4 ms·

That's one of the things that disappoints me most about the Pi, to be honest. Not the power situation, but the "no way to remix it" situation. While it's not q

That's one of the things that disappoints me most about the Pi, to be honest. Not the power situation, but the "no way to remix it" situation. While it's not quite as beefy as the Pi (especially the Pi 4), nor as cheap, the Beaglebone family of boards are awesome. They come with schematics, and you can order the processor in qty 1 from Digikey. I haven't yet remixed one yet (a 400-BGA is going to be stretching my abilities...), but I have leaned on the schematic quite a bit to figure out some clever things I can do with it.

m463 7y ago
When the Pi first came out I talked with a hardware engineer about it and he said they made some weird choices. One thing he pointed out to me was the pin design. Everybody else would design it with female pins so that you won't accidentally bend the pins or short them out. He loved the beaglebone though and recommended it. That said, I think the pi has a bigger community and more software. (I might be wrong)
- tonyarkles 7y ago
  > That said, I think the pi has a bigger community and more software. (I might be wrong) Most definitely. From an "ease of getting started" perspective, the Pi is absolutely amazing. NOOBS, or whatever the distribution is called, is pretty painless to get going. You flash it to the SD card, plug in a monitor and keyboard+mouse, and you boot straight into a familiar GUI with tons of tools pre-installed. Plus, the $35 price point (well, more once you include SD card, power supply, etc) is pretty hard to argue with. Debian IoT (the "standard" distro for the BeagleBone) is cool in its own right, but definitely not as approachable for someone who's new to embedded Linux. Things like GPIO mappings need to get tweaked sometimes, you're dinking around with device trees here and there, etc. For the stuff I've been working on lately (robotics), the BeagleBone Blue has been an absolute godsend. Tons of ports that speak different protocols (UART, I2C, PPM for driving servos, GPIOs, etc), and librobotcontrol is really straightforward to start building with. I guess a great way to distinguish between them: I pretty much always use a keyboard and mouse to get a Pi set up. I don't even know if the BBBlue has video output onboard, because I've never looked or tried. On boot it exposes itself as a network device over USB; you can SSH into it and start doing what you're trying to do.

m463 7y ago

When the Pi first came out I talked with a hardware engineer about it and he said they made some weird choices. One thing he pointed out to me was the pin design. Everybody else would design it with female pins so that you won't accidentally bend the pins or short them out. He loved the beaglebone though and recommended it. That said, I think the pi has a bigger community and more software. (I might be wrong)

tonyarkles 7y ago
> That said, I think the pi has a bigger community and more software. (I might be wrong) Most definitely. From an "ease of getting started" perspective, the Pi is absolutely amazing. NOOBS, or whatever the distribution is called, is pretty painless to get going. You flash it to the SD card, plug in a monitor and keyboard+mouse, and you boot straight into a familiar GUI with tons of tools pre-installed. Plus, the $35 price point (well, more once you include SD card, power supply, etc) is pretty hard to argue with. Debian IoT (the "standard" distro for the BeagleBone) is cool in its own right, but definitely not as approachable for someone who's new to embedded Linux. Things like GPIO mappings need to get tweaked sometimes, you're dinking around with device trees here and there, etc. For the stuff I've been working on lately (robotics), the BeagleBone Blue has been an absolute godsend. Tons of ports that speak different protocols (UART, I2C, PPM for driving servos, GPIOs, etc), and librobotcontrol is really straightforward to start building with. I guess a great way to distinguish between them: I pretty much always use a keyboard and mouse to get a Pi set up. I don't even know if the BBBlue has video output onboard, because I've never looked or tried. On boot it exposes itself as a network device over USB; you can SSH into it and start doing what you're trying to do.