BeagleBone Black

The Raspberry Pi was definitely not the first single board computer nor the first in it's form factor of "credit card" size.   In fact the concept has been around for decades and the first credit card size computers for years.   What the Raspberry Pi has done is popularize the notion AND (presumably) drive down the costs of at least one other computer in this class, the BeagleBone Black.

The BeagleBone Black, shown below, is the latest offering from BeagleBoard and seems to be aimed straight at the Raspberry Pi price point.   Since I am interested in the physical interface side of computing I was very interested to see this computer seeming to merge an Arduino with an ARM processor based computer. 

I have only started to work with this device but on first blush I would say that it looks and feels like a more professional device than the Raspberry Pi.   It has a faster processor, though less capable graphics, and as I said, a full range of physical interface capabilities including on board, 12bit, Analog to Digital Conversion.

On the down side I would say that it is more complicated to get going...I am struggling a bit with their way or burning images, and, their user community is not as strong as I have come to be used to with the Raspberry Pi.   Lastly, they chose JavaScript as their primary development language.  JavaScript???  

More to come later including a comparison of the environments that I have been testing.