people that have only worked with the RPi.
- kens 9y ago
  If you want WiFi, plugging a USB WiFi stick into the PocketBeagle is very simple. (I discuss it in the article.)
jstanley 9y ago
> What kinds of use-cases do people have in mind for this board? The 1GHz processor and 512MB RAM seem a bit like overkill for everything I can come up with. You don't have to use all of the CPU or RAM capabilities. The use cases appropriate for this board include all potential use cases for an equivalent board with less CPU or RAM. I don't think it's fair to knock it for being too capable.
- jacknews 9y ago
  But you do have to use the full price, and power/energy requirements of the board, so I think it's a valid question; where is this balance of price/power/capability useful? Development/prototyping is an obvious one of course.
  - icegreentea2 9y ago
    I agree - this doesn't make sense for many types of mobile-type applications. But you'd really consider this for really anything that has substantial direct user interface requirements (ie has an actual GUI + full keyboard and maybe even touchscreen interaction). Or maybe you might use this somewhere where you're not super BOM cost or power constrained, with fuzzy requirements, and limited developer resources. Using this class of hardware opens up using 'standard' Linux tools which can potentially bring great savings in terms of: portability, availability of developer resources, ease of development. There may be applications where a 5-10x increase in BOM cost in exchange for not having to hire an embedded guy might be worth it.
zokier 9y ago
I think the PRUs are the unique selling point of Beagles. So basically when you need both hard(ish) real time and full Linux stack. Neat example what you can do with that: https://hackaday.com/2015/02/19/turn-your-beagleboneblack-in-to-a-14-channel-100msps-logic-analyzer/ https://hackaday.com/2015/02/19/turn-your-beagleboneblack-in...
j_s 9y ago
http://bela.io http://bela.io - ultra-low latency audio and sensor processing
spdustin 9y ago
I use the Beaglebone Black running NodeRED to (gently) teach my kiddos about flow-based programming. All while it provides a HomeKit interface to my ISY/Insteon/Hue home automation accessories.
mmagin 9y ago
I have soldered a second USB connector on one and plan to use it as a lazy-person's means of doing some HID (trackball) remapping, though I've not had the time to actually work on that. My current stumbling block was how to keep the included ethernet/serial usb gadget support active while adding a HID usb gadget. I'd rather not have to actually hook up hardware serial to the board if I can avoid it. It's nice to be able to do a one-off thing like that with high-level tools.
DannyB2 9y ago
Problem: when a certain alarm condition occurs, an LED on the control panel needs to blink. Dimwit #1: Ah, use a 555 timer. Dimwit #2: Use an Arduino with the Blink sketch. Senior Software Developer: I'll use a Linux board with a blink program running on Node.js. The blink program will watch for the alarm condition and blink the LED in response. The program will also provide a web based configuration interface. What if marketing changes the requirements from a simple blink pattern to: blink blink (pause) blink blink (pause) etc... The simple 555 timer approach would be too inflexible. The arduino approach would require altering, recompiling and re-flashing the firmware. The senior software developer approach would be sufficiently flexible that you could connect a web browser and reconfigure the blink pattern. Each blink pattern can be given a name and saved. Such as the slow-blink, fast-blink, double-blink, etc. Each pattern consists of a list of on/off states associated with a duration in milliseconds. Anyone can point their browser to this and reconfigure new blink patterns that become popular. What could possibly go wrong?
- imba404 9y ago
  Not quite sure if this is sarcasm... Here's my counter-argument in case you were serious. Dimwit #1: 555's fail when hell freezes over. An engineering intern can make changes and see it work. The PCB will cost more than the electronics. 555 as a component will be available for years. Dimwit #2: Arduino/ATMEGA are so well documented that the next engineer supporting this should have no problem making appropriate changes even 10 years from now, assuming Microchip sustains the ATMEGA product line. Senior Software Developer: You've introduced an attack vector [the web interface], increased the BOM cost [the Linux board], programmed it in a language that changes on a yearly basis [node.js]. Not to mention having to provide a Linux image source programmable [preferably eMMC], and ensuring compatibility of the web config for major browsers for the lifetime of the product. All for a blinking LED.
  - softawre 9y ago
    His post was obviously sarcasm.
- cr0sh 9y ago
HeyLaughingBoy 9y ago
Often the extra horsepower is cheaper than developer time. A few months ago, I started on a project that needed to read an input signal, do some trigonometry on it and update some I/O at a 30kHz update rate. The kind of thing a DSP could handle in its sleep, but I don't have DSP tools and it wasn't worth the investment. Since a standard Arduino Uno wasn't fast enough to do the math, I built a table of precomputed sines & cosines, scaled to the output signal. But then we needed 12 bit analog input. Since the Cortex M0 on newer Arduinos (Due?) has a 12 bit A/D and is much faster, I could now drop my precalculated table and do the math on the fly. But the ADC in the M0 turned out to be crappy, so I ditched it for an off-board 12-bit ADC and went back to the Uno and the sin/cos tables. Had I not been concerned about latency and startup times, I'd have used a Raspberry Pi with an external ADC or a Beaglebone right out the gate and probably finished the project inside a week. I'm selling the hardware with enough margin that the extra cost doesn't matter to me and it matters even less to my customer.
- hinkley 9y ago
  You get compression at the low end. It’s not especially cost effective to maintain manufacturing capacity for a bunch of similar designs. If I can make better margins on a $5 part than I can my $4.25 part I’m going to be really tempted to shut down that line and make more of the other or a higher margin chip. That’s part of the story with Linux on BIOS. Motherboards started shipping with EEPROMs that were 2-4x larger than the BIOS would ever get, as big or bigger than typical rescue disks.

adammunich 9y ago

It's basically perfect for building anything in the drone or industrial control space because you can use the same monolithic IC that's on there, on low-quality boards that don't need expensive impedance control or 8 layers. It's actually a pretty huge development as far as electronics go.

thom_nic 9y ago
Those benefits are mostly a feature of the Octavo SIP (I think!) Unfortunately in my case, I want to use it in a product with wired ethernet, so a PocketBeagle limited to a USB or SPI ethernet device because the it doesn't expose the pins for the AM335x's integrated MAC. Also, buying the Octavo chip alone in small quantities is much more expensive than the whole PocketBeagle :( I wish they made a PocketBeagle-Pro with all signals routed out through high-pitch headers, comparable to Olimex's AM3352-SOM.

shakna 9y ago

With so many IOs, why not just add WiFi? Something ESP-line should do the trick, with little power consumption.

joezydeco 9y ago
This particular board is a subset of the larger boards in the Beaglebone family. Boards like the Green include wifi, and the superset/parent board Black has USB host ports, HDMI output, and Ethernet connectors. The Black has open-sourced schematics that can easily be edited into your own project. The Beaglebone design philosophy (start with this design and expand on it) is slightly different than the Raspberry Pi one (shoehorn it into whatever you are doing)... which is exciting to embedded developers but confusing to people that have only worked with the RPi.
kens 9y ago
If you want WiFi, plugging a USB WiFi stick into the PocketBeagle is very simple. (I discuss it in the article.)

jstanley 9y ago

> What kinds of use-cases do people have in mind for this board? The 1GHz processor and 512MB RAM seem a bit like overkill for everything I can come up with. You don't have to use all of the CPU or RAM capabilities. The use cases appropriate for this board include all potential use cases for an equivalent board with less CPU or RAM. I don't think it's fair to knock it for being too capable.

jacknews 9y ago
But you do have to use the full price, and power/energy requirements of the board, so I think it's a valid question; where is this balance of price/power/capability useful? Development/prototyping is an obvious one of course.
- icegreentea2 9y ago
  I agree - this doesn't make sense for many types of mobile-type applications. But you'd really consider this for really anything that has substantial direct user interface requirements (ie has an actual GUI + full keyboard and maybe even touchscreen interaction). Or maybe you might use this somewhere where you're not super BOM cost or power constrained, with fuzzy requirements, and limited developer resources. Using this class of hardware opens up using 'standard' Linux tools which can potentially bring great savings in terms of: portability, availability of developer resources, ease of development. There may be applications where a 5-10x increase in BOM cost in exchange for not having to hire an embedded guy might be worth it.

zokier 9y ago

I think the PRUs are the unique selling point of Beagles. So basically when you need both hard(ish) real time and full Linux stack. Neat example what you can do with that: https://hackaday.com/2015/02/19/turn-your-beagleboneblack-in-to-a-14-channel-100msps-logic-analyzer/ https://hackaday.com/2015/02/19/turn-your-beagleboneblack-in...

j_s 9y ago

http://bela.io http://bela.io - ultra-low latency audio and sensor processing

spdustin 9y ago

I use the Beaglebone Black running NodeRED to (gently) teach my kiddos about flow-based programming. All while it provides a HomeKit interface to my ISY/Insteon/Hue home automation accessories.

mmagin 9y ago

I have soldered a second USB connector on one and plan to use it as a lazy-person's means of doing some HID (trackball) remapping, though I've not had the time to actually work on that. My current stumbling block was how to keep the included ethernet/serial usb gadget support active while adding a HID usb gadget. I'd rather not have to actually hook up hardware serial to the board if I can avoid it. It's nice to be able to do a one-off thing like that with high-level tools.

DannyB2 9y ago

Problem: when a certain alarm condition occurs, an LED on the control panel needs to blink. Dimwit #1: Ah, use a 555 timer. Dimwit #2: Use an Arduino with the Blink sketch. Senior Software Developer: I'll use a Linux board with a blink program running on Node.js. The blink program will watch for the alarm condition and blink the LED in response. The program will also provide a web based configuration interface. What if marketing changes the requirements from a simple blink pattern to: blink blink (pause) blink blink (pause) etc... The simple 555 timer approach would be too inflexible. The arduino approach would require altering, recompiling and re-flashing the firmware. The senior software developer approach would be sufficiently flexible that you could connect a web browser and reconfigure the blink pattern. Each blink pattern can be given a name and saved. Such as the slow-blink, fast-blink, double-blink, etc. Each pattern consists of a list of on/off states associated with a duration in milliseconds. Anyone can point their browser to this and reconfigure new blink patterns that become popular. What could possibly go wrong?

imba404 9y ago
Not quite sure if this is sarcasm... Here's my counter-argument in case you were serious. Dimwit #1: 555's fail when hell freezes over. An engineering intern can make changes and see it work. The PCB will cost more than the electronics. 555 as a component will be available for years. Dimwit #2: Arduino/ATMEGA are so well documented that the next engineer supporting this should have no problem making appropriate changes even 10 years from now, assuming Microchip sustains the ATMEGA product line. Senior Software Developer: You've introduced an attack vector [the web interface], increased the BOM cost [the Linux board], programmed it in a language that changes on a yearly basis [node.js]. Not to mention having to provide a Linux image source programmable [preferably eMMC], and ensuring compatibility of the web config for major browsers for the lifetime of the product. All for a blinking LED.
- softawre 9y ago
  His post was obviously sarcasm.
cr0sh 9y ago

HeyLaughingBoy 9y ago

Often the extra horsepower is cheaper than developer time. A few months ago, I started on a project that needed to read an input signal, do some trigonometry on it and update some I/O at a 30kHz update rate. The kind of thing a DSP could handle in its sleep, but I don't have DSP tools and it wasn't worth the investment. Since a standard Arduino Uno wasn't fast enough to do the math, I built a table of precomputed sines & cosines, scaled to the output signal. But then we needed 12 bit analog input. Since the Cortex M0 on newer Arduinos (Due?) has a 12 bit A/D and is much faster, I could now drop my precalculated table and do the math on the fly. But the ADC in the M0 turned out to be crappy, so I ditched it for an off-board 12-bit ADC and went back to the Uno and the sin/cos tables. Had I not been concerned about latency and startup times, I'd have used a Raspberry Pi with an external ADC or a Beaglebone right out the gate and probably finished the project inside a week. I'm selling the hardware with enough margin that the extra cost doesn't matter to me and it matters even less to my customer.

hinkley 9y ago
You get compression at the low end. It’s not especially cost effective to maintain manufacturing capacity for a bunch of similar designs. If I can make better margins on a $5 part than I can my $4.25 part I’m going to be really tempted to shut down that line and make more of the other or a higher margin chip. That’s part of the story with Linux on BIOS. Motherboards started shipping with EEPROMs that were 2-4x larger than the BIOS would ever get, as big or bigger than typical rescue disks.