BeagleBone Black: A 1-GHz computer for $45 | Hacker News Reader

BeagleBone Black: A 1-GHz computer for $45

eetimes.com

146 pointsca98am7991 comments

I got three of these. I need controllers like I need a hole in my head but hey, they are really really cute. A bit of trouble with the release that was on them but downloaded and burned in the latest and they were fine. Sadly no, I have not yet put them on a meter but will when they are near such a setup.

Something that sets these apart from the Raspberry Pi are that they full of easy access I/O, and two the Cloud9 IDE.

It is insanely fun to write javascript code in a browser talking to this thing wirelessly and have it do stuff. For me who likes to do mobile robots this is the really really great. I've got one of the old Rovio telepresence [1] things (its a mobile base with a Web cam and a WiFi link) and this board is going to be its new brain. The angstrom distro on it is very similar to the distro that the Chumby came with only a bit more stuff (Python, yay!).

The HDMI output is ok (its not 1080p so don't even think you're going to do XMBC on this thing) but nothing to write home about.

One USB port so get a hub, but on the plus side you can provide you own 5V power supply and that means you don't need a powered hub (unless you're trying to run high power peripherals). The Logitech Unifying receiver works well if you want to add a keyboard and mouse in one plug. (Now if that Unifying Reciever did WiFi it would kick butt)

All in all I think its a really good board. Nice mix of features. It will put pricing pressure on the Arduino Due I suspect.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/WowWee-Rovio-Enabled-Robotic-WebCam/dp...

Is the Ethernet PHY connected to the main processor over USB or something faster/more efficient? One of my biggest complaints about the Raspberry Pi is that the Ethernet is capped at a few dozen mbps, presumably due to constraints associated with USB.

Ethernet is built into the SOC [1] and brought out to a phy. It can do gigabit Ethernet. With the wireless dongle in the USB plug it was doing 10.5MB/sec (megabytes per second) according to scp.

[1] http://www.ti.com/lit/ds/symlink/am3358.pdf

Note that the BeagleBone has a 100Mbps phy.

Maybe there's something wrong with your Raspberry Pi, all of mine do over 90 Mbit/s downloads over ethernet without any problems.

he probably means MBps.

Nope, mine don't seem to go higher than around 6MBps (48mbps) on a good day. Edit: That was with one of the first models. My new one seems to hit about 75mbps.

Using iperf (i.e. pretty ideal conditions) I peak at around 75Mbit/sec on a latest-generation Pi.

How robust are the boards? I'm moving a hydroponics setup from an arduino to something more flexible, and need them to be fairly robust. I use a thick plastic case to protect them, but they will be on 24/7/7. Also, how is setting up WIFI with these? Better than the RPi?

Standard FR-4 from the looks of it, it does fit inside an altoids tin although I've not installed one due to needing to cut out the holes for the peripherals.

No. it's not fun to run any code in a browser <textarea>. especially when you have a full linux distro with ssh and modern text editors, with decent undo, column editing, auto-completion, regexp, etc.

never really understood the appeal of the arduino interface or cloud9. Well, for the arduino i can at least try to explain that, same with android, there are so many bad tutorials based on copy/past and boasting those IDE, that lots and lots of people start already thinking that is their only option.

It means you can get started right away. If you want to be more serious, sure, write stuff in C or whatever, it works fine, after all this is just a Linux machine (with a simple webserver running cloud9 on port 3000). Or just ssh into the bone and edit your .js files in vim (it probably makes you feel a little bit more hardcore but yeah, it's still js).

No need for the negativity, can't blame those guys for wanting to get a larger userbase by making things easy. In the end the larger volume/bigger community is beneficial to everyone.

Actually having both is a pretty nice. The reason is that it can be intimidating to someone in getting started. The notion of IDE via the web server is also useful for keeping the required software down on a machine you may not control. I was helping kids learn programming at a high school but the school would not give us permission to install putty[1] on the machines, using a browser based dev kit works well in this case.

Once you get someone past the basics and into the 'advanced' mode setting them up with ssh, vim, and screen is a great way to be productive on a linux machine.

[1] Putty in this case being the terminal emulator for PC's which can also talk to serial ports.

Happy to see that these powerful little things are getting more affordable. What does those expansion pins do? Can they be used for I/O like button and LED?

Just about every pin on this processor can be used for GPIO. Some pins, like the DDR interface, can only perform one function, but the vast majority can be configured to do one of seven different functions.

I teach a beginning robotics class to local area kids. We were going to use RasPis this year but I could only get 2 of them (I needed about 10) so we ended up going with TP-Link WR703n's and arduinos instead. This actually ended up working better anyway with less hassle.

I'm hoping that BBB's (3B's?) are going to take their place in the fall. They seem much more suited to tinkering than raspis. A very exciting platform!

I've been wanting to do something similar with kids for a while. I've finally got a good hackers group going in my area, and most of the resources needed for hardware & space. Would you consider sharing some information about your class?

What is your recommendation for adding motors and sensors to it? Is there any good usb device controller to quickly start doing robotics?

There are a number of off the shelf motor controllers. I tend to build my own but the folks at Sparkfun [1] have a number of of them which other have used with great success.

[1] https://www.sparkfun.com/products/9107

I only got one, but I too am working on a remote robot, modifying an old Robie Jr.

I originally was attempting to use an MK802 android stick running ubuntu and interfacing it with an Arduino Micro.

However, for $45, it saves much time and "just works".

Also, like you said, it cannot do 1080p, so if you want that for XBMC get a Pi, but for a robot, this, to me, seems ideal.

That Rovio bot looks cool...two questions:

1. Looks like it's been out for a while. If you were getting a similar thing today, would you stick with it or go for something else [1]?

2. When you drop the beaglebone into the Rovio, would you actually be replacing its OEM controller, or just interacting with it over WiFi?

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Rover-App-Controlled-Tank-Night-Vision...

I used that Rovio bot in a robotics class. I'm no robotics expert (hardly a novice), but this was my experience.

The big hold-up is lack of access to (or maybe pure lack of) encoders on the wheels (we were using the wifi/web interface). It's impossible to move by dead reckoning. This was actually part of our class, to teach us how bad dead reckoning is and then we moved on to CV for tracking and control.

> Something that sets these apart from the Raspberry Pi are that they full of easy access I/O

How so?

I thought RasPi has plenty of I/O, but I'm not familiar with BB.

Minor quibble: The lack of analog sound output. It shows that their mindset was not entirely focused on the robotics / DIY genre, but more on the miniature computer thing. You don't do sound output on a robot or controller from HDMI.

I think the HDMI is more a concession than anything, since there's no real "GPU" to speak of. This is more akin to the Arduino, but with a little more creature comfort.

Except that this Cortex is running 1ghz, while the most Arduino (or TI Launchpad) microcontrollers operate at sub-100mhz speeds.

Err, what the heck are you talking about? The GPU is a SGX530. http://circuitco.com/support/index.php?title=BeagleBoneBlack

You're right, I was going off a review of the Beaglebone where they said you couldn't do 1080p TV like on the RasPI. Clearly incorrect. :)

I just bought two on an impulse buy. There's really no better time to be a hardware tinkerer.

There are so many awesome kits coming down the pipeline:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1106670630/mojo-digital-...

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/adapteva/parallella-a-su...

Got mine couple of days back and here are a few tips:

- The default OS version had some issues that I was not able to ssh into the board. Once I downloaded and loaded the latest version available on the site, I was able to ssh as root.

- I was not able to connect serially (from my mac). Turns out that the FTDI driver they provide is 32 bit but (my) Mac needs a 64 bit. So you have to install the 32 bit, save the Info.plist, then install the 64 bit and copy it back and chmod permissions correctly.

- While trying to do a "opkg upgrade", be careful. Mine got into some issues installing a downloaded version half way through the process. But this also somehow broke the network connection. So no more updates. I almost thought I bricked my board. But I was able to again use my SD (from the previous downloaded latest version) to the rescue and bring it back to life again.

Also there is a nice Ubuntu port available. It feels rather stable and more familiar than Angstrom, I recommend it. Of course you'll lose Cloud9 from the box.

Yes, I am planning to go Ubuntu as well.

I had the same issue not being able to ssh into the shipped OS. While updating to the latest OS, I ran into similar issues writing the latest version to the eMMC memory and also thought I bricked my board. The external SD port and the eMMC Flasher images really are a "get out of jail free card."

This board is a beautiful little piece of hardware. I'm really looking forward to tinkering around with it.

Wow, ordered on Friday, received today, with the standard shipping option. Digikey rocks!

After reading this post, I thought I would be clever and just install the proper drivers, turns out, you do have to follow krishna2's instructions exactly.

Hopefully this saves others the slight headache, I went through:

- Install the HoRNDIS-rel4.pkg network drivers included on the board.

- Install the FTDI_Ser.dmg serial drivers included on the board. When I installed them, an error message popped up stating something about the OS being unable to use the driver.

- Download the 64-bit drivers here: http://www.ftdichip.com/Drivers/VCP.htm . As of this posting, this is the latest version: http://www.ftdichip.com/Drivers/VCP/MacOSX/FTDIUSBSerialDriv...

- Before installing the latest serial drivers: cp /System/Library/Extensions/FTDIUSBSerialDriver.kext/Contents/Info.plist /tmp

- Install the new drivers.

- cp /tmp/Info.plist /System/Library/Extensions/FTDIUSBSerialDriver.kext/Contents/Info.plist

- Enjoy!

Here's the error message, for SEO juice:

USBMSC Identifier (non-unique): 5A-1813BBBK0554 0x1d6b 0x104 0x308 HoRNDIS: init: HoRNDIS tethering driver for Snow Leopard+, by Joshua Wise 0 0 dgmdmcontrol: start - Failed to find the CDC driver HoRNDIS: rndisInit: their MTU 1486 HoRNDIS: init: starting up with MTU 1486 HoRNDISUSBInterface: Ethernet address c8:a0:30:ab:92:29 0 0 AppleUSBCDCACMData: start - allocateResources failed 0 1 AppleUSBCDCECMData: start - Find CDC driver for ECM data interface failed 0 0 dgmdmcontrol: start - Failed to find the CDC driver 0 [Level 5] [com.apple.message.domain com.apple.commssw.cdc.device] [com.apple.message.driver AppleUSBCDCACMData] [com.apple.message.vendor_id 0x1D6B] [com.apple.message.product_id 0x104] AppleUSBCDCACMData: Version number - 4.1.23, Input buffers 8, Output buffers 16 HoRNDIS: rndisCommand: unsupported: RNDIS_MSG_INDICATE AppleUSBCDC: Version number - 4.1.23 Sandbox: sandboxd(36667) deny mach-lookup com.apple.coresymbolicationd Kext com.FTDI.driver.FTDIUSBSerialDriver not found for unload request. Kext com.FTDI.driver.FTDIUSBSerialDriver not found for unload request.

The impulse buying tech nerd within me sees a $45 computer with potential for being able to make anything and I am stuck for ideas as to what I could use this for. Does anyone have any suggestions?

My original Beaglebone has been stuck in a colo facility for a while now (18 months?) and has cost me about $20 of hosting fees so far.

The power consumption is stupidly low, the colo company had to find a different meter to measure it from their normal server oriented one.

I use it as a DNS server, and SSH tunnel destination.

Out of curiosity, where do you have it hosted?

Jump networks are the company, but it's in one of the Telehouse buildings in London

http://www.jump.net.uk/

Ooh, so can you just mail them one of these and they'll hook it up, and charge you ?? per month?

Yeah pretty much exactly that.

They gave me an IP address, subnet mask, and gateway, I preconfigured it, and posted them the board in a cheap case, plus the power supply with plug.

They invoice me annually for the power used including an amount of bandwidth which I never come near.

This is the PSU I use:

http://uk.farnell.com/jsp/search/productdetail.jsp?sku=17169...

with

http://uk.farnell.com/jsp/search/productdetail.jsp?SKU=17169...

If you can afford it, I would recommend buying one (or an Arduino or RasPi). Even if the most you ever do with it is run through some simple tutorials, it is still worth it. I have a few Arduino's and RasPi's, and to date, I have yet to make anything noteworthy, but going trough random tutorials has been fairly educational and entertaining.

I like the idea of building my own weather station or maybe a custom made ambilight(tm). It's been done before but I don't mind.

Personally, I'm going to use one of them for a sort of NAS box for my backups. The only network access will be via SSH, with key access only, and a "command=" target in the authorized_keys file so that it you can only backup to it and restore files from it -- but not destroy data. Always nice to have a dedicated backup server in case your system gets hacked.

I was going to use a RasPi, but I/O was too slow as it had to shove both the Ethernet and Disk through the same USB controller.

The other thing I'm using these things for (at least the RasPis) is a temporary fix for when someone's computer is busted -- it gets them back online with access to most of their daily routine, while I'm taking time to repair the PC. The BBB might have a bit more performance, so I might add that to the mix too.

Thanks, without your comment I wouldn't have thought to put this on the top of the possible-guts list for a similar project I've been hoping to get to. I was thinking of a little NAS back-up box going out in the back-yard, buried and protected in some nice groundwater-safe enclosure. For a sort of pseudo-off-site backup.

Throw a USB wifi module on it, and permanently mount it in your car. Then, at night, when it is in range of your home network, have it rsync your backups to it from a primary backup server. I'm sure that the board itself is low power enough that it won't run down your car battery overnight, not sure about a USB hard drive though (or just configure the drive to auto spin down when not in use).

Mount all of your network storage to it, run bittorrent sync client on it, sync all your stuff to everywhere directly from your house / office / both.

I was interested in getting an arduino for a while but wasn't sure what to do with it and was busy with other software projects. Recently, I got a pi at PyCon for free, then shortly after we bought some chicks for raising chickens for eggs. I put the two together and am building out a monitoring system for them, that includes a web cam, temperature sensor and remotely controlled brooder light. I like to call it a chicken pi :)

But, I think it just takes one small project to get you started. I've noticed that this has a snowball effect as I start reading more and talking to more people about electronics and automation. Lots of fun! It's all about hacking, learning and having a good time!

You should interface a potentiometer with the Pi to adjust the brooder light, only so you can call it a chicken pot Pi.

I missed pycon, but got a Pi anyway.

Mine is currently a part time camera host for the (hot, young) chick cam, and rapidly getting the electronics and control programming to run the door on the coop. My long term plan is to have a few webcams in the coop and do some computer vision for chicken detection.

Pulling in the Shenzhen thread -- I wish I had the lab I had in HS 20 years back to do this: a bench full of scopes and power supplies, meters, and a parts room that was open for use. No paying retail + $10 shipping and waiting a week for parts.

Cool! I wanted to add a control for the door, as well, and experiment with computer vision.

The current code is on github: https://github.com/wiredfool/coop-door . I'm going to be adding schematics and other non code bits there soon.

I've finally got the last few parts to move it from breadboard to soldered pc board, so I'm hoping to get that done this weekend.

I'm using my original beaglebone as my 'home automation' server. It's been a while since I work on it though.

http://alvarop.com/2013/02/automation-progress-light-alarm-a...

I feel the exact way. I have been inspired to study electrical engineering ever since I read this story from 10 years ago: http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/03/01/15/1829244

And the nerd/hacker/enthusiast in me would gladly put down the cash to make it happen.

However, I also run into a wall when thinking of what to do with such a device. I'm not inspired by webcam+embedded linux. I don't want home automation. I already have devices hooked up to a TV. I work on the Kindles, which use Android (Fire) and embedded Linux (eink), so I can't argue buying a BeagleBoard for educational reasons.

Every time a product like this comes up, I get excited and start searching the TI website or BeagleBoard.org or Raspberry Pi or Arduino for lists of related components I could purchase to put together. Make my own weather station? I live in Seattle, the weather never changes :). What about a toiler paper roll sensor so I know if I need to buy more next time I'm at costco? (with a gf, this is hard problem!). I don't want this electronic staying in the bathroom around the moisture. What about getting a blue light star tracker and calculating celestial position like the old stealth fighters did? Cool, but kind of niche.

The closest idea I came up with is making an RC car. It would get me into the shop to make a frame, perhaps use a 3D printer for mold coverings, and be a fun demo with friends. When I start looking for motors, I get stuck finding a place to buy a motor. Take this page, for example:

http://www.ti.com/tool/dk-lm4f-drv8312

It's unclear to me if this page is a 'kit' for a large shop who want to try out this motor for a specific application. Or do I really need the huge controller board to operate this brushless motor?

Also, is it even possible to buy 4 or 8 of the motors? Or do I really need to put in an order of 1k or 10k units?!?!

Forgive the naive question, but where do other people go shopping for related components like a motor to wire together with these kits? What am I doing wrong?

Check out sites like https://www.sparkfun.com/, http://www.newark.com/, or https://www.adafruit.com/ if you're looking to purchase modest amounts of sensors, displays, servos, etc. for hobby projects.

I just ordered one from Digi-Key, and intend to try to compile Inferno on it to run in hosted mode. If that works, I'll network it with the Inferno hosted on my home computer, and see if I can get them both to work well with each other. Once I have the two computers up and running, I'll see if I can use the BB Black as my main home computer, and move off my current desktop.

I got Cubieboard. It's pretty much same specs and it has SATA.

https://cubieboard.myshopify.com/collections/frontpage/produ...

Looks like the Cubieboard has nominally better specs - twice the RAM and NAND), but a couple things worth noting if people are looking to do electronics-type hacking:

* the Cubieboard comes w/ male headers for its I/O pins. This is a lot less convenient from a practical perspective. There's an additional baseboard you can get but it's huge or I guess you can put your own blocks on.

* the Beaglebone comes w/ two PRUs if you need to do real-time work this is pretty sweet

* For general I/O, libraries like PyBBIO and Bonescript make the Beaglebone dead simple to program with. As far as I can tell, to access GPIO for the Cubieboard, there's a custom kernel module driver you'll need to install to access via /sys and no clear docs on PWM or other "basic" stuff.

Also looks like right now, the Cubieboard is a lot less mature and it's unclear what the timeline is for it to get better - for example, looking at the Google Groups threads, looks like there's the VPU/GPU acceleration is a bit finicky (the Cubieboard uses Mali-400, Beaglebone uses SGX530, both closed source/binary only drivers). There also seems to be a pretty active contingent of... less than helpful people on a lot of threads.

Great to see that ArchLinux ARM already has support for the BeagleBone Black [1]. I have a Hackberry A 10 that I'm very happy with, but this looks like a great product as well. I'm definitely tempted to go for this rather than the Hackberry next time.

1: http://archlinuxarm.org/platforms/armv7/beaglebone-black

archlinux arm is so baller

I've been using the BeagleBone A6 (pre-Black) at my University this semester for an embedded systems lab (Computer Engineering undergrad). TI provided them to see what we could do.

Cloud9 was fun to play with, and allowed quick access to all the functions you might want on the headers. Pretty easy to develop on, and requires very minimal setup or work to actually start programming in js.

Next, I put Ubuntu (Angstrom is very similar) on it and played around and was able to get familiar with where all of the pin input and output files lived, and how the muxing was put together in the OS. Once you explore a bit it's pretty quick. At that point, just pick a language and start writing whatever you want. I've written shell, C, and python for it for various projects this semester. It's super easy to run a web server on it to control the board from afar which makes for a killer demo at a hackathon or something. Also would be super easy to have it control things around your home from your smartphone.

Some notes / reminders: - X11 (Xming for PC) if you don't want to / can't use HDMI and you want a GUI (lxde). - Don't put a 5V data line into the UART pins (or most pins), classmates busted at least 5 A6's this way (new model may have improved).

I haven't used a Pi yet, and have a Model B coming my way now, but I'm absolutely grabbing a Black or two to see if it's any better. Would definitely recommend it!

I realise this is a different unit, but I tried the BeagleBoard-XM and trying to get it to display Ubuntu on my run-of-the-mill Sony TV was an exercise in frustration. The instructions for it were fairly opaque, and between relying on random shell scripts, random online build systems, and endless conf file changes, I never got it to work.

Plugging the Raspberry Pi in and having it display immediately on the TV almost brought tears to my eyes. Maybe the situation is improved for the BeagleBone?

I got the MK808B for $48. It's a dual core 1GB PC with WIFI in the size of a thumb drive. It comes with Android and connects to TV via HMDI. Works pretty well as a Android TV device. Want to get another one to install Linux to play with it.

Can you please provide a link?

I have been playing w/ an MK802 stick and it has a few issues.

Various sellers from $40 and up. The free shipping ones from reputable sellers are close to $48.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/B00ALSZNLW/ref=dp_olp...

PicUntu http://ubuntu.g8.net/ seems to got Ubuntu booted and running on the device.

Have you personally been able to get XBMC working and decoding 1080p?

"Carlos Betancourt, a marketing engineer for TI's Sitara processors, described BeagleBone Black as "truly" open source. He noted that open source software is not always as open as it claims to be. "When it comes to hardware, open source means you can buy all these chips and use them for your own design," Betancourt said. "

I'm sorry, but that is NOT open source "when it comes to hardware". It's very cool, it's open source when it comes to software, but open source hardware is a completely different kettle of beagles, and I find it annoying that TI spokespeople would be trying to claim as much. It makes us "hackers" dis-trusting and TI look disengenuous.

Still think it's awesome! Just wish TI marketing would stop hitching a free ride.

EDIT: What is a "marketing engineer"?

The schematics, bill of materials, and PCB layout files are freely available here: http://circuitco.com/support/index.php?title=BeagleBoneBlack...

What more do you want?

I think he wants masks for every chip, microcode, design files, free licensing from ARM, and access to the TI fab so he can make his own chips.

I don't think people realize how much stuff is in these chips and how much work and NRE it takes to make something like a $10 SoC happen. It's nice to see the advantages of scale being useful and -yay- we all get cheap XBMC players, but don't take it for granted.

You realize the Beagle project is developed by TI, right?

I think their marketing has been just superb on this platform, and it's a huge turnaround from the days of $4,000 EVKs for their chips.

Their marketing has, indeed been superb. My issue is with the use of the term open source with regards to hardware that seems not to be. Sorry, it's really just a semantic point, but I find that marketing departments are all too aware of semantics and take advantage of them all the time.

My definition of open source hardware is nicely outlined at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_hardware .

Once again, I think the project is awesome, I think the marketing, despite good, is, well, marketing.

Hey, what a coincidence. I just wrote up some notes from the time I spent this evening tuning up the Debian Wheezy base image for the BBK:

http://github.jfet.org/BBKNotes1.html

Got the Black delivered on my door today, will try to post a quickie review tomorrow :-)

Do you have a power meter by any miracle? The main advantage I see to this over the Raspberry Pi (for my application) is its spartan power usage.

No I don't have a power meter. I know the Black works on a USB 2.0 port of my laptop and my desktop too, so it uses less than 500mA. From my experience working with Ti's stuff, they are often pretty good about power consumption though.

My main problem with the Pi is that it is very finicky... plug a USB device in, and it dies/connection drops and all kinds of weird things happen. I have seen none so far on the Black.

Isn't the finickiness related to power consumption? USB is only rated up to 500mA, so drawing too much power from the Raspberry Pi's own USB port will cause all sorts of havoc especially when the RPi itself is powered off another computer's USB port.

In fact technically RPi model B's official spec is that it requires 700mA. You can often get away with less, but you'll definitely start to hit 500mA+ under stress and with peripherals, which is above what USB can officially supply.

Your best bet is to get a nice solid cellphone wall-wart type charger, preferably rated 2A and up. With enough juice powering the Pi, all the issues relating to USB disconnects, freezing, and ethernet dropping stop happening.

Gonna guess that the stability you're seeing with the beaglebone is just from its much lower power requirement.

I can vouch for this. I use a Blackberry wall-wart type charger for my Pi, and it's been rock solid. I only power it down it when I'm off travelling someplace for more than a day.

    pi@raspberrypi ~ $ uptime
     10:58:03 up 17 days, 13:45,  1 user,  load average: 0.00, 0.01, 0.05
    pi@raspberrypi ~ $

Of course if you never plug anything in, it will stay up for a long time. The problem arises when there are things being plugged in and out.

Many USB devices don't work with the Pi. It's pretty picky.

    pi@mia ~ $ uptime 
     15:40:15 up 94 days, 23:03,  1 user,  load average: 0.00, 0.01, 0.05

I have a 1 TB USB HDD plugged in at all times (separately powered though), which acts as my NAS.

The USB implementation in the rpi's chip is rather... odd.

I've seen that flakiness as well - thanks for that report that it doesn't happen on the Black.

if you haven't found an answer to this by monday, send me an email (notatoad-gmail) and i'll let you know. doing a power consumption test between beaglebone and beaglebone black is on my to-do list.

The spec sheet[1] says power consumption is 210-460mA@5V (the rpi-B in comparison is specced at 700mA right?)

[1] http://circuitco.com/support/index.php?title=BeagleBoneBlack

Great piece of kit. For some reference we just put together a listing of 30+ prototyping platforms: http://postscapes.com/internet-of-things-hardware that people have been using for "Internet of Things" DIY projects.

Dallas Makerspace has a good list of embedded Linux hardware. https://dallasmakerspace.org/wiki/Embedded_Linux_Computers

I've been thinking about making a small PC dedicated to NES and SNES emulation. Is there anything that would make the BeagleBone a better or worse choice than a Raspberry Pi for this project?

The BeagleBone CPU is much faster than the RPi. The GPU is less sophisticated, but that hardly matters for your application.

If you want your SNES emulation to be accurate, this won't cut it I'm afraid.

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2011/08/accuracy-takes-power-o...

But if you're just doing run-of-the-mill SNES emulation, it should be great.

The raspi does have analog video output, but it's composite. If you're an old school gaming purist you'd want something with analog RGB output.

I've got a Raspberry Pi set up emulating a bunch of NES and SNES games like you plan on doing. I had to overclock it pretty far to get SNES working at all, and higher-end games (particularly those using the FX chip like Star Fox) really struggle. The emulators can't really use the Pi's better video card as far as I know, but I think the stronger CPU on the BeagleBone may give it the edge.

Similar to this: pcDuino [1]

[1] http://www.pcduino.com/

do you have some "motivational" examples of using this kind of board?

I used the original white beaglebone to build something to alert us when the dishes needed doing http://imakethin.gs/blog/the-great-opencv-washing-up-detecto...

nice work :)

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