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Just created my first production BeagleBone design

Fred27

It's still difficult getting hold of a Raspberry Pi - especially if you need a Pi 3 for an existing design. So, on my recommendation the company I work for have switched a design to use BeagleBone Black instead. It seems to be going OK so far. This sort of hardware is not our core business and it's not a particularly demanding application, but it'll be interesting to see how it goes.

As our development team are very familiar with Microsoft's .NET, it'll be running a .NET Core - which works surprisingly well if you want cross-platform (i.e. Windows and Linux) stuff.

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  • in reply to cstanton

    I think I can give some basic info. It's being used as a video source switcher. Some big waterproof buttons to send messages over the network to a bit of professional video switching kit. In addition to some physical buttons, it also announces itself using UDP broadcast to a remote management application that can monitor and control a load of them over the network.

    It's being used for a outdoor professional sports event. Probably shouldn't say more than that.

  • in reply to Fred27

    As the BeagleBone Black is open-source hardware, are there any aspects of its licensing/use that you're encountering as a production design/implementation as to whether it hinders/supports using it? Or expectations to make available how it operates?

    Open-source hardware/software's somewhat of a contentious topic lately.

  • in reply to cstanton

    The only negative aspect of the open source aspect of the BeagleBone is the lack of documentation. The hardware is great, but support is severely lacking. The BB Black has been around a while and seems to suffer less from this than the later devices.

    The standard open source mantra seems to be that it's open, so you have everything you need available to you. This might be great in theory, but doesn't work so well in practice. Yes, I could go through the datasheet for TI's Sitara processor. I could trawl through the Linux source code, learn about device trees, etc. and build it myself from scratch. If I had endless time then maybe I would. However, I need to write my code. I'd like to be able to leverage the OS, and development tools that have been provided. This can be where the BeagleBone falls flat, but other companies have done much better. It's definitely significantly easier to work with the Raspberry Pi than the BeagleBone. Microsoft's .NET Core is open source but has been really well documented and supported.

    My theory is not that open source itself is the problem, but as you aren't owed anything by the creator, they have the option to leave things however they want. It does seem that once the "fun" bit of producing some great hardware is done, the boring bit of documenting and supporting it can give way to getting started on the next bit of shiny hardware.  I doubt that the BeaglePlay's documentation will get much attention now that the BeagleV-Ahead is out.

  • in reply to cstanton

    That's a very interesting link! 

  • in reply to Fred27

    I agree with what you're saying, I believe that's what most people find when they use this hardware.

    I was mainly wondering if using the BeagleBone Black meant that it was under any form of licensing similar to GPLv2/v3, where by you had to make your integration or use of it also open source and available to anyone that requests it and couldn't have it closed source. Arguably there're aspects of Linux which are like this, but Linux licensing is probably not applicable since you're using Microsoft's .NET framework.

  • in reply to cstanton

    I would guess that if I made any changes to the hardware or Debian source then I might be impacted by licencing. However, just running my own application on an unmodified BeagleBone should be out of the licencing scope.