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Comment by flyingcircus3 | Hacker News Reader

I've been very disappointed with the rollout of their most recent board, Beagleplay. There are all of these self-congratulatory videos of Jason Kridner at trade shows talking about they're making Embedded Linux more accessible/simple. Yet 4 months after release, the quickstart guides are mostly notes to future quickstart guide editors, or otherwise describe workflows that don't actually work.

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Yeah, I had the same experience with the BeagleBone AI-64. Their documentation is extremely lacking. To make it worse, the whole point of the board is TI's ML inference accelerator, and TI's documentation and sample code for it are completely useless.

The Beagle hardware is great but it seems to me they just don't have the resources or focus to support the hardware they release.

I think the newer AI board from beagleboard is "BeagleBone AI" without the "64"?

Anyway I was thinking about buying it, but ended up with buying Nvidia's Jetson instead, due to software and documentation difference.

I believe the 64 variant is the newer part. The older one is a 32 bit architecture IIRC.

Jetson has a big edge in software and documentation, no doubt. Poor documentation and SDKs seems to be the norm for a lot of embedded processors, especially for the AI acceleration piece.

I’m curious for this new beagle board if there’s enough documentation / software to use the AI accelerator.

I had similar frustrations a while ago when using their BeagleBone Black. Being new to embedded linux, it took me weeks to try and figure out how to get fast I/O pin access using their PRU. It took sifting through countless tutorials that were out of date and didn't work

Great opportunity to contribute

Having random people reverse-engineer your hardware in order to document it seems... a lot less ideal than having the people who actually built it in the first place reveal some of the information that they must already know and probably have written about it.

My response to people who assume "if you have enough time to complain about it, you must have the time to fix it yourself" is typically that if you have enough time to tell someone to do it themself, why don't you?

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