[lemevi]

Have you tried a BeagleBone Black or any kind of BeagleBoard? What are you scaling RPi's for? Arduino and Raspberry pis strike me as toys compared to BBB's. BBBs are a lot less forgiving and require way more understanding of basic electronics to do anything with, even as simple as lighting an external LED will break your BBB if you didn't do it right, but they seem more powerful in terms of what you can do (although underpowered compared to Rasbperry Pi when it comes to video processing).

[perlin]

I have plenty of experience frying BBBs while trying to make LEDs blink ;) http://colorcreative.io/portfolio.html. The reason we use RPis in my place of work is due to USB peripheral support. I love the dedicated PRU in the BBB, though. It's perfect for the tight timing spec required by the WS281x LEDs :)

[StavrosK]

Wait, how can you break the BBB with a LED? I'm going to use one for a LEGO robot, and I'd like to not fry it :P

[lemevi]

The gpio pins have low tolerance. Apply more than the 8mA or 3.3v and you permanently damage your board. LED's usually require 20mA to achieve a good brightness so you have to create a safe circuit using a bipolar transistor and the 3.3v power pin which supplies way more current than a gpio pin. If you hook up that transistor wrong or short the circuit it's game over.

I actually think you can even damage the board if you create a short between the gpio pins and ground. So any kind of circuit requires a resistor, carefully reading the system manual and data sheets for your components and using ohm's law prior to hooking up components.

[StavrosK]

That's good to know, thank you. I'll have to only drive the MOSFETs with it, in that case, and avoid too much experimentation.

[lemevi]

Oh I wasn't saying not to use a bipolar transistor. In any case, both would work. Good luck!

[StavrosK]

Oh, no, I need the MOSFET anyway because of the load. I generally meant "I'll avoid unknown components/experiments with the BBB", thanks!

[hatsunearu]

Our team has personally blown through three of them through shorting faults. It's our fault, but the BBB is a pretty tender beast.

[StavrosK]

That's too bad, it's pretty pricy :/ It's no $2 ESP8266, I wouldn't feel very bad shorting that, but at $70, I'm going to be super careful with my BBB.