
Arduino Uno vs BeagleBone vs Raspberry Pi - tdrnd
http://blog.makezine.com/2013/04/15/arduino-uno-vs-beaglebone-vs-raspberry-pi/
======
ChuckMcM
Personally I think this great stuff. And yes the Beagle Bone black narrows the
field significantly.

Tools wise there is hole here that when it gets filled will be pretty
impactful, I'm talking about the Arduino concept implemented with the ARM
Cortex M4. This is because the costs of the chips are low, but the tool chain
support which has been part of the foundation of Arduino's success aren't
there yet. Now bits and pieces do exist, if you get Atmel Studio (Makers of
the ATMega and SAMx ARM chips) you will see they have a gcc toolchain for ARM
that is as self contained as the toolchain for AVR (and by self contained I
mean that it is a 'bare bones' tool chain and the resulting binary includes
the bits normally supplied by an OS like startup, initialization, and memory
management)

The part that is really cool though is that you can build computers out of
these things again and they are moving into the space being left behind by
Windows/Intel and Apple becoming more application delivery appliances. One
risk I see though is that a lot of poor security architected embedded systems
are finding their way into the routable Internet. That can be funny when port
scanning software turns your lights on or off, but its a risk none the less.

~~~
zokier
There is already an official Arduino ARM Cortex M3 board, the Due:
<http://arduino.cc/en/Main/ArduinoBoardDue>

Teensy 3.0 afaik has some degree of support for Arduino IDE too. LeafLabs
Maple has Arduino-style IDE too. And finally there is Energia IDE for
Stellaris Launchpads.

So I'd say that the "Arduino for ARM" field is already quite contested, and
I've probably missed some projects.

~~~
ippisl
I think only the teensy and due strive to be fully arduino compatible(to be
able to run sketches exactly the same as arduino, versus offering similar
looking API).

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mullr
This must have been written before the announcement of the BeagleBone Black:
$45, similar performance profile, HDMI out. Seems very much analogous to the
Raspberry Pi.

<http://beagleboard.org/Products/BeagleBone%20Black>

~~~
georgemcbay
Yup, it was written on the 15th when the Black was still a badly kept secret
but not openly announced.

I ordered two BeagleBone Blacks from Adafruit yesterday, anxiously awaiting
their arrival. I love the emerging competition in this space and I'm happy to
see TI (who I've had mostly positive interactions with when needing unofficial
hobbyist support, and whose Stellaris and MSP430 ecosystems I love) still
catering to this market, and on paper the BeagleBone Black looks really,
really good (it would look good for a lot of things even if they kept the old
price with the new specs, the new price of basically half the old one is icing
on top).

~~~
derekp7
I only have one grip with the BB black -- the HDMI out resolution. Maximum of
1280x1024. Which itself isn't so bad, but that (and several other resolutions
on it) are geared towards 4/3 monitors instead of 16/10 or 16/9. Which itself
I don't mind so much, but there aren't many 4/3 monitors on the market any
more.

BTW, anyone have information on the performance of the graphic drivers for
this board? Would it be any good for full screen video?

~~~
notatoad
there are _tons_ of 4:3 monitors kicking around. Put a want ad on craigslist
and you're going to be flooded with them.

~~~
derekp7
Actually what I was referring to is a lack of 4:3 monitors in general use.
What I'd like to use these small/cheap computer boards for, is if I'm helping
someone "fix" their computer, this could be a good stop-gap measure to hook up
so they can continue to get Web/email/social networks/etc things done while
I'm rebuilding their desktop. Most people I run across either have a VGA CRT
monitor, or a 16:9 flatscreen.

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wzdd
There are so many things wrong with the comparison table it's difficult to
trust the article. The Uno can run on 5v, not 7-12v; the Pi has shipped with
512MB of RAM for quite some time now, not 256MB; the Pi has 17 GPIOs, not 8.
For example. I understand this is for beginners, but honestly…

~~~
markdown
The article is from 2012.

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xabi
Don't forget $49 <http://cubieboard.org/>

~~~
subsystem
...and MarsBoard (similar to Cubieboard, but also has a dual core version)
<http://www.marsboard.com/>

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ippisl
the new beaglebone(esp. the new one) has two more advantages over the
raspberry pi which haven't been mentioned:

1.It can run single precision floating point at 16-24 times faster than the
raspberry pi.

2.It has two fast(200MHZ) microcontrollers inside called PRU. Those are great
when you want to have stuff running fast , with precise timing. They only work
in assembler though.

I think a compiler for them would be useful for the maker crowd.

~~~
cmicali
#2 was the reason we used the beaglebone on a project that requires high-rate
sampling - the PRU made it possible to what we needed with almost no
additional hardware (normally you'd need an extra microcontroller or FPGA)

If/when it gets easier to develop for I think it helps make beaglebone/am335x
a really attractive option for a lot of uses.

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jhuckestein
I'm so glad that affordable, low-power, hackable computers that run full
operating systems are finally available. I don't think it's appreciated enough
in the maker community what kind of impact this will have.

I'm a software engineer dabbling in electrical engineering. A while ago an EE
friend of mine showed me how to use a transistor to power a motor using a GPIO
pin on my Raspberry Pi. I was so stoked when it finally worked! I could turn
wheels by typing "echo "1" > /sys/class/gpio/gpio4/value" into my ssh session.

Within 10 minutes I was able to churn out a web interface that has two
buttons, forward and backward, that you can access from a mobile device to
drive around your raspberry pi. I had already hooked up a battery pack and
webcam before. Suddenly, within minutes of "making the wheels turn from
software", we had a remote controlled robot with a camera! All this is
possible on an Arduino (I hear you can actually run Linux on it if you put
some effort in), but it'll be much more work. For the Raspberry Pi, I simply
popped in an SD card with Debian and installed all my favorite tools.

By all means, I love writing low level C code and fiddling with basic
microprocessors. I once hacked a DVR frontpanel into an alarm clock that makes
you do arithmetic to stop the alarm. It was super fun. The chip didn't have
any memory management and if you weren't careful your stack or heap would
overwrite the program in memory. Between that, displaying custom bitmap fonts,
correctly addressing the LCD display etc it took about a week to finish the
project. On a Raspberry Pi you could do this in one afternoon using any
language/tools you like.

~~~
qxcv
> I hear you can actually run Linux on it if you put some effort in

Some time ago there was someone who decided to hook a RAM chip up to an 8-bit
micro-controller---like one of the ones in the various Arduino models---so
that they could run Ubuntu on it. Their write-up
([http://dmitry.gr/index.php?r=05.Projects&proj=07.%20Linu...](http://dmitry.gr/index.php?r=05.Projects&proj=07.%20Linux%20on%208bit))
is actually quite interesting, though watching it boot is less so ;)

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outside1234
Does anyone have experience using the BeagleBone black vs. the Raspberry PI?
I'm wondering if the library support for hardware hacking on it is as robust
as the PIs?

I'm doing a lot of experimentation on a project to bring a node.js based
development model to devices and the BeagleBone's power consumption is really
attractive for battery devices.

(If you are interested, you can read more on my experimental project here:
<http://bit.ly/115pt9U>)

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sown
Here's the twist for me: Can I design my own?

I've been reading some books on embedded design or making your own PCBs and
they had tutorials in eagle.

I took digital electronics courses and...is doing a schematic really as easy
now for SoC design as it was for putting TTL chips on a breadboard? There's
the routing that needs to be done, and I am SO SERIOUS about doing this, I
will buy the full version of Eagle (Orcad is $10,000 or so).

I still feel like I don't know what to do, though.

~~~
adestefan
Sure. Modern SoCs are so integrated that its really just wiring up IO and
maybe some flash RAM. A good place to start are the Atmel AT91SAM line of
chips.

~~~
mkhattab
It's a lot more difficult than that. Perhaps designing a board around a low-
speed microcontroller is easier for beginners but definitely _not_ a modern
SoC. One of the reasons is because most of these SoCs come in highly dense BGA
(ball-grid array) packages and usually this means you'll need more layers to
route traces on your board, which introduces more complexity. Another reason,
perhaps the most important, is that there are a lot more pitfalls in designing
high speed PCBs. Unfortunately, I do not know much more about this.

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rustc
Seems like a good place to ask:

I have good programming skills, but I know almost nothing about micro
controllers. What would be a good place to learn more about these things, and
what you can build with them? Would prefer something which teaches more about
the electronics/hardware part than the programming one.

~~~
georgemcbay
The Raspberry Pi and BeagleBone are full-blown computers. They run Linux and
everything you know about Linux/Unix (if anything?) carries over, but then on
top of that they have a bunch of GPIO pins to which to can attach lots of
different electronic components like LED displays, accelerometers, motors,
etc, to build basically anything (robots, little dashboard computers,
whatever).

The Arduino is a different beast, you can't run Linux on it, it is a low-
powered (by both meanings of the phrase) microcontroller meant to write real-
time code which does most of the same things you'd use GPIO for on those other
devices, it just happens to be better at controlling some things (like PWM-
controlled devices) because you get more predictable timing because it isn't a
full computer running a full multitasking OS).

Each of these devices have their own little communities, google "(product)
forum" like "raspberry pi forum" to find good starting points for each device.
The Adafruit learning system at <http://learn.adafruit.com/> is a good place
to get tutorials for lots of these kinds of devices (Arduino is heavily
represented because it is the oldest, cheapest, and probably still most widely
used of these platforms for creating custom hobby projects, but they have
tutorials for just about everything).

------
zaius
Has anyone tried using a beaglebone as a router? I was considering getting one
and using a USB Ethernet to add a second interface.

An aside - are there any arm boards with dual Ethernet? Are there any with
gigabit Ethernet? Could they theoretically even keep up with 2 gigabit ports?

~~~
lhl
I have a bunch of these Linux ARM boards including the original beaglebone,
rpi, pcduino, ODROID-X2 and a few others. Most of these have less than stellar
IO and almost all are 10/100 only. The i.MX6-based Sabre Lite has gigE,
although perf maxes out much lower. Here's lots of details:
<http://boundarydevices.com/i-mx6-ethernet/> \- it can't get close to maxing
out a single, much less two ports.

If you are looking for something exclusively to do routing, you really should
take a look at dedicated hardware from guys like Mikrotik
<http://routerboard.com/> or Ubiquiti
[http://dl.ubnt.com/Tolly212128UbiquitiEdgeRouterLitePricePer...](http://dl.ubnt.com/Tolly212128UbiquitiEdgeRouterLitePricePerformanceVsMikroTik.pdf)
\- they're actually cheaper than the Sabre Lite and perform much, much better.
They're also pretty open/hackable to boot.

~~~
zaius
Thanks for these links. I ended up grabbing a routerboard 450G because they
look like a really nice piece of kit. Probably overkill for playing around
with routing, but I couldn't help myself.

~~~
lhl
Cool, the Mikrotiks are perfect for getting into routing as the RouterOS docs
are very in-depth w/ lots of examples (yay, wikis):
<http://wiki.mikrotik.com/wiki/Manual:TOC>

You can install OpenWRT to compare although it looks like installation is a
slight pain: <http://wiki.openwrt.org/toh/mikrotik/rb450g> \- it's probably
easier to install as a metarouter if you're just playing w/ it:
<http://wiki.mikrotik.com/wiki/Manual:Metarouter>

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futhey
I feel like I've fallen behind. I loved my beagleboard, opted out of the
pandaboard, and was never interested in the raspberry pi.

Beaglebone's a little cheaper, but I'm not sure what it's allure is supposed
to be (The $88 version)?

The new beaglebone looks like an inexpensive and tempting nettop replacement.

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wycx
Also: Udoo

[http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/435742530/udoo-
android-l...](http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/435742530/udoo-android-
linux-arduino-in-a-tiny-single-board)

Freescale i.MX6 Cortex A9 and Atmel SAM3X8E ARM Cortex M3 on the same board!

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habosa
Minor point but the Raspberry Pi model B has come with 512MB RAM for a while
now. The original model B was 256 but they upgraded some time before I got
mine (which was in January).

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gokult
These look great. What are folks doing with them? Is there a separate sensor
plugin market where I can shop for ideas?

~~~
skaevola
A couple of popular hobby type websites are Sparkfun
(<https://www.sparkfun.com/>) and Adafruit (<http://adafruit.com/>). You can
obviously also buy sensors from places like Mouser or Digikey, but you'll have
to do a fair bit of digging through datasheets. The nice thing about Sparkfun
and Adafruit is they publish plenty of tutorials for getting stuff running
with Arduino or Raspberry Pi.

