What Technology to Choose for a Physical Interface Project?

High Level Project Requirement

Goal of the project will be to integrate a piece of test equipment with a user friendly and computationally capable front-end that can operate without being attached to a dedicated computer.   The host needs to capture observations from a single analog source (at a rate of between 100 and 200 obs/sec), provide real-time feedback, and save the captured data to be presented with some other analysis tools.

Obviously I had a fair amount of experience with the Arduino and with the Raspberry Pi but I also wanted to look at another single board computer.   A survey of the market led me to the BeagleBone Black.   Given this, the alternatives that were investigated on a hands-on basis were:

• Arduino - a single-board microcontroller designed to make the process of using electronics in multidisciplinary projects more accessible.
• Raspberry Pi - a credit-card-sized single-board computer developed in the UK by the Raspberry Pi Foundation
• Beaglebone Black - a low-power open-source hardware single-board computer produced by Texas Instruments in association with Digi-Key.

There are a variety of other technologies but these three represent what I feel to be the best of those other alternatives.