BeagleBone Black Released With 1GHz Cortex-A8 For Only $45 142
DeviceGuru tipped us to the release of the latest single board computer from Beagle Board. It's been two years since the previous BeagleBone was released, and today they've released the BeagleBone Black (including full hardware schematics) at a price competitive with the Raspberry Pi ($10 more, but it comes with a power brick). Powered by a Cortex-A8, it has 512M of DDR3 RAM, 2G of onboard eMMC, two blocks of 46 I/O pins, a pair of 32-bit DSPs, the usual USB host/client ports, Ethernet, and micro-HDMI (a much requested feature). Support is provided for Ångstrom GNU/Linux, Ubuntu, and Android out of the box. Linux Gizmos reports where some of the cost savings came from: "According to BeagleBoard.org cofounder Jason Kridner, interviewed in a Linux.com report today, cost savings also came from removing the default serial port as well as USB-to-serial and USB-to-JTAG interfaces, and including a cheaper single-purpose USB cable. (Three serial interfaces are available via the expansion headers.) In addition, the power expansion header for battery and backlight has been removed."
Re:Missing in action. (Score:5, Informative)
The inclusion of SATA and GigaE would presumably drive the price up to a point they don't think would let them compete with the Raspberry Pi. That will change though, and I'm very looking forward to that time. As soon as SATA and GigaE can be included at around the same price point, these devices suddenly become a viable basis for a whole wealth of serious storage and network devices. The only reason I don't use the Raspberry Pi for anything more serious than a media server on my network is because of the limitations of its USB throughput for both storage and networking.
Re:BUT WILL IT DRIVE CENTRONICS EQUIPMENT ?? (Score:4, Informative)
Yes it will ... it has 65x GPIO, you add the required level converters and use a bit-banging driver.
Or you can get a cheap USB-Parallel adapter if you just want to print.