Hello. Just joined as I’m doing research for my startup in the sustainable energy space and am looking for a platform to base our compute capabilities on. I have some decent experience doing projects on the RPi platform and am trying to get up to speed on the BB platform. I have been a programmer and hardware hacker for a long time, although I won’t be doing the bulk of this work long term, as a founder, I am vested in the platform decision and want to make sure we’re making a good one.
On paper, the BB platform seems ideal. The BBB in particular seems perfect for our application as it allows a good amount of IO, reasonable compute speeds, decent memory and storage options, and supports a lot of comms protocols. Our requirements need a lot of environmental sensors (GNSS/RTK, temp, pressure, moisture, Hall effect/voltage/amperage instrumentation, compass/accelerometers, lots of relay/on/off switch stuff, etc). Our needs are not heavy compute like the BB AI boards are geared for, but lots of IO and compute of the “if this then turn on that” sort of compute in near real time.
From this perspective, the BBB competes very favorably with the RPi or ESP platforms in almost every aspect.
However, as I go to look for BBB to start prototyping on, I’m having trouble finding boards in stock anywhere. For most electronics distributors (Digikey, Mouser, etc), they are discontinued and have been for awhile. I’m specifically looking for the BBB wireless to start and I can’t find it available anywhere.
Also, I’m worried about support for various sensors and capes/boards, as our requirements need a lot of environmental sensors as I mentioned. I’m not expecting a ton of plug n play boards like you see on the RPi, and I know that some of those boards could even be adapted to work with the BB IO pins, but there just seems to be a vast dearth of choices that are BBB specific. This makes me feel like there’s just a general lack of support by vendors.
Lastly, as I read through the forums, I see relatively little community activity, and just a handful of names that speak with expertise and real world authority. This compared to very engaged and deep communities on the RPi and ESP forums. Most of the topics seem to be with basic “getting things to work” topics, like driver support or flakey OS configuration details, which concerns me that some of the software just isn’t fully baked. Our applications need to be fairly reliable (as reliable as hardware/software tends to get).
From the outside, I really feel like the BB project has everything we would want for our product sets, but don’t want to get into it and realize 6 months later that this was a dead end and have to switch development to another platform altogether. Especially the RPi platform, as it already feels limited for what we want to do.
So I ask for candor and objectivity as humbly as I can: would you start a new project on BB today? What are the pros/cons, particularly given the rough requirements I’ve mentioned? Are we missing something in our evaluation criteria that you would recommend considering?
Thanks in advance for your engagement and thoughts. Cheers!