An acquaintance of mine organizing a STEM event asked me today:
"we're going to has some DIY astronomy stuff there. Would your BeagleBoard be a bit overpowered for that? I'm thinking there are going to be people there interested in making telescopes and needing to position them. Perhaps that is more Arduino & Raspberry Pi [...]Like I said, if you can point me to something (like Youtube video) as to why the Beagleboard is slicker, I'm more than happy to spread the word."
Here is my response:
Check out the video from this post: http://beagleboard.org/blog/2013-07-29-Five-years-of-DIY-hacks/
Five Years of BeagleBoard.org Video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bIvkerJr5wE&feature=player_embedded
To clarify BeagleBoard vs. BeagleBone: BeagleBoard has additional features like DSP and is a more expensive board. BeagleBone Black is $45 and fits in an Altoids tin (aka credit card sized). It has higher processing power than the Pi (except for HD video due Pi's VideoCore GPU). I also includes 2GB onboard Flash storage so no separate SD card is needed. It is ready to boot up out of the box (no flashing SD cards, etc).
It would be great for any type of project that needs automation, motion control, remote sensing & web-accessibility (or all the above). A telescope control system would be a great use case! A BeagleBone Black is cheaper than Pi + Arduino. Pi has limited hardware interfacing. Networking with Arduinos is expensive and difficult. BeagleBone Black handles all of that - and its completely Open Source Hardware. This is great for engineering education and for design engineer & makers who need to optimize the Bone for their use case!
It has tons of I/O compared to Pi:
- 7 Analog Pins [Pi has no analog input aka ADC]
- 65 Digital Pins at 3.3V [Pi has only 26 pins total on its P1 header]
- 2x I2C
- 2x SPI
- 2x CAN Bus [Pi has None; great for automotive projects, diagnostics, etc]
- 4 Timers
- 4x UART aka plain old serial [Pi has 1]
- 8x PWM [Pi has 1 PWM and it is used for analog audio]
- A/D Converter [Pi has none]
It has easy programming environments for hardware interfacing such as:
- Python (via Adafruit's tutorial and library)
- Javascript (via Jason's Bonescript library):
- Arduino (via user-space Arduino funded by Google Summer of Code project)
- ROS (Robot Operating System)
I'd appreciate the feedback from element14 Community members: Am I making a sound argument? Are there additional points I should make? Are there advantages of the Pi and Arduino that I am glossing over?
Thanks,
Drew
