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Morgaine Dinova wrote:

 

Plus the fact that the immediate out-of-the-box experience with BBB tethered to a PC through USB is completely fault-free,

I actually think that's a huge plus point for the BBB. It did take a bit of explaining to the folks at work though as the concept is a bit alien when you're used to the RPi.

Brian Welsby wrote:

 

Judging by the posts in the Beagleboard forums a lot of users are on Debian  and Ubuntu rather than Angstrom.

That should probably be a good indication to them that a change to the default could be a good idea.

selsinork wrote:

 

Morgaine Dinova wrote:

 

Plus the fact that the immediate out-of-the-box experience with BBB tethered to a PC through USB is completely fault-free,

I actually think that's a huge plus point for the BBB. It did take a bit of explaining to the folks at work though as the concept is a bit alien when you're used to the RPi.

I use BeagleBone White with USB for terminal connection and Ethernet for X Windows.  For me it's natural, because I learned X Windows development back around 1990.  But to a newcomer X Windows seems completely backwards -- the remote device is the client and the screen you're looking at locally is the server.  As with many engineering concepts, it doesn't make sense until you learn how it works internally so that you can pretend to be the remote device and imagine the packets flying back and forth across the link.

Has anyone alse had troubles with ordering a BBB?

I ordered mine, ages ago. The receipt from Element14 gave a delivery date in June... which came & went, no sign of BBB.

Called the company, checked the website: "It was shipped". No records of when, no parcel tracking, nothing.

Oh well, accidents happen. Replace it, please. "Oh, but NOW you have to sign a form, promising not to use it to make a guidance missile". Huh?

"It comes from the USA, it's a US trade thing". OK, another day wasted faxing forms.

Weeks pass...Still no BBB, contact Element14 again.

"You have to wait for next shipment from the UK" HOLD ON A MINUTE - I filled in a form to get a product from the USA, and it gets sent to England?

So, has anyone else had troubles actually getting a BBB? Because after this hoo-ha, it needs to tap-dance and excrete gold bars to make up for the aggravation. 

Alan Campbell wrote:

 

Has anyone alse had troubles with ordering a BBB?

No, but it's probably the case that a lot of other people posting to this thread are either in the UK, or the US.

Oh well, accidents happen. Replace it, please. "Oh, but NOW you have to sign a form, promising not to use it to make a guidance missile". Huh?

"It comes from the USA, it's a US trade thing". OK, another day wasted faxing forms.

This seems to be something that TI has done with the classification of the SoC.  When you order one from e14 in the uk, the despatch note has something stapled to it about some EU 'dual-use' regulation and it requiring export authorisation to re-export outside the EU. Nothing to sign though.

The daft thing about it is that you can order much more powerful/capable SoC and don't get this.

This sort of thing used to be quite common when shipping various bits of computer technology into Russia, Eastern Europe, or 'encryption technology' into France, but generally hasn't been the case for best part of 10 years now.  So I was quite surprised to see it turn up again with the BBB.

I filled in a form to get a product from the USA, and it gets sent to England?

Supply chain works in mysterious ways..  e14 is based in the UK.  I remember there were odd things when the RPi was still in restricted availability with them getting shipped from China to the UK, then back out to your corner of the globe.  I'm sure it makes sense to a beancounter somewhere...

Alan Campbell wrote:

 

Has anyone alse had troubles with ordering a BBB?

No problems at all here in UK, they're in stock for next day delivery from cpc.farnell.com (all of mine have been from there), and 910 BBBs are currently in stock at uk.farnell.com so that'll be next day delivery too.

But we don't have an inside path to acquiring BBBs here, since they're manufactured by CircuitCo in Texas, not in UK.

Weeks pass...Still no BBB, contact Element14 again.

Something has gone very very very wrong.

We are looking at replace 8-10 old XP machines. We purchased a Raspberry Pi to try but it doesn't stream video very well at all. I was recommended by a friend that the Arduino would work better for us but I was just recommended BeagleBone Black. We will basically be using them online using Google Docs, YouTube and other educational sites. It would also be nice if they had VGA output as that is the equipment we have. Do you know of a single board computer solution that is reasonably priced that would work for us?

BeagleBone Black doesn't have the sort of hardware acceleration needed to be good at streaming video. 

The Raspberry Pi should be a lot better for video, but it will depend on what compression method is in use. You may need to buy some codec licenses for it from here http://www.raspberrypi.com/license-keys/

It's also likely that you need to use omxplayer on the Pi to get the best out of it's video capabilities as other players may not be optimised for the Pi

VGA output is problematic, most of the current boards have HDMI outputs which means DVI or using an HDMI-to-VGA converter. Some working converters for the Pi are listed here http://elinux.org/RPi_VerifiedPeripherals#HDMI-.3EVGA_converter_boxes

Other things to look at are Sabre-Lite (but cost of these is encroaching on a cheap Intel Atom based PC), Wandboard, or perhaps Minnowboard (which is a cheap Atom PC)

Richard Moeller wrote:

 

We are looking at replace 8-10 old XP machines. We purchased a Raspberry Pi to try but it doesn't stream video very well at all. I was recommended by a friend that the Arduino would work better for us but I was just recommended BeagleBone Black. We will basically be using them online using Google Docs, YouTube and other educational sites. It would also be nice if they had VGA output as that is the equipment we have. Do you know of a single board computer solution that is reasonably priced that would work for us?

Using BeagleBone Black...

You could build something using the design materials from http://circuitco.com/support/index.php?title=BeagleBone_VGA to add VGA.

Or, you could use an HDMI to VGA converter.

Or, you could make a VGA adapter out of resistors: http://hackaday.com/2012/06/26/offloading-vga-generation-onto-a-coprocessor/

Or, you could contact CircuitCo for a custom version of BeagleBone Black that included VGA.

Pi streams video well in my experience with RaspBMC (XBMC Media Center).  Download NOOBS to try it out: http://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads

The BeagleBone Black provides a much faster web browser experience I have found.  This is because it has a newer generation ARM processor (e.g. CPU) than the Pi.  It would probably be the best bet since Google Docs is pretty CPU intensive I'd imagine (lots of javascript).  You could also run Android on the Bone and use the Android version of the Google programs.

I don't believe either the Bone or Pi will play YouTube in the browser.  XBMC with YouTube add-on installed is the best route I believe.

Neither have VGA and a HDMI -> VGA converter isn't cheap compared to the price of these boars.  I'd recommend looking at the Olimex OLinuXino A13 which has VGA:

https://www.olimex.com/Products/OLinuXino/

I believe Farnell should be getting in the future:

http://uk.farnell.com/olimex/a13-olinuxino-micro/a13-cortex-a8-olinuxino-micro-sbc/dp/2308267

And Newark would then have it via direct ship:

http://www.newark.com/olimex/a13-olinuxino/a13-cortex-a8-olinuxino-linux-sbc/dp/69W8086

cheers,

drew