Technology Alternatives - Summary, Conclusion, Recommendation

This post is part of a thread titled "What Technology to Choose for a Physical Interface Project"

Summary, Conclusion, Recommendation

The following two charts provide a summary of my conclusions after an initial period of "hands-on" evaluation.

 

My conclusions, in narrative form, were summed up as follows:

• Cost does not seem to be a huge issue given that all of the solutions are close in terms of required investment.
• Customer requirements that demand a high degree of computation for analysis could make the single-board computer alternatives attractive given the limited memory available on the Arduino boards.
• The Arduino Mega would be the recommended choice if an Arduino were to be used given it has much more memory than the Uno. 
• The Arduino provides the most simple hardware solution though it’s reliance on “C” as a development language, and without an IDE as good as the BeagleBone Black, adds complexity on the software side.
• The Raspberry Pi, with an Arduino, provides a very flexible solution but at the cost of complexity with two hardware environments and two languages.
• The Raspberry Pi, with an ADC, was a bit more challenging to integrate than was expected though in most other respects it has been easy to work with to date..
• The BeagleBone Black could provide the best overall solution from a hardware and software complexity perspective though it’s user community does not seem as strong as that of the Raspberry Pi.
• At this point in the investigation I would recommend the Arduino Mega with an external ADC or the BeagleBone Black.   
• While the BeagleBone Black merits further investigation, particularly around the user interface, it has been very impressive to date:
• Combines features of Raspberry Pi and Arduino in one package,
• Includes 12bit resolution on board with a high sample rate,
• Looks and feels more “industrial strength” than the Raspberry Pi (and is faster),
• Provides a very user friendly development environment with some characteristics similar to Visual Basic,
• Allows for easy porting of code from Arduino given language similarities.

 Final decision was to pursue a BeagleBone Black solution.