Interesting how we are the last to know about this!
Regards,
John
Funny how these articles always seem to report stuff that’s either incorrect or not entirely accurate.
I think the overlying information given by the site is nice to know ( such as new hardware being released ), but their actual write-ups are nothing more than FUD. The article you linked to had several points of misinformation, such as the BBB’s processor speed ( but somehow they managed to get it right in the table of board differences ).
Anyway, the board sound interesting, but personally I think they went the wrong direction in removing the eMMC. and am pretty sure it can be disabled via device tree overlays if additional IO’s are needed ( which really wont give you many back anyway.).HDMI on the other hand, I’d never miss.
Don’t even get me started with “Angstrom is prefered by most / more professional developers . . .” Because that is plain B.S. Also the statement "Moving to the more user friendly Debian
. . ." Is fairly hilarious. Mainly because many long time users of other distro’s seem to have a hard time grasping the concepts of a more traditional Linux distro like Debian. For the record though this statement is accurate as Debian actually has real / proper documentation. Where Angstrom falls flat on its face
I could go on, and on, but the fact is that “real professionals” are going to use what makes the most sense for their project. If they want small, Angstrom is probably the last thing in their minds. QNX, or Busybox on a microkernel come to mind far ahead of anything else.
Funny how these articles always seem to report stuff that’s either incorrect or not entirely accurate.
I think the overlying information given by the site is nice to know ( such as new hardware being released ), but their actual write-ups are nothing more than FUD. The article you linked to had several points of misinformation, such as the BBB’s processor speed ( but somehow they managed to get it right in the table of board differences ).
Anyway, the board sound interesting, but personally I think they went the wrong direction in removing the eMMC. and am pretty sure it can be disabled via device tree overlays if additional IO’s are needed ( which really wont give you many back anyway.).HDMI on the other hand, I’d never miss.
Looks like the same board as the BBB with the eMMC and HDMI chips not populated. I’m sure Gerald & circuitco have analyzed the market requirement and this is what the market wants. If you have the numbers, I’m sure they will manufacture a batch with the eMMC populated or you could always add it yourself.
From what I could gather from the article, these are embest ./ element14 boards. Kind of hard to read through as one part of the article seems like it’s implying one thing, where in another it seems to go another direction.
So from the article “The BlueSteel-Basic is available for pre-order now at $55” and the full version is $55 at Digikey. What’s the point? 
Moreover does removing a couple of chips make this board industrial friendly?
“The IT version offers an industrial temperature range of -40 to 100°C” - who wrote this bullshit? There aren’t any ICs at the market that can accept such temperature
This COM is a BBB clone and really tested and qualified for industrial applications!
http://www.mentorel.com/product/usomiq-am335x/
Unless the volume pricing is really cheap, I just don’t get it…
Just an aside, there are plenty of ‘ICs’ on the market that are validated for -40 to +125C, or even -40 to +150C.
So not entirely sure where that comment is coming from.
Jonathan Smith
The GbE variant seems like it would be fairly useful, except that it only has one GbE port ( really need two to be useful ). Unless all you need is a USB2.0 to GbE bridge . . .
So from the article "The BlueSteel-Basic is available for pre-order now
at $55" and the full version is $55 at Digikey. What's the point?
Well, the full version is only hypothetically available at DigiKey.
The commercial board may allow CircuitCo to make a profit, and act as a incentive keep them in stock, which would be nice.
Moreover does removing a couple of chips make this board industrial
friendly?
Less power is a win. Less complexity is a win. Possibly greater availability due to fewer exotic parts is a win.
- Mike
I suspect this board is mostly intended as an update to the original
BeagleBone White.
Yes, you can disable eMMC on a 'Black with the cape manager, but the
system is still setup to boot from eMMC. If you want to use the eMMC
pins on a black you need to make sure they are not loaded/driven until
the system has booted, which is a pain (and many capes originally
designed for the 'White don't do this). Also, the eMMC overlaps with
the GPMC bus, which is the best/only way to get a general purpose high
speed bus off the chip to interface to something like an FPGA. Anyone
designing a system using the GMPC is required to disable the eMMC and
run from uSD anyway.
I'm mostly hoping this pulls some of the commercial users away from
using the stock BBB, leaving more for the community. I figure there's a
reason the board has the specs it has, and I suspect it's based on who's
buying them in quantity.
Charles, well as you pointed out there is a positive in every situation I suppose 
Works out fin for me in other ways as I do not plan on buying any embest / element14 branded boards anytime soon.
And yeah i got the part where they were trying to help out BB white cape people but GbE on a board with no internal storage? I don’t get it, but hey I’m not going to buy one anyway so who cares what I think right ?
William,
You’ve mentioned embest a couple of times, I’d just like to clarify that the BlueSteel board is manufactured by CircuitCo and not embest.
Scott
From what I could gather from the article, these are embest ./ element14
boards. Kind of hard to read through as one part of the article seems like
it's implying one thing, where in another it seems to go another direction.
The board is produced by CircuitCo. It's a great little board with
just the right stuff removed to make it more palatable for some. I
like it a lot.
Short and Sweet
BlueSteel-Basic and all other BlueSteel products are manufactured in the Richardson, Texas on site of Circuitco.
the benefits for BlueSteel products have been carefully considered to provide the follow benefits:
-
no restrictions on commercial usage
-
volume price discounts
-
Enable Third Party Software Vendors to provide commercial SDKs
-
all I/O is available on the expansion header
as an OEM/ODM developer, the BeagleBone Black presents a great starting point, however it does present a number of obstacles, in that BeagleBoard.org has significant restrictions on the use of the BeagleBoard logo and the use of the board in commercial products:
http://www.elinux.org/Beagleboard:BeagleBoneBlack#Terms_of_Use
In addition, there a limited set of authorized distributors who can sell BeagleBone Black, and they are limited in the number of boards they can sell to a single customer. For example you can look at the Adafruit website:
"Limit 1 (one) per customer, orders cannot be combined."
http://www.adafruit.com/products/1876
Another aspect is that most OEM/ODM developers who are including the BeagleBone Black (in violation of the terms of use) want to have the full set of I/O on the expansion header so that they can implement their own features on a daughter board. It is far easier to add a feature you need on a daughter board, than to remove features you don’t need from the main board.
This very same principle of commercial usage has already been recognized by Embest which has released their own version of a BeagleBone Black clone for the same target market. Logic Supply has a very good discussion of the issues:
Hi Scott,
Thanks for clarifying. I guess I found the whole write-up at LinuxGizmos rather confusing. Part of the problem on my behalf is that I guess I’ve viewed Circuitco, and beagleboard.org as kind of the same entity. The other part of my confusion is that the write-up seems to be all over the place.