BeagleBone Black / Raspberry Pi / etc.
 

I bought a BeagleBone Black (only $45) a couple weeks ago and due to low supply and high demand I only recently recieved it. It's essentially a Raspberry Pi (single board computer), except it has like ~60 GPIO pins instead of like 8 (for attaching things like sensors and motors, etc). It also has a lot better specs than the Pi, which is only $10 cheaper.

My main goal in life is to build a robot that will chase my kittens around and shoot them with a water cannon. I plan on building a wheeled chassis that can flip upside down and still drive (in case it gets knocked down the stairs by an angry kitten). I plan to use infrared and ultrasonic sensors for navigation in addition to stereo video for image/pattern recognition. I don't really have a timeline as to how long this will take to get the software and hardware running decently, but I am guessing at least a month or two. I was going to attempt this with just a microcontroller, but it became apparent that as the more features I wanted to add to the robot, the more that multithreading would be necessary. Programming finite state machines in C is only viable to a certain point, then you kind of need the overhead of a complete operating system. I plan to install Arch Linux on it which is the most stripped down version I know of, then write a threaded GPIO framework in C++11.

I also have plans to try and run EQ off of it, through Wine, but I need to obtain a MicroSD card and a MicroHDMI cable for it. I'm not sure what the graphics processing capabilities are, but I do think it should be able to at least boot up and run at a choppy framerate.

Anyone else played around with these kind of boards before, done some cool stuff?

I got an rpi, and use it as my media player for movies using xbmc. Streaming over wireless using a nas. I use raspbmc. I have used the raspbmc to stream video from an ipad using airplay that raspbmc supports. That worked good.

I had it running seq for eqlive to see if it would using an hdmi to dvi adapter.

I plan to build a full size arcade playing old games like defender and put an rpi in it, using one of the game emulators. Havent decided whether to use the gpio or a keyboard convertor to usb card.

H

I used a shitty knock off that was in half Chinese but streamed netflix

Replaced it with Google Chrome, never been happier

Our tv supports netflix and amazon video. My nas will run as a plex server, which newer tvs also support.

Lack of netflix in rpi hasnt mattered to us.

Have a roku 2 for that downstairs. That works good for old analog tube tv. I am a cheap skate. I need some new tvs.

H

no

What tv do u use that naturally supports netflix amd amazon? New Samsung smart tv or?

Its a Vizio, but about 3 or 4 years old.

The netflix is older ver too, that doesnt support diff users. So that sucks.

H

I really want to get a Parallella board as it is one of the few single board computers that comes with a multi-core processor. It also has a full-fledged FPGA integrated into it, so the possibilities of things you can do with it in terms of concurrent sensor readings are almost endless. I made an 8-bit processor with about 10 instructions on an FPGA a few years ago (CPU http://i.imgur.com/VRGsFi9.png / ALU http://i.imgur.com/FkcwVYA.png / Cache http://i.imgur.com/sqr09Ky.png) and have always wanted to make a 64-bit one with a full instruction set. The problem with the Parallella is it started as a kickstarter project and not all of the original donators havent gotten boards yet, so theres a long wait to get one.

They claim on their FAQ that it has 25x the computing power of the Pi.

:c

I got one and made a RetroPie box out of it that I'm going to put in my car (screens in the back for the kids). Also using it as a portable movie box for them.

Netflix got better once I could split the kids profile from the parents profile.

However our recommended are still 10 rows of cartoons "because you've watched: scoob doo, rugrats, Dora the explorer, the croods, dragon tales....."