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BeagleBone Blue was also released for sale this year, https://beagleboard.org/blue https://beagleboard.org/blue > BeagleBone® Blue is a complete, Linux-enabled

by mch82 9y ago

BeagleBone Blue was also released for sale this year, https://beagleboard.org/blue https://beagleboard.org/blue > BeagleBone® Blue is a complete, Linux-enabled robotics computer. Community-supported and fully open-source, the real-time performance, flexible networking and rich set of robotics-oriented peripherals make building mobile robots quick and affordable. Unlike the Raspberry Pi line of single-board computers, the BeagleBone line is completely open source and permissively licensed. The design files for Blue are at https://github.com/beagleboard/beaglebone-blue https://github.com/beagleboard/beaglebone-blue UC San Diego is developing coursework based on the Blue, https://www.ucsdrobotics.org/ https://www.ucsdrobotics.org/

swiley 9y ago
IMO: with the exception of the "cheap desktop computer" use case, the beaglebone series of SBCs is better for pretty much anything than the raspberry pi.
- khedoros1 9y ago
  The Raspberry Pi is pretty terrible for "cheap desktop computer". It's better for a lot of graphics and video-related things than the Beaglebones. And the newer Pi's have more RAM and faster CPUs than most of the Beagles. The PRUs and huge GPIO count are the good things about a Beaglebone, IMO. It seems like there's less documentation and pre-built libraries out there for them than for the RPi computers, which is a shame. RPi wins out on price and community.
  - mch82 9y ago
    The community docs for Rasperry Pi do win out for the moment, and so do product and accessory availability. Long-term, it seems like the goal of the BeagleBone foundation is to support each board for a number of years in order to allow for text books, curriculum, and other support material to emerge. Their focus seems to be on robotics and headless embedded systems rather than trying to duplicate the "cheap desktop learning computer" objective of the R Pi. It will be interesting to see if they're able to achieve that goal. I do think the BBB model for open source is the most comprehensive model so far. I'd be very interested to hearing of other open source hardware models. The Open Compute Project hardware licenses were promising, but I haven't seen much action on them since the request for comment in 2014... http://www.opencompute.org/blog/request-for-comment-ocp-hardware-license-agreement/ http://www.opencompute.org/blog/request-for-comment-ocp-hard...
elcritch 9y ago
Wasn’t sure what made the BeagleBone Blue variant variant good for robotics until I read about the 8 servo drivers and 4 DC motor drivers built into the SBC! That’s going to be really handy for lab robotics projects. Buying a servo hat for Raspberry Pi’s or wiring up my own driver chips for one off projects has been annoying. Thanks! Question, do you know if the UCSD course is using the PRU’s and/or porting ROS to the PRU’s? That’d be really excellent. And of course there’s the Pocket BeagleBone [1] that was released this year. I just preferred 4 for prototyping, primarily since they have the onboard dual 200 mhz real-time processors, are in stock, and have really good support and design specs. 1: https://beagleboard.org/pocket https://beagleboard.org/pocket
- mch82 9y ago
  Unfortunately, I'm waiting on the publication of the MOOC and course materials to find out. It looks like the latest book, "BeagleBone Robotics Projects, 2nd Ed", https://www.amazon.com/BeagleBone-Robotic-Projects-Second-control/dp/1788293134/ https://www.amazon.com/BeagleBone-Robotic-Projects-Second-co..., came out in June and I haven't had a chance to look through it. The 2014 book, "Mastering BeagleBone Robotics", by the same author walked through multiple robotics examples implemented using Python and didn't involve the PRUs. Using only Python, there were examples of a rotary aircraft, fixed wing aircraft, sailboat, wheeled vehicle, and computer vision tracking. My understanding is that TI only recently began improving the PRU documentation to make it more accessible and that Code Composer and other tools TI has created for working with the PRU are maturing slowly. I've never tried using it. Here's the PRU page on the BeagleBone wiki: https://elinux.org/Ti_AM33XX_PRUSSv2#C_Compiler https://elinux.org/Ti_AM33XX_PRUSSv2#C_Compiler Another thing I've never tried, but that might be of interest to HN readers, is the Nerves project for Elixir development on single board computers including BeagleBone Black. https://hexdocs.pm/nerves/targets.html https://hexdocs.pm/nerves/targets.html

by mch82 9y ago

swiley 9y ago

IMO: with the exception of the "cheap desktop computer" use case, the beaglebone series of SBCs is better for pretty much anything than the raspberry pi.

khedoros1 9y ago
The Raspberry Pi is pretty terrible for "cheap desktop computer". It's better for a lot of graphics and video-related things than the Beaglebones. And the newer Pi's have more RAM and faster CPUs than most of the Beagles. The PRUs and huge GPIO count are the good things about a Beaglebone, IMO. It seems like there's less documentation and pre-built libraries out there for them than for the RPi computers, which is a shame. RPi wins out on price and community.
- mch82 9y ago
  The community docs for Rasperry Pi do win out for the moment, and so do product and accessory availability. Long-term, it seems like the goal of the BeagleBone foundation is to support each board for a number of years in order to allow for text books, curriculum, and other support material to emerge. Their focus seems to be on robotics and headless embedded systems rather than trying to duplicate the "cheap desktop learning computer" objective of the R Pi. It will be interesting to see if they're able to achieve that goal. I do think the BBB model for open source is the most comprehensive model so far. I'd be very interested to hearing of other open source hardware models. The Open Compute Project hardware licenses were promising, but I haven't seen much action on them since the request for comment in 2014... http://www.opencompute.org/blog/request-for-comment-ocp-hardware-license-agreement/ http://www.opencompute.org/blog/request-for-comment-ocp-hard...

elcritch 9y ago

Wasn’t sure what made the BeagleBone Blue variant variant good for robotics until I read about the 8 servo drivers and 4 DC motor drivers built into the SBC! That’s going to be really handy for lab robotics projects. Buying a servo hat for Raspberry Pi’s or wiring up my own driver chips for one off projects has been annoying. Thanks! Question, do you know if the UCSD course is using the PRU’s and/or porting ROS to the PRU’s? That’d be really excellent. And of course there’s the Pocket BeagleBone [1] that was released this year. I just preferred 4 for prototyping, primarily since they have the onboard dual 200 mhz real-time processors, are in stock, and have really good support and design specs. 1: https://beagleboard.org/pocket https://beagleboard.org/pocket

mch82 9y ago
Unfortunately, I'm waiting on the publication of the MOOC and course materials to find out. It looks like the latest book, "BeagleBone Robotics Projects, 2nd Ed", https://www.amazon.com/BeagleBone-Robotic-Projects-Second-control/dp/1788293134/ https://www.amazon.com/BeagleBone-Robotic-Projects-Second-co..., came out in June and I haven't had a chance to look through it. The 2014 book, "Mastering BeagleBone Robotics", by the same author walked through multiple robotics examples implemented using Python and didn't involve the PRUs. Using only Python, there were examples of a rotary aircraft, fixed wing aircraft, sailboat, wheeled vehicle, and computer vision tracking. My understanding is that TI only recently began improving the PRU documentation to make it more accessible and that Code Composer and other tools TI has created for working with the PRU are maturing slowly. I've never tried using it. Here's the PRU page on the BeagleBone wiki: https://elinux.org/Ti_AM33XX_PRUSSv2#C_Compiler https://elinux.org/Ti_AM33XX_PRUSSv2#C_Compiler Another thing I've never tried, but that might be of interest to HN readers, is the Nerves project for Elixir development on single board computers including BeagleBone Black. https://hexdocs.pm/nerves/targets.html https://hexdocs.pm/nerves/targets.html