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BeagleBone Black Wireless

beagleboard.org

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Re: BeagleBone Black Wireless

#21

Post by BHSPitMonkey »

dublinben wrote: post #7
jwatte wrote: post #4

The 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?

The 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.

I had the opposite experience with mine; My BeagleBone Black kept becoming soft-bricked while trying to run Debian (unable to boot, forcing me to reinstall the OS/loader or restore a backup), and I eventually found out it was because upstream Debian updates were incompatible with the board's funny hardware. One needs (or at least needed) to take special care not to update one's kernel.

Switched to a RPi2 after that headache. The BBB has been collecting dust ever since.

Re: BeagleBone Black Wireless

#22

Post by petre »

CaptSpify wrote: post #8
revelation wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I 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.

What 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?

Debuan, Angstrom, Arch Linux ARM, also others. The Beaglebone is more suited platform for M2M applications.

http://elinux.org/Beagleboard:BeagleBoneBlack

Re: BeagleBone Black Wireless

#23

Post by pasbesoin »

pwython wrote: post #15
pasbesoin wrote: post #9

OT, 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.

You may be thinking of the ODROID-C2. http://www.hardkernel.com/main/products/prdt_info.php

Thank you. That looks like one of the ones, perhaps the only one, that I recall.

Gigabit Ethernet, even. Do wish the USB could be >= 3, but for $40, I'm not going to complain.

    Mali™-450 GPU (3 Pixel-processors + 2 Vertex shader processors)
I'm thinking this implies a binary blob?

Re: BeagleBone Black Wireless

#25

Post by mintplant »

The link at the bottom goes to https://beagleboard.org/wireless which isn't working for me, but 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, including a PDF schematic: https://github.com/beagleboard/beaglebone-black-wireless/raw... which features a Texas Instruments WL1835MODGBMOCT WiFi/Bluetooth module: https://store.ti.com/WL1835MODGBMOCT.aspx

Re: BeagleBone Black Wireless

#26

Post by dhess »

BHSPitMonkey wrote: post #21
dublinben wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The 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.

I had the opposite experience with mine; My BeagleBone Black kept becoming soft-bricked while trying to run Debian (unable to boot, forcing me to reinstall the OS/loader or restore a backup), and I eventually found out it was because upstream Debian updates were incompatible with the board's funny hardware. One needs (or at least needed) to take special care not to update one's kernel. Switched to a RPi2 after that h…

Possibly too late for you, but if you decide to put the BBB to good use in the future, this is all you need:

http://elinux.org/BeagleBoardDebian

Re: BeagleBone Black Wireless

#27

Post by rdtsc »

jwatte wrote: post #4

The 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?

Does RPi have PRU co-processors?

Re: BeagleBone Black Wireless

#28

Post by ausjke »

Used 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.

Re: BeagleBone Black Wireless

#29

Post by stephenmm »

I 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!

Re: BeagleBone Black Wireless

#30

Post by faragon »

mintplant wrote: post #25

The link at the bottom goes to https://beagleboard.org/wireless which isn't working for me, but 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 , including a PDF schematic: https://github.com/beagleboard/beaglebone-black-wireless/raw... w…

The 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/

[2] http://beagleboard.org/pru

P.S. I'm not related to CHIP product, just a happy user :-)

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