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BeagleBone Black Released With 1GHz Cortex-A8 For Only $45
DeviceGuru tipped us to the release of the latest single board computer from Beagle Board. It's been two years since the previous BeagleBone was released, and today they've released the BeagleBone Black (including full hardware schematics) at a price competitive with the Raspberry Pi ($10 more, but it comes with a power brick). Powered by a Cortex-A8, it has 512M of DDR3 RAM, 2G of onboard eMMC, two blocks of 46 I/O pins, a pair of 32-bit DSPs, the usual USB host/client ports, Ethernet, and micro-HDMI (a much requested feature). Support is provided for Ångstrom GNU/Linux, Ubuntu, and Android out of the box. Linux Gizmos reports where some of the cost savings came from: "According to BeagleBoard.org cofounder Jason Kridner, interviewed in a Linux.com report today, cost savings also came from removing the default serial port as well as USB-to-serial and USB-to-JTAG interfaces, and including a cheaper single-purpose USB cable. (Three serial interfaces are available via the expansion headers.) In addition, the power expansion header for battery and backlight has been removed."
Slashdot is an aggregation/discussion site. Of course it's going to have stories after site X, because that's the very nature of a site that aggregates news.
"Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much." - Oscar Wilde
Coming from South Africa, I am disappointed that the Rasberry Pi is so expensive. Hopefully these boards will be better priced here ..
I had a ticket in the "queue" to order an RPi. When my turn came - would cost R 650-00 (Dollar was around 8.42 at the time so close to $ 80 USD) - I passed.
The inclusion of SATA and GigaE would presumably drive the price up to a point they don't think would let them compete with the Raspberry Pi. That will change though, and I'm very looking forward to that time. As soon as SATA and GigaE can be included at around the same price point, these devices suddenly become a viable basis for a whole wealth of serious storage and network devices. The only reason I don't use the Raspberry Pi for anything more serious than a media server on my network is because of the limitations of its USB throughput for both storage and networking.
Still no SATA and no GigaE.
OK I get the SATA but do you really need GigaE for a 1GHz cortex? I think it would be hard to find a real-life case where network throughput was a bottleneck.
The specs sheet says 1.7GHz that can be overclocked to 2.0, but one I got was already at 2.0 the first time I plugged it in.
There's only one big shameful downside: the graphics card supports only vertical resolutions of 720 and 1080, thus requiring a monitor of utterly useless proportions. My rasPi has seen around half an hour of monitor time total, so I guess this is not a big loss.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
Yes it will ... it has 65x GPIO, you add the required level converters and use a bit-banging driver.
Or you can get a cheap USB-Parallel adapter if you just want to print.
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+1 Wow, High UID & excellent comment? Impressive
In what way is 1056246 a high UID? It's up to over 2.5 million now. He's probably been hear for 6 or 7 years by now.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Oh get off my lawn you young whipper snappers. :P
Don't blame me for redundant posts. I can't type very fast. Hence the user ID.
It's probably 3. Same as the Beagle and Pi. :)
5, according to my user page, although I lurked for a number of years before I made an account. Regardless of that, the idea that a certain UID (or age) is necessary to have insight into this industry is ridiculous. I know a number of brilliant programmers and IT folks who are younger than me. Experience is great, but it's not the only factor that goes into making someone competent.
"Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much." - Oscar Wilde
Even though the interesting parts of the RPi's GPU drivers remain closed source (the parts that run on the GPU), they have opened up enough of it that the drivers can easily be ported to different operating systems, or even used without an OS. It's not much but it's still better than the rest of the ARM SoCs.
Mada mada dane.
Always happy to oblige the young ones.
I think you'll find that's _my_ lawn ;)
no taxation without representation!
That's cute. :)
Everywhere this is being discussed, there's an astroturfer popping up with the same GigaE complaint. They're working from a script.
The other guys were given scripts!? I was freelancing the whole time... where can I join this "astroturfer" group you speak of?
The Pi has set a new benchmark for how cheap this sort of device "should" be. Other than the slight processor upgrade and the addition of the emmc nearly every change had cost-cutting as at least part of the reason behind it to bring the device down from "twice the cost of a Pi" to "slightly more expensive than the Pi but in the same ballpark".
I suspect the extra cost of a gigabit phy and magjack over a 10/100 phy and magjack fitted neither the budget nor the goals of the device.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
To be fair most people that need that serial port either are interfacing with 3.3V logic or have a pile of 3.3V->USB serial converters in their junk box. At least the BeagleBone follows the FTDI convention so that many of the off-the-shelf converters will Just Work, unlike the competition.
So look, I will give you that eSata would be nice, but you couldn't do it for the same BOM. The connector and controller will drive the price up. So let us give up this fiction/pipedream that you could produce it for the same price. In the future, maybe, but right now? no.
But as for Gigabit Ethernet, just how much data do you think you can pump though a single core 1GHz ARM? What are you doing that 100Mbit isn't enough? Or is this just some kind of megapixel war thinking that bigger is better? I think you would have a hard time proving that GigaE has enough demand to make a difference for the fast majority of [BeagleBone] users.
What do you know I wrote a novel
Not as cute as finding out one of the 4-digit ID's is On Lawn? ;)
Have a look at the Cubieboard - US$49 with SATA, 1GB RAM and 4GB Flash - both twice that of this board. It also has an IR sensor, and 96 pins of I/O