[SOLVED] 1st Embedded board:- RPi B+ OR BeagleBone Black - Rev C OR Cubietruck Cubieboard3 ?

Hey guys,

I had to sell my assembled desktop for financial constraints a few months ago. Though as of now my Thinkpad does the duty of both a desktop with a 19' second monitor at my home desk as well as a netbook while lazying around in my hall, I have around 5K-6K INR(~90 US$) spare which I would like to spend on an embedded box which I could play around with.

1) I'm getting a full kit of RPi B+ in amazingly good price locally :-
https://www.crazypi.com/Raspberry-pi-complete-kit

2) The BeagleBone black is 15$ more, but looks really good :-
https://www.crazypi.com/BeagleBone-B...K-COMPLETE-KIT

3) And the most powerful and expensive of the lot is CUBIETRUCK :-
https://www.crazypi.com/CUBIEBOARD/C...ARD-CUBIETRUCK

I could afford all of the 3 above but I don't even know if more power on the 3rd one will ever be useful or will there be a good community support?

My intentions are to learn
- How embedded Linux can be installed from scratch up.
- As a C enthusiast and a perpetual Python learner, I'd have another platform to play around with.
- Something which can be expendable as in more accessories available once I grow into it.
- I don't want it to be a desktop replacement by any means however I plan to run it as a machine which stays up for days and downloads torrents for me.

Just a confused guy here, any help would largely be appreciated.

Thanks and regards.

I've a BeagleBone Black sitting at home but to be honest I've hardly even turned it on.

On the other hand I've three RasPis, all just the older "B", I've one for generally mucking about with, one that's always on and currently sits doing regular rsyncs of my personal "production" web server and one that's got an AdaFruit LCD touchscreen on it! (Currently running a ZX Spectrum emulator and playing Manic Miner using the buttons beloq the touchscreen)

The great thing about the Pi is that there's such a HUGE community and a wealth of sites and reference material. The Pi isn't fast, but it all depends on what you want to use it for. For learning about Linux etc. it's just fine.

I'm tempted by the B+ but I've also been recently tempted by this:

http://www.sainsmart.com/banana-pi-m...dual-core.html

Haven't got a hold of one yet, but it's on my Xmas list!

Thanks for replying man.
I had a look at banana pi and its available as well at a bit higher price somewhere between RPi and beagleboard black-
https://www.crazypi.com/BANANA-PI

However I've got couple of questions now -
1. Does lack of physical power off/ reset buttons matter for RPi?
2. Will banana pi be compatible with the addons of RPi?
3. How's beaglebone black standing compare to banana pi? Their price is almost same though beaglebone seem to have an edge with eMMC. How's the community support for beaglebone compare to pi?

thanks.

1. It's never bothered me in the past, I've never managed to crash my own Pi to the point where I couldn't login and do a normal shutdown -h. On the few occasions where I've had to pull the power on one at work (we use them with "screenly-os" to drive displays) it's never been an issue either.

Regarding the Banana/BeagleBone, I've not really done much more than read the specs of the Banana so couldn't give any real information about comparison.

If you search a bit, over time you'll find that a lot of people end up having their SD and microSD cards fail due to write cycle overflows. All the flash cards have a finite amount of write cycles and as a result they will eventually fail. On the Pi, the only boot card is the SD card. People then tend to use that card to store data and stuff. Eventually the card fails. Now you can make it so that the Pi only boots off the SD and use an external HDD via USB to store data which you'll write, erase, re-write, etc. It's just something to be aware of. Similarly the BBB MMC is also flash memory, therefore same issue but you can boot off the internal MMC, use a microSD card for data, or a USB attached HDD also for that.

As TenTenths says, the Pi has a very large community and a wide variety of projects.

My concern, stated above is that people think it's all cool, very cheap, they set it up as an everyday computer, pat theirselves on the back, and then a few weeks or months later it stops working because the flash media has finally reached a limit of write cycles.

The other thing to be aware of is for all of these ARM based variants, the ARM is fine; however in a full PC, they have circuitry and a bridge chip specifically to drive the USB with 2 Amps of current capabilities. As a result, desktops and full laptops generally drive enough power for things like external USB HDDs or WIFI dongles, etc. The Pi, BBB, and other ARM board variants hedge on running low power, no fans, they do have bridge circuitry to drive the peripherals, however they are not generally capable of driving good power through the USB interface. Therefore it's a good idea to look into powered USB peripherals. There was a great product, a USB HUB that someone posted a link too, in fact I think on one of the LQ forums. The HUB was powered via an A/C to D/C power supply from your wall, but also the HUB had a specially marked mini or micro USB jack which had like the Pi symbol on it and the intention was that this jack was to be used for the cable to power the Pi. In addition to it being cool, saving one from using extra wall jacks, it also IMHO tied the grounds together commonly between the USB peripherals and the Pi, which is a good thing on a hobbyist system where the hardware hasn't specifically been tested rigorously. That jack was also exclusively power, not USB except in the form of the connector.

Note also that while you can buy different wall power converters to USB where they drive more amps with different products, it doesn't matter if you buy some highly capable converter which can drive like 5A, the Pi only will take what it needs and it's circuitry driving the USB is the limiting factor as far as how much power is available for peripherals. So thinking you can buy a more powerful power supply for the Pi isn't the correct solution.

Regarding SD cards, I've had no problem with branded cards, the 32Gb I've just taken out my Pi was in use 24/7/365 doing rsync backups every 15 minutes and never had issues. Only reason I took it out is that I've upgraded it to a 64Gb card.

Regarding powered peripherals, there's quite a few hubs now that are being aimed at Pi(etc.) users which have a suitably "robust" output and I'd definitely go down that route if I was using other things that needed power.

Thanks guys. So the main 2 problems with RPi are :-

1. No local storage, which means a sooner wear and tear of the SD cards. But would a good Sandisk class 10 card work for booting the OS- for lets say an year?

2. The power output limitaion, but as you mentioned that can be solved by - either using a external fast SD card mounted on a USB card reader for data store or by using a USB hub powered by external power supply for connecting the SATA disks/SSD.

The biggest pro of RPi seems to be the hugest community over all the 3 and I think for a first timer, it would be wise to go with RPi so that if I get stuck somewhere, at least I'd be able to get help faster than lets say Cubieboard community. Also, its the cheapest of the lot so even if I brick it in the process, won't hurt too much.
I just need a push from the existing ARM board users to confirm that as an ARM newbie, I'll be making better decision by going with RPi B+.


PS: The MINIX 3 has been ported to Beablebone first, rather than RPi. Strange. This could be good exercise with RPi.

Thanks.

Personally I feel that all SD cards are pretty much equal. These are manufactured in huge bulk. Likely the actual manufacturers have several OEM contracts where they build similar parts with minor differences in the chip design, provided by the manufacturers. Meanwhile the materials and quality are all similar because they are manufactured using common processes. Further, the technology is little different between each until someone invents something different than NAND technology to store NV data on these chips.

The length of use time depends how much you write to the card and how much data you're writing, plus erasing.

Great read. But then, how are the thousands of people running some pretty cool DIY projects/ robotic projects/ 24*7 file/web servers running on Pi are managing this deal with?
Just keep backing up your complete SD card image every month or so?

Regards.

Originally Posted by PrinceCruise Great read. But then, how are the thousands of people running some pretty cool DIY projects/ robotic projects/ 24*7 file/web servers running on Pi are managing this deal with? Just keep backing up your complete SD card image every month or so? Regards.

Just search the web for things like "sd card write cycle limits" or similar terms. Granted the cycles are upwards of 1 million and wear leveling helps a great deal. Some test company did all location writes constantly to a card and killed it in about 3 months. Yes, it's a LOT of data, and the bigger the card, the more space allocated for wear leveling. Not saying you can't get long use out of an SD card, but it does depend how much data you are writing and re-writing.

Well, much thanks for the replies, both of you.

I believe, in that case going with RPi will be a better choice if I attach a small USB pen drive to one of its ports for user data and writing log files. plus for an ARM first timer the community support will be helpful.

I'll look for the option of using flash file system for root if that helps.

Any other valuable suggestion would be welcome.

Thanks.

If I understand what you need I'd suggest a Hardkernel Odroid U3, which has a powerful Samsung SoC and 2GB RAM for 65$ including shipping. I'd not buy a Banana Pi, and Cubietruck costs much and has a weak SoC.

I was thinking the odroid myself. I tried to move my web server to a Pi a while back and my calendar crashed it so its back on the old laptop. Seemed to work ok otherwise so I think just a little more power would be fine.

I've tried to sue the Pi for PiMAME/Piplay and had several of the games lag as well, it just doesn't seem up to the task of doing anything.