The Beaglebones, including this one, use the AM335X chip, which includes two PRU units on die. These are microcontrollers that have access to the same memory as the main ARM cores, and an API to share data.

This allows for real-time-ish use cases that the Raspberry PI can't handle well. Low latency audio, driving large LED matrix boards, high speed input sampling, etc.

So it's not quite the same market. $25 in this space is rock bottom pricing.

> jarmitage: if you're interested in making ultra low latency (as low as 80us) embedded musical instruments, check out Bela http://bela.io

> tyingq: The pair of PRUs in the Beaglebone black is a large part of it.

source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15121720 (Aug 2017)

CNC machining and 3D printing is one use case where Beaglebones are very common.

This LinuxCNC fork supports it natively: http://www.machinekit.io/

I started using the BB Black when it was first introduced and am quite surprised it didn't become more popular. At the time, the alternative was the RPi, and the BBB was way faster and had dedicated Ethernet (something the RPi still doesn't have -- its Ethernet controller hangs off the USB bus).

To answer the question though, honestly I'm not sure how you can go wrong with it being a smaller community. You can largely take advice about the RPi and apply it to the BBB (or the PB, in this case). The hardware and software is all roughly similar, after all.

It was more expensive and less heavily marketed as an educational device. And the BBB is much less focused on graphics; a huge part of the Pi community is focused solely on media centers and retro gaming emulation.

I got burned pretty badly (in time, not money since it was ultra cheap) on the Onion Omega2 fiasco. The thing was released when it was alphaware, and all the support documentation was for the previous machine.

It's matured a lot in the last few months, but that first half year was very rough. It took two or three firmware releases to even make it stable, and it's still a bugfest. (Can the support web site even work on iPhones yet? It used to be Windows+Chrome only.)

Because of that, my next foray into ultra-low-cost computing will be Raspberry Pi. At least I know it's an established product and because of that it probably has a good community and documentation.

"Good documentation" might be a bit of an overstatement. The second you get off the beaten path with a Raspberry Pi, things can get pretty hellish. Try bare metal C on just the second rendition, and weep before the non-existent documentation for the SoC they used. The official response to this issue (to paraphrase) was "it's fairly close to the previous version; you can figure it out." I don't want to know what sort of suffering you would have to go through trying to do bare-metal programming on an RPi 3.

There's at least a forum section dedicated to it, with a few posts containing collections of resources: https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewforum.php?f=72

That doesn't change the fact that the documentation you need isn't there, and that they have no plans to provide it. Can you figure it out? Sure. Am I going to pull my hair out doing trial and error trying to figure out the GPIO pinout for an SoC that they have no interest in providing documentation for when I can just buy a product with better documentation? Of course not.

This is a new product from an established company. The original Beaglebone was released in 2008, 4 years before the original Raspberry Pi, and is far better supported from a technical perspective (meaning PCBs and spec sheets, and not umpteen unanswered forum posts about the same issue with the blind leading the blind).

BeagleBoard is fairly well established. The BeagleBone Black was one of the most popular boards by survey on hackerboards.com—even a couple years after the then-latest revision (2014)—second only to RasPi products, which were undercutting BBB on price.

Beagle has a pretty large community. They've been around longer than the Raspberry Pi. The RPi because of it's super low cost has proliferated greatly and enabled people to get in and try out stuff they wouldn't be able to before. Which has always been their goal, to build an educational tool.

If you are just fiddling around and mostly are looking to have something that's a lot like your linux experience. Either will work and it might be easier to find a specific github project for what you're doing on the RPi, but that is barely my usual experience. Even something like running a MAME cab on an RPi3, you'll get set up quick with RetroPi, but some things you might want to play won't hack it on the little CPU in there.

Any one of these is a great entry point, but it is definitely advisable to jump into your new project by seeing what people are using and picking the board. If your idea is even slightly left of mainstream you'll probably test out quite a few. More than likely, if you didn't have EE skills before you start, you'll hit some hard walls with esoteric choices like SPI vs I2C, or the best way to do wireless communication and not gobble your battery.

Long and short, embedded projects don't quite silo like software. You might start out thinking about your Pi like buying a netbook, then four years later you're doing embedded C on a 16-bit proc to get where you're going. Even just a few years ago this would be totally inaccessible to anyone without very specific experience (usually a degree). Now for a dollar, anyone can fiddle and grow an idea and the tools have become amazing! But just because it runs an ubuntu flavor and has a familiar window manager, doesn't mean people didn't make real specific choices to get it into that tiny package and you'll have to figure out what you really need as you go.

+1

Another thing I am curious about is why is there such a price difference? RPiZ - $5 PB - $25

https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/raspberry-pi-zero/

I think the RPi CPU's are significantly less costly, and of course have higher volume production runs. Traditionally, the chips used in RPi have difficult-to-obtain low level documentation and therefore binary blobs for drivers. RPi foundation is willing to make that trade-off in favor of cost. The Beagle ecosystem has from the beginning been more of a traditional reference design "please buy our chips for your personalized version" sort of board.

yeah rpis are leftovers from old massproduced chips.. plus they lack lots of features

The Pi Zero can be extremely hard to find at $5 depending on where you live, though. Ditto for the Zero W at $10.

They're pretty awesome, but every time I go looking for one it takes a few days. Still, it is sort of fun. Like hunting for a newly-launched console.

Microcenter but they were doing a '1 per customer' thing for a while.

There aren't many MicroCenters around, and they still do an escalating price scale. $10 for 1, $15 apiece for 2-5, $20 apiece after that.

I wonder if these are sold at Microcenter. They're about 15-20 miles from one here in Michigan, although it's not like that particular store is their Headquarters or anything.

It is a shame there aren't more MicroCenter stores around, although I'm not sure really how they stay in business. It was logical that computing equipment would make the switch to being purchased primarily online[0]. Somehow MicroCenter competes well on price and very well on selection. That place is like a retail NewEgg, carrying all kinds of very specialized things. They've got everything from water cooling rigs (multiple brands), to oddities like shrink tubing, development boards, 3D printing supplies and every kind of upgrade for PCs you can think of. It's a place I avoid when I don't have an hour to sit around and a reasonable budget because I always leave there with more than I intended on purchasing but it's so nice that when I need an adapter to plug my one power supply cord into my two ports on my new graphics adapter, I can drive up the road.

Small tangent, yeah, but this product would fit really well over there.

[0] While I'm sure Apple stores do OK and full PCs probably sell OK in larger electronics chains, none of those chains carry anything resembling a reasonable selection of pieces/parts.

Their website lists some kind of Beagleboard starter kit.

Micro Center is where I went last time I built a desktop, last time I upgraded it, last time I bought boxed software, last few times I bought Raspberry Pis or components for them. And they're usually pretty full of other people doing the same. It used to be on my way home from work, and I'd stop in a few times a week just to browse.

It's about 20 minutes away, but I think I'd really rather go there than buy something online, if I have the time. And I imagine that's how they stay in business.

As far as I can suppose (although I don't actually have a source), RPiZ is sold at a loss and is made in much larger quantities than its competitors.

I would be surprised if PocketBeagle isn't also sold at a loss, although at a different scale.

Anyone else got thoughts/evidence on this?

It is definitely not sold at a loss. No maximum to the order quantity, just lead time if it is more than inventory.

Neither company is large enough to sell at a loss (where would they get the money?), although the Pi is very close to selling at marginal cost.

Lots of discussion about that here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10631668

I’ve become a huge fan of the NanoPi Neo series. The lower end models are < $10 and still moderately powerful, besides being quite a lot smaller than the Raspberry Pi’s

Check out the OrangePi Zero series too. They're comparable to the NanoPi Neo and NanoPi Neo Air in size and features, but seem to land in mainline u-boot and Linux a bit more quickly.

Looks pretty stable too: http://wiki.friendlyarm.com/wiki/index.php/NanoPi_NEO

Slightly more recent, smaller (pi zero like form) http://wiki.friendlyarm.com/wiki/index.php/NanoPi_Duo

something like 9$ (shipping included)

I just got my NanoPi Duo and it’s pretty cool. With WiFi and its form factor it’s very useful.

Though I kind of wish it used an H5; I can’t imagine it costs much more but it’s a much better SoC.