I don't know anything about the Beagle. How is it different than say a Raspberry pi 5? It says open source hardware but what does that actually mean. I'm curious about buying one but I want to understand them better first
Today I find the quality of the Raspberry Pi is dramatically improved, the tooling to help a beginner get started is amazing, and of course there's just simply a much larger user base that have likely resolved the problems you'll encounter.
However the real magic of a Beagle bone is listed in this features: Arm Cortex-R5 subsystem for low-latency I/O and control
There are many use cases such as robotics, where there is a need real time control and Beagle bones have this capability built in, whereas with Raspberry Pi you'll see people connecting an Arduino and a Raspberry Pi together to meet this requirement. Its kludgy, burns tons of time, and it also adds up cost wise.
In any case if you're just starting out, and you ever get interested in these things, know that you'll likely end up with many of them over the years. RPi is great for beginners, but if I was deploying something into the field as an IOT startup etc, I still prefer a Beagle.
My 2c
As far as I am concerned, the AI acceleration in BeagleY-AI's DSP is just a fad (TI DSP itself is quite respected in the industry).
I would probably say it's better to buy a Pi 4/5/Zero and one of RP2040/Arduino/micro:bit/Nucleo and master them separately, possibly with a UART/I2C/SPI link in between before moving on to a single package.
Open source hardware means they give you schematics and the board layout as an Altium project. You can take that and customize it to fit your needs. When it comes to processors that can run embedded linux that's actually common. Advantage if you don't modify the layout of the high speed buses your prototype will likely just work.
"If you have to ask" you're almost certainly better off with a rasp5 or probably 4 if you are looking for a mini PC to get some use out of that monitor you have flying around. Raspberry has a larger community and is therefore more accessible when starting out.
If you're looking to get a better understanding of the "low-level" workings of computers, consider an Arduino.
It's slower.
> Memory 4GB LPDDR4
Has less and slower memory.
> Arm Cortex-R5 subsystem for low-latency I/O and control
Might use less power at idle, the Pi 5 is extremely power hungry when doing nothing (~5W).
> Dual general-purpose C7x DSP with Matrix Multiply Accelerator (MMA) capable of 4 TOPs
An AI chip with questionable software support.
The rest seems about the same, it's loosely based on the same PCB layout.
As many can attest with the random "ARM SBC of the day" the Raspberry Pi continues to reign supreme because the software and ecosystem is second to none in the ARM SBC space. You can Google "[insert project/task here] raspberry pi" and unless it's completely ridiculous you will have your pick of implementations, how-to guides, and things that are often packaged up really nicely for even the novice Raspberry Pi user.
NPUs on ARM boards are nothing new. Like many people I have a graveyard of SBCs including things like the Khadas VIM3 (2019). If you Google "khadas npu" you will find that it basically only supports OpenCV and that took three years[0]. That's not nothing but compared to GPU it almost is.
The BeagleBone ecosystem is likely the clear very distant second to Raspberry Pi. I'm hoping they do better.
As we can see from the near-absolute dominance of CUDA (> 90% market share) software support and ecosystem matters much, much more than "X TOPS".
[0] - https://opencv.org/blog/working-with-neural-processing-units...
Getting the cheapest Orin Nano with 20 TOPS for ~2.5x the price of this is still probably the better choice for any proper inference.
The cheapest carrier board I could find: https://shop-us.avermedia.com/products/avermedia-standard-ca...
and 4GB Orin Nano full board is $499: https://www.seeedstudio.com/reComputer-J3010-p-5589.html