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Pi vs BeagleBone-Black

Former Member

So, just over a year on from the initial availability of the R-Pi and the new BeagleBone Black is upon us.  They've obviously taken a leaf out of the RPF's playbook and produced a cost reduced version at a price only marginally above the Pi.

 

I find it interesting that the compromises are very different, for example there's a proper PMIC and the ethernet is not troubled by being connected to USB, however the on-board HDMI seems less capable.

 

Other differences are in the documentation, I'm currently viewing the pcb gerbers for the beaglebone..  Have yet to see any sign of those for the R-Pi a year later. There's even an up to date devicetree capable kernel too.

 

Technology has also moved on somewhat, we get a 1GHz Cortex A8 which is better than the Pi, along with various other stuff and lots more GPIO's too.

 

Ok, so it's clear that I like the look of the new beaglebone, and given the price I'm likely to put any further R-Pi plans on hold until I have a chance to play with this. It's also making things like the Olinuxino-maxi I bought recently look very slow/expensive while still being cheaper than the similarly specced Olinuxino-A13

 

Some details of the beaglebone-black here http://circuitco.com/support/index.php?title=BeagleBoneBlack

 

What do the rest of you think ?   I don't expect this to displace the Pi anytime soon, but I expect it to be very attractive to those people who don't simply want to put XBMC on it and duct tape it to the back of the TV..

Parents

  • selsinork wrote:

     

    mynameisJim wrote:

     

    It's constantly facinating to me that if the Foundation had chosen to add an eprom and put this information in there where it could never be touched

    That's the thing though isn't it. It would need to be a mask programmed rom and inside the SoC.  People have become far to conditioned into the way of thinking that says you can 'flash' the firmware or that rooting your phone or overclocking your device is the done thing for any sort of external chip to survive for long without thorough examination.  If nothing else, the Pi has proven that there's a lot of people out there who are interested in doing things with it that the RPF never considered.

    Besides, if they had made the GPU code unchangeable, it seems unlikely that the camera board would have been possible.

    Sure the camera board would have been possible, but like you said, it would require a flash of the firmware.  It's kind of an interesting discussion that might be worth splitting into a separate thread, but should we reconsider what does and does not constitute as being open source.  I'm not trying to say that everything on the pi is open, we all know that isn't the case and there's no point in opening that can of beans again, but the boot process does get a lot of criticism for having the level of visibility it does instead of being completely obscured.  As individuals in favour of open source products, I feel like we're almost fighting for things to go the wrong way.  When it comes to ranking something on how open source it is, I think that we should deduct points for hardware obscured code and consider how much usability and configuration we're giving (such as with config.txt) and award such devices for being more open.

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  • selsinork wrote:

     

    mynameisJim wrote:

     

    It's constantly facinating to me that if the Foundation had chosen to add an eprom and put this information in there where it could never be touched

    That's the thing though isn't it. It would need to be a mask programmed rom and inside the SoC.  People have become far to conditioned into the way of thinking that says you can 'flash' the firmware or that rooting your phone or overclocking your device is the done thing for any sort of external chip to survive for long without thorough examination.  If nothing else, the Pi has proven that there's a lot of people out there who are interested in doing things with it that the RPF never considered.

    Besides, if they had made the GPU code unchangeable, it seems unlikely that the camera board would have been possible.

    Sure the camera board would have been possible, but like you said, it would require a flash of the firmware.  It's kind of an interesting discussion that might be worth splitting into a separate thread, but should we reconsider what does and does not constitute as being open source.  I'm not trying to say that everything on the pi is open, we all know that isn't the case and there's no point in opening that can of beans again, but the boot process does get a lot of criticism for having the level of visibility it does instead of being completely obscured.  As individuals in favour of open source products, I feel like we're almost fighting for things to go the wrong way.  When it comes to ranking something on how open source it is, I think that we should deduct points for hardware obscured code and consider how much usability and configuration we're giving (such as with config.txt) and award such devices for being more open.

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