company that I work for has used quite a lot (more than 1000 I believe) BeagleBone Black boards for their solutions. Lately we’ve been facing problems due to the platform being generally pretty old and having single, relatively slow core, not much memory and only one Network Interface. We’ve been looking for alternatives (BBAI-2, Fire, Ahead, and as of late Pocket 2), but nothing seems really interesting: BBAI-2 is closest, but it isn’t that much of a stretch to say that it is also already old, in addition it requires quite a lot of power, seems to produce inordinate amounts of heat and still has only one Ethernet port (this is the same for most other solutions we tried). Fire would be nice if it wasn’t for the fact that it seems most of things that are taken for granted in BBB would require us to do FPGA programming (like eqep, but correctly me if I am wrong) or buying IP-cores (out of question, prices are far outside our range) and doing less FPGA programming. V-Ahead seems nice, but doesn’t seem to have anything capable of real-time. As for Pocket2 - it seems it doesn’t even have Ethernet interface plus 512MB RAM is on the level of BBB, so it is a no-go for us, aside from that it seems absolutely awesome.
We’ve been looking into other solutions, for example MYIRtechs’s offer is interesting (I tried REMI PI, but… eh, if anyone is interested I can share my experience), but nothing really fits the bill.
So the bottom line is: is there a DIRECT alternative to BeagleBone Black considered, planned, or in the works? If it can be expected in the near future (lets say 10-12 months) then it would be great to know, we would be able to spend our time doing something more productive than scanning internet for similar SBCs.
YES, that is an extremely priceless point. I don’t believe many have looked at the hours upon hours of stuff RCN has done for the BB. Those image building scripts alone are many hours of work.
That is exactly why I didn’t waste any money on even a trial board from odroid.
What we are using now is from 3 other vendors, all of them something different going on.
The other extremely critical issue is if the board smells, so far we have not found any thing on the BB / Ti stuff that comes direct from a legitimate supplier. That is another issue on its own…
Yes, I have checked many, many boards. Odroid seems ok, but their 2 Ethernet Port offerings are (AFAIK) x86_64 processors without digital I/O, and their offers with digital I/O come with single Ethernet Port (which is not a deal breaker considering how few boards have more than one) but no real-time - I think one of them had CPU with Cortex-M0, but there was absolutely no documentation on how to use it. We are reluctant to do extensive research that can lead us to final conclusion that something can’t be done.
In fact there are other things to consider: BBB has “Industrial” version (the one we have been using) and I don’t think any other vendor offers similar things.
Other things that make it hard to find good SBC: most of them sacrifice a lot of pins to get connectors for cameras and HDMI/Digital Port which are absolutely useless to us. And then there is tendency to put extensive support for AI, which is ALSO useless for us. Just look at BBAI2, it has support for Neural Networks, like 4 DSP processors and so on. I think what I really need is:
2 Ethernet Ports
2 to 4 Cortex-A53 (or similar, 64-bit, general purpose) cores
some Real-Time units capable of interfacing with hardware - 4 PRUSS with 16kB RAM (the more the better) would be nice, but 1 with more RAM is the minimum
eQEP interface (not all timers/PWM modules have it I believe)
eMMC and SD
MYIRtech’s REMI PI that I mentioned earlier would be God send, alas! it does not support booting from SD, at least I was unable to find a way to do it, plus it seems that you can use either WiFi or SD card (they use same lines if I understand the problem correctly). This was a real surprise and immediately turned nearly perfect device into piece of useless junk.
So yeah, BeagleboneBlack 2 “Industrial” will be an instant hit, it should be designed ASAP
