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  • Author Author: Catwell
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Raspberry Pi vs. The World: compare and contrast the competition

Catwell

Round One - Fight!

 

Mockery is the greatest form of flattery. Raspberry Pi hit the world by storm. Immediately, the industry responded. Since Raspberry Pi was introduced, many usurpers have tried to dethrone the board with little luck. Like Kleenex or Xerox, Raspberry Pi is the defacto description of small form factor computers. Every new board mentions Raspberry Pi somewhere in its literature; a mantra being “we are better than.” However, are any of the alternatives better? Let’s take a look.

 

This chart is put together under some criteria. The board must have some sort of video out built in or designed for it. The board must have come into existence since the release of the Raspberry Pi. In addition, I picked boards that either suggest directly, or third party referencing, it as a replacement for a Raspberry Pi.

 

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Raspberry Pi vs The World: a comparison between the top contenders. (See attached files for large resolution images of the list... all images via their respective companies)

 

The BeagleBone Black, UDOO, and Parallella seem like strong contenders in ousting the Raspberry Pi from its global domination. But, all these boards lack one critical success factor, a huge and fervent community. Raspberry Pi prevalence is so large, that numerous companies have sprung up just developing accessories for the board. And they are all paying salaries because of it. Just see this list of Raspberry Pi Accessories that put the little board back on top of the stack.

 

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Attachments:
Raspberry Pi contender list.txt.zip
imageRaspberry Pi vs The World 1 PDF 2.pdf
image
Parents

  • It might not be as large in sheer numbers, but the 100% Open Source Hardware BeagleBoard & BeagleBone has a strong community (http://beagleboard.org/) that has been around for 5 years as of this past Monday!

     

    http://beagleboard.org/blog/2013-07-29-Five-years-of-DIY-hacks/

    image

  • in reply to fustini

    One advantage of the BEagle  NNNN NNN devices is that the comunity that exists although smaller is more generally more technicaly capable and asking a question tends to get you an answer that is more likely right and consistant. With the RPI you need to filter 10 pages of oppinion to find the same facts... the noise floor of the RPI comunity is much higher !

  • in reply to Problemchild

    John Alexander wrote:

     

                           

     

    the noise floor of the RPI comunity is much higher !

     

                       

    I've been thinking about that recently. It's often repeated that the Pi has a bigger community and with >1million sold that's hard to argue with.  But I wonder how to gauge the value of the community. Is a large community where only 1% contribute useful and accurate stuff better or worse than a (potentially much) smaller community where 50% contribute in the same way ?

    There may be just as much useful stuff available for either, but how does the noise floor contribute to the end level of effectiveness of the community for someone asking about a problem?  Especially if the person asking the question is outside the respective communities looking in.

  • in reply to Former Member

    As with all noise it totally beats up on the effectiveness of the comparitively small core of people working hard to produceuseful work or say interesting useful things.

    To be quite honest I/m tired of "comunities" where it's all about shouting louder and more often to get a "fact " across most of this stuff is plain wrong or at best ill thought out/considered!

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  • in reply to Former Member

    As with all noise it totally beats up on the effectiveness of the comparitively small core of people working hard to produceuseful work or say interesting useful things.

    To be quite honest I/m tired of "comunities" where it's all about shouting louder and more often to get a "fact " across most of this stuff is plain wrong or at best ill thought out/considered!

Children
  • in reply to Problemchild

    John Alexander wrote:

     

                           

     

    it's all about shouting louder and more often to get a "fact " across most of this stuff is plain wrong

     

                       

    Yeah, I'm beginning to get tired of pointing people to the current BBB SRM so that they can see for themselves that it can really do 1080p. Too many people shouting about it not being able to image

  • in reply to Problemchild

    John Alexander wrote:

                           

    To be quite honest I/m tired of "comunities" where it's all about shouting louder and more often to get a "fact " across most of this stuff is plain wrong or at best ill thought out/considered!

     

    Here is my solution to the problem:  Divide people into engineers, organizers, and followers.  (This has nothing to do with their age, education nor employment, but only with their worldview.)

     

    Engineers are those with whom you can interact rationally for the purposes of analysis.  Organizers are those with whom you can interact rationally to define well-grounded things for them to organize, but they will often ignore you.  Followers are those with whom you cannot interact rationally as an engineer at all, but whose comments can provide very useful ideas for product, system, business, or community development.  All three are important.

     

    It's only when the above categories are mixed up that discussions get heated, and it's always a waste of time for everyone concerned.  The goals and the methods of communication in those 3 categories are entirely different, which is why it so often disintegrates into non-communication.

     

    The irony in the above is that the followers constitute the majority of the human population, and if engineers could be said to have anything like a Prime Directive, it is to elevate all of humanity up Maslow's pyramid, everybody.  Even those followers who ban you because they don't comprehend the engineering mindset.  This can seem thankless at times, but that's life, we're all in it together.  To make it bearable, keep the 3 categories separate.  They don't speak the same language.

     

    Life is hard.

  • in reply to morgaine

    I think there has been some legitimate confusion regarding BBB's support for 1080p.

    Apparently it doesn't have a hardware decoder (unlike RPi), and software decoding is

    reportedly somewhat of a work in progress, with audio problems at certain resolutions,

    and with network streaming not working as well as access from local storage.

  • in reply to Former Member

    coder27 wrote:

                           

    I think there has been some legitimate confusion regarding BBB's support for 1080p.

    It may be unfortunate that it can be pushed to support it.  Cue the complaints from people who want to run a media centre on the board ...

  • in reply to morgaine

    Cue the complaints from people who want to run a media centre on the board ...

    well, certain things like youtube in a browser window at 480p or 720p may work better

    on BBB than RPi.  But I think it's still a work in progress.