Beaglebone Black

[Dirk Broer]

The Beaglebone Black, in its Rev.C, is a worthy opponent for the Raspberry Pi B+.
In fact the Beaglebone has more than an edge on the single-core Raspberries (A, A+, B and B+)
by virtue of its 1000 MHz ARM Cortex-A8 CPU, its 4GB onboard storage -and the USB cable that comes free with it.

Compared to the Raspberry you can save on the cost of an external SD-card and the USB cable,
and suddenly the price difference between the boads has -more than- evaporated.

Rev.B, which still used 2GB onboard storage.

Doesn't the beaglebone Black have any draw-back? Well, it only has one USB2.0 port, but then again:
you can use keyboard, monitor and mouse of any Windows or Linux PC to control it over the supplied USB cable.
And just like the Raspberry Pi A versions, you can make use of a USB hub when you need more than one USB port.

And like the Raspberry Pi, the Beaglebone has much hardware made to fit: there are shields especially made for the Beaglebone,
just like for the Raspberry Pi. There is e.g. a Logi Bone -just as there is a Logi Pi- to turn your bord into a FPGA tool;
there are Beaglebone to Arduino shields, so your Beaglebone should be able to carry e.g. a radiation shield too, just like the Raspberry.

So far the only thing that really sets the Beaglebone Black aside from the Raspberry Pi is the lack of a quad core development, a Beaglebone Black2.

I'll go and test it, using BOINC, and let you know what fares better: The Raspberry Pi B+, the Beaglebone Black Rev.C, the Banana Pro or the Raspberry Pi2.

As it turns out the Raspberry Pi2 fares best, followed by the Beaglebone, The Raspberry Pi B+ and lastly the Banana Pro (least stable of the four, needs constant care/reformatting its SD-card).