[mtdev]

Anyone considering doing a raspberry pi project may want to look at the new beaglebone black. It is marginally more expensive, has better performance, is completely open and has a fairly good software support community.

http://beagleboard.org/Products/BeagleBone%20Black

[georgemcbay]

I've got a couple of BeagleBone Blacks, they are great devices.

I love writing Go code on them:

http://www.gmcbay.com/2013/05/go-on-the-beaglebone-black/

http://www.gmcbay.com/2013/05/more-go-on-the-beaglebone-blac...

One caveat emptor for them vs the Pi though is that it doesn't have the GPU assisted video-decoding ability of the Pi (which, despite not being one of the main goals of the Pi ended up being an important factor in the success of the platform, IMO) and even for just basic framebuffer and 3D graphics they do not support 1920x1080 output currently (and if they do in the future it'll likely be limited to a slow refresh rate due to pixel clock limitations). For many people/projects this doesn't matter and the much better GPIO of the BeagleBone (and the presence of a couple of real-time capable microcontrollers separate from the ARM cpu) would be more important than the video limitations.

[johnohara]

Mine arrived two days ago. Beautifully laid out, two symmetrical 46-pin female headers, micro hdmi and microSDHC. Boots flawlessly and looks like a usb drive to Win 7. You need a magnifying glass to see some of the components on its underbelly.

John Clark has just created a new website called armhf.com which has step by step instructions for loading Ubuntu 13.04 into eMMC memory. Site's 20 days old and provides image downloads.

Chose this board as the controller for a Techno-Isel to 3D printer conversion.

[drivers99]

microSD slot and normal HDMI I believe

[georgemcbay]

HDMI connector on the BeagleBone Black is (unlike the Raspberry Pi) micro-HDMI.

[drivers99]

You are right. On closer inspection of each picture I now understand what the ports are: http://www.adafruit.com/blog/2013/05/02/back-in-stock-beagle...

[bnycum]

I second that opinion. The BeagleBone Black has a whole lot more pins available. Some of those pins are ADC (8), PWM (8), and I2C (2). I think the Pi only has 1 PWM and 1 I2C. I'm looking at a BeagleBone Black for in use of a robot I want to build. I do love my Raspberry Pi, though it's main use is opening my garage now.

http://itsbrent.net/2013/03/hacking-my-garage-with-a-raspber...

[jgrahamc]

Has anyone used one of these to make a MAME machine?

[nva]

The cape selection is quite impressive as well.. http://circuitco.com/support/index.php?title=BeagleBone_Cape...

[nfriedly]

How responsive is the BeagleBone Black as a desktop computer?

[newman314]

Does the BeagleBone Black have a distribution that supports ARM hfp?

[tehwebguy]

Mine arrived yesterday, can't wait to play with it!

[andyl]

+1 for BeagleBone Black - what a great device.

Beware: running 'opkg update ; opkg upgrade' broke my system. (disk out of space) Recovered by reloading the OS.