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Another manufacturer for BBB

bwelsby

Just seen Embest (a Farnell company ) is producing their own clone of the  BeagleBone Black

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  • Looks like a price increase is happening:

     

    http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.hardware.beagleboard.user/64166

     

    Since it seems to be aimed at getting more manufacturers involved in order to increase supply, I'm surprised that e14 isn't using the embest one for this.

     

    Still, a price increase is dubious at best. The BBB is already more expensive than the more capable OLinuXino-LIME and it won't take much to push it into head to head competition with e14's RIoT board.

  • in reply to Former Member

    Looks like we might be getting the Embest one outside China after all, noticed this the other day

     

    image

     

    Mfg is e14, country of origin China and unfortunately includes the previously mentioned price increase image

     

    The RIoT board is £46.55 here in the UK, it has twice the RAM, twice the eMMC, gigabit network, four usb, audio connectors, better CPU, better GPU... the list goes on of ways it offers more than the BBB.  So while I'm sure there will be a certain amount of RPi effect where people will choose the BBB simply because it's a BBB, personally I don't think it'll be quite so simple a choice. 

    The BBB is really good at the original price, but it's competing against a different set of boards at this price.

  • in reply to fustini

    image

    image

     

    Help... can't read this image

    image

    Interesting that a BBB is now 'Exclusively from element14'

    image

    image

    image

    Yes,its really an AM3358..

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    Spot the differences...

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    One interesting thing to note, and that's already been noticed in the beagleboard google group is that the e14 boards don't have the A5B, A5C, A6 etc marking, so we don't really know what version they are and what fixes are incorporated.

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  • in reply to Former Member

    After some digging, it appears that my e14 board is a RevB, it has the R8/R9 fix from A6A and a AM3358 which appears to make it a RevB.

  • in reply to Former Member

    And TP9 seems to go to a previously unused pin on the AM335x. You've got an additional I/O pin, not that there was a shortage : )

     

    image

  • in reply to shabaz

    never even noticed that!  pity it's not uart3_rx though...

  • in reply to Former Member

    Great comparison!  I just got mine too.  I agree it would be nice if the sticker said that revision though my box did have Rev B printed on it.

  • in reply to fustini

    lol.. actually so does mine..  I wonder why they print that in just one place and on the edge that you're least likely to look at.

     

    Hope they have the RevC stickers ready image

     

    Looks like the 1K or thereabouts they had in the UK has sold out in about 1-2days and they're eating into the 5th May delivery already. Hope the e14 factory is ready for what's to come image

  • in reply to fustini

    I just did a check from the terminal.  Details in a github gist:

    https://gist.github.com/pdp7/10182933

    kernel:

    Linux beaglebone 3.8.13 #1 SMP Wed Sep 4 09:09:32 CEST 2013 armv7l GNU/Linux

     

    u-boot.img:

    u-boot legacy uImage, U-Boot 2013.04-dirty for am335x \024, Firmware/ARM, Firmware Image (Not compressed), 379364 bytes, Wed Jul 10 07:03:22 2013, Load Address: 0x80800000, Entry Point: 0x00000000, Header CRC: 0xB08E82B0, Data CRC: 0x9923231

    image

  • in reply to fustini

    Laptop with linux on it, impressive.  Still working 486 laptop, even more impressive image

Reply Children
  • in reply to Former Member

    Hehe, I'm a Strongbad fan image

     

    Yup, I've been using Linux for my desktop/laptop OS since around 2004 (oh my, that is 10 years ago now... feeling old).  Sadly, I think I'm the only person in my office that runs it anymore (darn Macbooks had several jump ship) but we've got a good community LUG here in Chicago image

  • in reply to fustini

    I was thinking that the last time I had linux on a 486 laptop (early IBM Thinkpad) was around 1992/3, so I'm blaming you for making me feel old image

    4511_ibm_thinkpad_360c_bare_bones.jpg

  • in reply to Former Member

    I still use thinkpads, and they still look near identical :-)

    I sadly ordered the CircuitCo BBB a month back before the Embest one was announced, and so now I have neither, hehe.

    I was going to ask Farnell if the order can be swapped to an Embest one, but they disappeared pretty quick and are now out of stock too!

  • in reply to Former Member

    NICE! It probably still works image

    The laptop I had back in '04 was a Thinkpad Pentium II.  They had great quality.

  • in reply to shabaz

    Ya, I'm a Thinkpad fan - I'm glad my employers have been too!

     

    Your best bet for the BBB may be to place a backorder on the CircuitCo and Embest SKU so you'll have a place in line either way.  I'm hoping the Embest/Element14 SKU stock will rebound soon.  The rapid sales of the initial batch should send a strong signal to the business folks I hope.

  • in reply to fustini

    At least on the uk site they've set to CircuitCo sku to 'no longer stocked' and there was a message in the mailing list yesterday saying they'd sent out a mail telling people to cancel any order for the CircuitCo one and re-order the e14 version instead.  A couple of hours later they were all gone.

  • in reply to Former Member

    I like how the screen border is almost the same size as the screen.

    Either there's a lot of c$%^ hiding or they couldn't make the keyboard any smaller....

     

    I have a couple of older laptops, and perhaps I should install Linux.

    There must be hundreds coming up as Windows XP support is no longer .....

     

    Also the only Itoy in our house is the iRON .. its the newer cordless model, that like our Wireless Challenge ..... needs to be put back to recharge.

     

    Mark

  • in reply to mcb1

    I don't remember there being a lot inside the screen, but these were early LCD's with response time measured in days rather than miliseconds.  Think the resolution was 640x480 or something like that.

     

    The width was essentially down to the front of the base having a 3.5" floppy drive, battery, then 2.5" hard drive side-by-side, so difficult to make it much narrower.  No USB, optical drive, network or wifi back then, so floppy was your only way to get anything on or off.

    The circuit board was along the back, but even while relatively narrow you still had the depth of that floppy drive. So physically it was about as small as it could get, the screen however was even smaller.

     

    I used to work in the place that built these for IBM for a while.

  • in reply to Former Member

    Those were the days.

    Everything was so  much more relaxing while waiting for your technology to start or do anything.

     

    I do think we live in the best time as we have seen most of the technology mature into what it is now.

    We also managed to see some of it mutate into something it wasn't designed for. ie spam.

     

    My son has a Commodore 64 portable (SX64) ... now that was a small screen and a 51/4 floppy drive.

     

    Mark