Review on 🖥️ Eleduino BeagleBone Black Rev C (4G) SBC Development Board by Jim Linquist

============How to choose between BeagleBone Black and Raspberry Pi============If you just want to run XBMC /Kodi then BBB is useless. Get a Raspberry Pi. If you have a hardware project where you need to drive a lot of sensors and motors (but don't need HD video playback or high-resolution display over HDMI), BBB is your best bet. If you are an educator and want to teach your students programming skills, use the Raspberry Pi and its learning materials. If you want to work with the latest ARM designs, play with Android, Linux and more, choose BBB. For desktop configuration: 🍒 With Raspberry Pi you can use whatever accessories you have, just insert the SD card, connect the power supply and you're done. 🍒 The BBB only has a micro HDMI connector, so you will need an adapter for standard HDMI. Cable. Also, the BBB only has one USB host port, so a USB hub is required to connect the keyboard and mouse. It's entirely possible to run a Linux desktop on a 4GB eMMC in a BBB, but you can add an SD card (class 10), cloud storage, or an external USB drive. In addition, the BBB does not have the video decoding and encoding capabilities of the Raspberry Pi, has no camera interface (although a USB camera can be used), HDMI resolution is limited to a maximum resolution of 1280×1024, and the output is composite not available. The BBB is a great little hobbyist board with lots of I/O and decent software support. I love that the Texas Instruments AM335x Sitara MPU datasheet is free to download and there is no NDA (unlike many Broadcom and Marvell chips). I bought the BeagleBone Black thinking I could use it for industrial system development. The BBB I received was running Debian on kernel 4.4.9-ti-r25. From the looks of it, the folks behind BBB have taken great care to ensure each device is loaded with the latest software before it ships. I've never had to rely on any SBC vendor for tech support or customer service (I compiled the kernel and boot image for my BBB anyway), but it's a refreshing attitude and I'm sure a lot of people love BBB. broad support. One thing about the BBB that I liked was the protective coating as the devices I design will work in industrial environments. However, after receiving the BBB, I found that the conformal coating was only there so the BBB marketing team could tell they had it. The chips are unevenly covered: some are fully covered, others are half covered, one is about 3/4 covered. It struck me as odd. If you need a development board for industrial applications (e.g. industrial temperature range, long-term availability, PRU, QEP, HR PWM) I would recommend the Element14 BeagleBone Black Industrial 4G. It has the same specs as the BeagleBone Black Rev C but comes with a red PCB, support for an extended temperature range (-20 to +85°C) and additional board protection with a conformal coating. Or check out the similarly priced Freescale iMX6, which has a different feature set. PS One thing I miss in an industrial grade SBC is a way to keep time accurate in the event of a power outage. Instead I added some solid battery powered RTC modules. PSS Octavo Systems has developed a BeagleBone Black reference design that is exactly the same as the original board except for one detail: it is based on the company's OSD3358 (SiP) system, which combines a Texas Instruments AM3358 Cortex A8 processor with up to 1GB of RAM , TI LDO and PMIC and over 140 passive components in a single 400-ball BGA package. The only other three core components of the reference design are the eMMC flash, the Ethernet transceiver, and the HDMI framing module. The industrial version has a temperature range of -40°C to +85°C.