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BeagleBone Black: A 1-GHz computer for $45

eetimes.com

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Re: BeagleBone Black: A 1-GHz computer for $45

#11

Post by orangethirty »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #4

I got three of these. I need controllers like I need a hole in my head but hey, they are really really cute. A bit of trouble with the release that was on them but downloaded and burned in the latest and they were fine. Sadly no, I have not yet put them on a meter but will when they are near such a setup. Something that sets these apart from the Raspberry Pi are that they full of easy access I/O, and two the Cloud9 I…

How robust are the boards? I'm moving a hydroponics setup from an arduino to something more flexible, and need them to be fairly robust. I use a thick plastic case to protect them, but they will be on 24/7/7. Also, how is setting up WIFI with these? Better than the RPi?

Re: BeagleBone Black: A 1-GHz computer for $45

#13

Post by ChuckMcM »

wyager wrote: post #10
ChuckMcM wrote: post #4

I got three of these. I need controllers like I need a hole in my head but hey, they are really really cute. A bit of trouble with the release that was on them but downloaded and burned in the latest and they were fine. Sadly no, I have not yet put them on a meter but will when they are near such a setup. Something that sets these apart from the Raspberry Pi are that they full of easy access I/O, and two the Cloud9 I…

Is the Ethernet PHY connected to the main processor over USB or something faster/more efficient? One of my biggest complaints about the Raspberry Pi is that the Ethernet is capped at a few dozen mbps, presumably due to constraints associated with USB.

Ethernet is built into the SOC [1] and brought out to a phy. It can do gigabit Ethernet. With the wireless dongle in the USB plug it was doing 10.5MB/sec (megabytes per second) according to scp.

[1] http://www.ti.com/lit/ds/symlink/am3358.pdf

Re: BeagleBone Black: A 1-GHz computer for $45

#14

Post by ChuckMcM »

orangethirty wrote: post #11
ChuckMcM wrote: post #4

I got three of these. I need controllers like I need a hole in my head but hey, they are really really cute. A bit of trouble with the release that was on them but downloaded and burned in the latest and they were fine. Sadly no, I have not yet put them on a meter but will when they are near such a setup. Something that sets these apart from the Raspberry Pi are that they full of easy access I/O, and two the Cloud9 I…

How robust are the boards? I'm moving a hydroponics setup from an arduino to something more flexible, and need them to be fairly robust. I use a thick plastic case to protect them, but they will be on 24/7/7. Also, how is setting up WIFI with these? Better than the RPi?

Standard FR-4 from the looks of it, it does fit inside an altoids tin although I've not installed one due to needing to cut out the holes for the peripherals.

Re: BeagleBone Black: A 1-GHz computer for $45

#17

Post by gcb0 »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #4

I got three of these. I need controllers like I need a hole in my head but hey, they are really really cute. A bit of trouble with the release that was on them but downloaded and burned in the latest and they were fine. Sadly no, I have not yet put them on a meter but will when they are near such a setup. Something that sets these apart from the Raspberry Pi are that they full of easy access I/O, and two the Cloud9 I…

No. it's not fun to run any code in a browser . especially when you have a full linux distro with ssh and modern text editors, with decent undo, column editing, auto-completion, regexp, etc.

never really understood the appeal of the arduino interface or cloud9. Well, for the arduino i can at least try to explain that, same with android, there are so many bad tutorials based on copy/past and boasting those IDE, that lots and lots of people start already thinking that is their only option.

Re: BeagleBone Black: A 1-GHz computer for $45

#18

Post by krishna2 »

Got mine couple of days back and here are a few tips:

- The default OS version had some issues that I was not able to ssh into the board. Once I downloaded and loaded the latest version available on the site, I was able to ssh as root.

- I was not able to connect serially (from my mac). Turns out that the FTDI driver they provide is 32 bit but (my) Mac needs a 64 bit. So you have to install the 32 bit, save the Info.plist, then install the 64 bit and copy it back and chmod permissions correctly.

- While trying to do a "opkg upgrade", be careful. Mine got into some issues installing a downloaded version half way through the process. But this also somehow broke the network connection. So no more updates. I almost thought I bricked my board. But I was able to again use my SD (from the previous downloaded latest version) to the rescue and bring it back to life again.

Re: BeagleBone Black: A 1-GHz computer for $45

#19

Post by Cixelyn »

llgrrl_ wrote: post #6
outside1234 wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have a power meter by any miracle? The main advantage I see to this over the Raspberry Pi (for my application) is its spartan power usage.

No I don't have a power meter. I know the Black works on a USB 2.0 port of my laptop and my desktop too, so it uses less than 500mA. From my experience working with Ti's stuff, they are often pretty good about power consumption though. My main problem with the Pi is that it is very finicky... plug a USB device in, and it dies/connection drops and all kinds of weird things happen. I have seen none so far on the Black.

Isn't the finickiness related to power consumption? USB is only rated up to 500mA, so drawing too much power from the Raspberry Pi's own USB port will cause all sorts of havoc especially when the RPi itself is powered off another computer's USB port.

In fact technically RPi model B's official spec is that it requires 700mA. You can often get away with less, but you'll definitely start to hit 500mA+ under stress and with peripherals, which is above what USB can officially supply.

Your best bet is to get a nice solid cellphone wall-wart type charger, preferably rated 2A and up. With enough juice powering the Pi, all the issues relating to USB disconnects, freezing, and ethernet dropping stop happening.

Gonna guess that the stability you're seeing with the beaglebone is just from its much lower power requirement.

Re: BeagleBone Black: A 1-GHz computer for $45

#20

Post by mcescalante »

I've been using the BeagleBone A6 (pre-Black) at my University this semester for an embedded systems lab (Computer Engineering undergrad). TI provided them to see what we could do.

Cloud9 was fun to play with, and allowed quick access to all the functions you might want on the headers. Pretty easy to develop on, and requires very minimal setup or work to actually start programming in js.

Next, I put Ubuntu (Angstrom is very similar) on it and played around and was able to get familiar with where all of the pin input and output files lived, and how the muxing was put together in the OS. Once you explore a bit it's pretty quick. At that point, just pick a language and start writing whatever you want. I've written shell, C, and python for it for various projects this semester. It's super easy to run a web server on it to control the board from afar which makes for a killer demo at a hackathon or something. Also would be super easy to have it control things around your home from your smartphone.

Some notes / reminders: - X11 (Xming for PC) if you don't want to / can't use HDMI and you want a GUI (lxde). - Don't put a 5V data line into the UART pins (or most pins), classmates busted at least 5 A6's this way (new model may have improved).

I haven't used a Pi yet, and have a Model B coming my way now, but I'm absolutely grabbing a Black or two to see if it's any better. Would definitely recommend it!

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