Today I received from SeeedStudio a BeagleBone Green. Here’s the unboxing video:
For those who may not know this board, it’s an embedded computer, that is a board that can run Linux O.S. (or Android). BeagleBone Green is the result of a collaboration between BeagleBoard.org and SeeedStudio: it’s based on the open design of the BeagleBone Black board – manufactured by BeagleBoard – slightly modified by SeeedStudio with the addition of two Grove connectors and with the removal of the HDMI port.
The Grove connectors make easy the connections of sensors, actuators… that adopt this standard:
A comparison with the Raspberry Pi is natural: on the Internet you can find several articles about pros and cons, starting from the biased ones (for example this one, from the BeagleBoard website) to the more neutral ones(here and here).
In my opinion, the main advantages of the BeagleBone Green are:
- eMMC onboard, without the need of an external SD card to run the operating system
- a good choice of I/O peripherals (7 ADC, 8 PWM, 4 serials…)
- 2 32bit PRU microcontrollers
The last point is the most intesting: those two embedded microcontrollers allow to develop realtime complex applications like logic analyzers (BeagleLogic).
To summarize pros and cons, the Raspberry Pi seems more suitable for multimedia applications, while the BeagleBone for automation and realtime tasks. Which is your opinion? Have you already worked with this board?