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BeagleBone boards discussion

koudelad

Hello,

do you use BeagleBone boards personally or professionally?

I have a few boards in my electronics box, but haven't used them for a few years (or ever).

Looking at the beagleboard.org website, it somehow got more confusing than it used to be. It is hard to find software images and later I realized why - the OS is not compatible with all boards they way Raspberry Pi OS is.

BeagleBone Blue (ready to be used with various motors), Green, White, XM disappeared. BeagleBone Black has more than a year old OS images (Debian Buster), only newer boards have Debian Bookworm.

It is great that the boards are open-source, but with uncertain SW support, I wouldn't used them professionally. I do use Raspberry Pi professionally, because the compatibility and OS support is excellent.

What do you think?

David

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  • I've seen the heart of the BBB design built into a custom PCB for a particular product. In other words not using the BBB board but having it fully custom. But that was a very long time ago. It didn't help that the product was aborted (not a fault of the BBB). I still have one of the first production units if I find it I could take some internals photos. I've lost the login details to be actually able to use it in any way.

    I've also seen the RPI built into a new form too (I.e. not using the compute module) again as part of a custom PCB, probably with assistance from Avnet but I don't know. 

    Also was involved intimately with a startup that used the BBB as-is as part of ther MVP. But that was only because Intel messed them around and end-of-life'd Intel Edison, so they quickly switched to BBB.

  • in reply to shabaz

    I guess you have to be a skilled designer if you want to design a custom board and not even using the compute module.

    By the way, I have heard or read claims, that BBB should be able to boot linux in 5 seconds, but in my experience it was always almost 2 minutes, thanks to systemd and other services. Might be achievable for a kernel hacker and good linux developer.

    I was more curious if people are using the boards as they are, without significant customizations. Raspberry Pi is definitely used by amateurs a lot, but BB is seen a lot less.

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  • in reply to shabaz

    I guess you have to be a skilled designer if you want to design a custom board and not even using the compute module.

    By the way, I have heard or read claims, that BBB should be able to boot linux in 5 seconds, but in my experience it was always almost 2 minutes, thanks to systemd and other services. Might be achievable for a kernel hacker and good linux developer.

    I was more curious if people are using the boards as they are, without significant customizations. Raspberry Pi is definitely used by amateurs a lot, but BB is seen a lot less.

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  • in reply to koudelad

    IIRC the fast boot time was in the early days when they used Ångtrom linux as the OS.  That got replaced by Debian years ago.  I’ve only used Debian with my BBB and they don’t boot fast.  

    If you’re running Xwindows on a BBB, yes, that takes minutes to boot up.  But Xwindows is so slow on the 1 core processor, it never was useable.