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Arduino: now a Single Board Computer!

fustini

So I often get annoyed when folks refer to the AVR-based Arduino boards (or even the ARM microcontroller DUE) as a Single Board Computer.  The Yun blurred the lines a bit... but the news today from Maker Faire Rome has the Arduino brand fully in the SBC world now:

 

Arduino Announces new Boards and Collaboration with Intel and T.I.

http://makezine.com/2013/10/03/arduino-announces-two-new-linux-boards/

image

 

coder27 posted about the Intel-based Arduino board, and there is also an upcoming Arduino model based on the TI Sitara (same as in the BeagleBone Black - an ARM Cortex A8).

 

I just read an interview on Make with about the new Arduino TRE:

 

Talking to Jason Kridner About the new Arduino Tre

http://makezine.com/2013/10/03/talking-to-jason-kridner-about-the-new-arduino-tre/

"The focus is on simplicity. It isn’t just a BeagleBone split in the middle [...] If you know Linux, you’ll be able to come in that way. If you know Arduino, you’ll be able to use the AVR as the system master."

image

 

I'm not sure exactly what this all means, but it is exciting to have more SBC options and the Arduino brand will be an interesting influence on the SBC market.  I do know that I didn't need any coffee to feel wide awake this morning image

 

What is the feeling of our SBC discussion group here?

 

cheers,

drew

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  • I think with Intel and T.I. as players in the Arduino market place this will move from the hobby level into the professional level and we will see more of these in the work place than we have before.  To Beaglebone was a great board and I liked it a lot, but the black was a tad disappointing. I own the pcDuino, UDOO, several Arduinos, and Due and look forward to receiving the Galileo too. I posted several benchmarks and gpio tests on http://www.marchdvd.com so this is exciting news for me. 

  • in reply to Former Member

    ed march wrote:

     

    Beaglebone was a great board and I liked it a lot, but the black was a tad disappointing.

     

    Could you elaborate why BBB disappointed you?  It seems to me that it's virtually all progress compared to its predecessor (I have both boards here), since the only losses are JTAG + serial port on the mini-USB and no PMIC header.  Those are rarely used facilities, and in exchange for their loss the gains are truly huge and important to almost all BBB users.

     

    I've never heard anyone suggest that BBB was a disappointment before, so I'd like to hear your PoV.

     

    Morgaine.

  • in reply to morgaine

    Morgaine Dinova wrote:

     

    ed march wrote:

     

    Beaglebone was a great board and I liked it a lot, but the black was a tad disappointing.

     

    Could you elaborate why BBB disappointed you?  It seems to me that it's virtually all progress compared to its predecessor (I have both boards here), since the only losses are JTAG + serial port on the mini-USB and no PMIC header.  Those are rarely used facilities, and in exchange for their loss the gains are truly huge and important to almost all BBB users.

    I thought having USB serial and JTAG was a great BB White feature since it provided a nice interface for bare-metal programming.  However, the reality is that very few people do bare-metal programming on a chip as complex as the Am3359, so the capability added a lot of expense for something few people would use.  I think adding HDMI output and dropping the price to US$45 was the opposite of disappointing.

  • in reply to johnbeetem

    Indeed, and every other comparison I've read has said the same.  Yet apparently one person thinks otherwise, so I'd like to understand his rationale in case we missed something important. image

     

    Morgaine.

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  • in reply to morgaine

    Last year a friend and I bought bought a BBBK and his kept loosing the network, my worked fine, I ran lighttpd  as a web server. He brought his board to TI since he lived near then in Texas, they didn't low what to do and gave him a new board, he show him my board and said make them work the same, and TI couldn't - he kept my board for the project and I switched to pcDuino. The other main problem was the device tree was not working in any of the linux distribution SD card images. We had a hard time getting the GPIO and several harts working, we ended up using the debug uart.  I have a UDOO board and all the IO in /sys/class for the device tree works 100%, also the PcDuino works 100%, TI dropped the ball on the software, they let the open source community  do the sw, while they just did hardware, rather poor. Other companies write the necessary drivers for the arm processors and provided a 100% working package. The white BB did not suffer from this mess. I also worked with Bruce Lightner on his pico web many years ago and respected him, he gave its a low star review on amazon due to networking issues.