Pi vs BeagleBone-Black

Hello everybody, newbie here. Well newbie to the Pi/Beagle/Arduino/RT Linux world, not to embedded software engineering generally - cut my teeth on embedded 8086/ASM-86/PLM-86/iRMX systems 25 years ago, have written many a line of heavily multithreaded C/C++ on embedded and server systems, and have enjoyed knocking out the odd dual-6502 system for educational purposes. Ah those were the days, before we all got sucked into PC programming.

But I'm rusty and looking to have some fun with ARM.

So...my 2 cents on this discussion:

Some say you should pick the best hardware/OS for the individual job at hand, and favour using a dedicated CPU for hardware interfaces. 

However I prefer to pick one (reasonably priced) board for all the projects I have in mind. I don't want to have to learn and support multiple board personalities, idiosyncrasies and programming/operating environments. I can accept that that will sometimes mean shoe-horning a square board peg into a round application hole. Nobody has argued that angle.

In my search for such a board I've discounted RPi (weak ISA, too many idiosyncrasies) and, sadly, also BBB due to its pathetic video (apparently it isn't considered 'cool' here to have media/video applications in mind, but I do).

A real contender (albeit at double the cost) seems to be this. I wondered if the dedicated back end microcontroller advocates have seen that and have opinions.

I could settle for BBB if there were ever likely to be:

1) a "proper HDMI" shield, ie. providing 1080p with h/w acceleration for H264 etc.  

2) a coprocessor shield, such that either the BBB or shield could be the front end hard RT coprocessor with the other one being the application processor.

As long as said shields cost less than the base BBB board. Given that an RPi Model A (=$25 as is) could do the functionality, that seems like a reasonable ask. An RPi-A shield, anyone?

Horses for courses, really.  I'd tend to use Pi for media applications, BBB for hardware interfacing and basic networking, and neither of them if the application would perform better with gigabit networking or high speed disk access using SATA.

Trying to force a board to perform well in an application for which it isn't naturally suited is not the best approach, and being wedded to just one board or one manufacturer means that one can't take advantage of the wide range of choices available.  This is one reason why I quite regularly try to combat fanboism --- it prevents fair assessment of alternatives from being made.

Alternatives are good.

Horses for courses, really.  I'd tend to use Pi for media applications, BBB for hardware interfacing and basic networking, and neither of them if the application would perform better with gigabit networking or high speed disk access using SATA.

Trying to force a board to perform well in an application for which it isn't naturally suited is not the best approach, and being wedded to just one board or one manufacturer means that one can't take advantage of the wide range of choices available.  This is one reason why I quite regularly try to combat fanboism --- it prevents fair assessment of alternatives from being made.

Alternatives are good.

Morgaine Dinova wrote:

 

neither of them if the application would perform better with gigabit networking or high speed disk access using SATA.

out of curiosity, have you managed to get hold of any other boards that have SATA ?  the theoretical sequential read performance of a sata drive hooked up to my SL seems quite poor at less than 25% of what I know the drive to be capable of on different hardware

Wish list for a RasPi server:

by Lob0426 » Mon Jul 01, 2013 5:26 pm

What I would like to see is a RasPi Server.
No fancy GPU really needed.
possibly v7 instructions ARM
512MB
USB based Ethernet ok but would like to see a native Ethernet.
1 USB port to connect HDD's or cameras.
Enhanced GPIO pin outs.

http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=63&t=31844&start=139

ARMv7 instruction set, native ethernet and SATA are the ones.. for a RasPi <anything> I'll skip usb of any description thanks

Interesting that he asks for better GPIO and then a few posts later complains that the cubieboard "has connectors all over it also, making it heavy", doesn't sound like he wants a server at all...

selsinork wrote:

 

out of curiosity, have you managed to get hold of any other boards that have SATA ?  the theoretical sequential read performance of a sata drive hooked up to my SL seems quite poor at less than 25% of what I know the drive to be capable of on different hardware

Unfortunately, no.  The Sabre-Lite exceeded my budget, and the Wandboard turned out to be delivered from Texas despite being "in stock" at Mouser UK so they lost a potential customer near the end of the ordering process.  The next expected candidate with SATA will probably be Olimex's A20-OLinuXino-MICRO and/or A20-OLinuXino-MICRO-4GB.  Hopefully one or both of those will appear in Farnell UK since they already have the A10S-OLinuXino in their product listings awaiting delivery.

If SATA performance turns out to be poor, we'll have to jump up and down and rock the boat and publish performance figures until someone in design takes note.  Apparently that's how the system works.

Hi Morgaine -

Horses for courses, indeed. Spot on. However, the more I read of the beagle-pi-duino discussion, the

more I wonder about OTHER engineers, educators, and students reading the SAME story, thinking along

the lines of "Hmm... well... perhaps NOT" especially with respect to designing/training/using the more

um... insular (yeah, that's it) of the participants. I value openness. When I read a quote such as "You

can't buy the chips" I see a flashing, red warning: "Stay Away! Nothing but problems here!"  Best - L

"You can't buy the chips"

There is a fascinating thread on that topic here:

http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=63&t=1593

It must be a really sore subject, given the extreme defensiveness exhibited

by the mods demonstrating their claimed tribal nature.  The normally affable

Abishur in particular resorts to citing unpersuasive logical fallacies, even

going so far as to provide the wikipedia reference for "false analogy".

Probably the reason it's a sore subject is that RPF relies to a great extent

on the open software community, and seems to want to project an image

of openness to maintain the favor of that community, but is limited in

how open they can be.  They haven't helped their cause by such things as

Pete Lomas's opinion piece in Wired titled "Sell out a little to sell a lot",

where the promise of open gerbers was what was being happily sold out.

Similarly, their exaggerated claims of opensourcing their drivers just

worsened their relationship with the open source community.

That's an old thread about gerbers though.

Eben's recent  interview with TuxRadar (which we've already discussed) really raised the comedy bar to beyond awesome by linking the witholding of gerbers to a desire to protect Broadcom from "opprobrium".  That's going to take considerable skill to beat as an excuse.  My jaw dropped so far I'm still searching for it.

We certainly can't complain about lack of merriment here!

Ever since hearing that word, I've been looking for an opportunity to use it

in a sentence.  Maybe Eben was just doing the same.

I don't discount the merriment though reading that his only concern is protecting

Broadcom from opprobrium and his only other concern is preventing cloning.

A while back maybe a couple of mos ago, I saw some chatter regarding release of the Gerbers and I posted about an interview I read where they (RPi arch's) plainly stated that they weren't releasing those things becasue they didn't want copy cats and saw their device more as a sw/integration platform.

A number of people pummeled me on that (though I could care less - I was just the messenger - I looked at Pi and made the immeditae decision to go with Beaglebone because I want open HW w/o excuses).

Well it looks like maybe they said the same thing again or implied it from what I see posted. Anyhow, if they were not restricting the HW, then what reason (sane and logical one's need only apply) would they have for with holding anything???

BEST OF LUCK.

Yes, here's the reference:

http://www.element14.com/community/thread/23575?start=155&tstart=0

Your recollection was exactly correct, and those who pummeled you should

not have been so quick to believe the contrary "About us" statement.