Anybody else using or thinking about BeagleBone Black?

Community General Discussions
1

I'm looking to re-flash and install MachineKit. I'm also eying a Linuxcnc fork as a backup. Has anybody made this board as easy to grasp as an Arduino?

2

Unfortunately it isn’t as
Unfortunately it isn’t as easy to grasp. There are a lot of web resources, but nowhere near as many as for the RasPi. And I doubt there ever will be. The RasPi is supported by the British educational system and is sold with little profit. I can buy one for $40. There is a huge RasPi community including a free web magazine.

I’m still experimenting with the BBB and it works, but I haven’t tried to replace the operating system or such. Unfortunately I’m not working on that anymore for the immediate future.

3

I have a BBB and plan to also flash the MachineKit image.

The guys around here can tell you my plans can take years to get traction. You may want to sign up for the linuxcnc mailing list. I look through some of the posts from time to time. I am sure I have missed some MachineKit posts. At least you will see if/when people have problems and maybe get useful information about how to proceed if you have problems. One piece of info I have run across somewhere is if your BBB is old enough you may need to flash a newer Debian image to the board before trying to flash MachineKit to it. I believe my board is one such candidate.

4

I have another single-board

I have another single-board computer to try for my robots, and that’s http://vocore.io

It’s half the price of rpi, yet has build-in wifi. I will let you know how it works when I get it.

5

** Thanx for the replies,**

 Thanx for the replies, everybody. I have to make my rev c (currently angstrom distro) work in order to use the Hardware Abstraction Layer in multiple projects to standardize as many of my projects’ elements as practical. Seems to be aimed at engineering students lol. Will keep you updated here as I get parts of it useful for we mortals.

6

VoCore looks sweet,

VoCore looks sweet, especially at $20, but I currently have a basic stamp homework board, propeller chip quickstart board, arduino mega 2560, and the beaglebone black. Played properly, I may just able to produce a debian or ubuntu-based environment for programming all but the BS2 in C++.