I have two BeagleBone boards -- a PocketBeagle and a BeagleBone Blue -- that had been purchased with ambitions too big for me to realize in the past. In the interest of learning more about the hardware so I can figure out what to do with them, I followed the lead of a local study group to read Exploring BeagleBone, Second Edition by Derek Malloy. I enjoyed reading the book, learned a lot, and thought it was well worth the money. Now that I am better informed, I returned to the topic of what I should do with my boards.

I appreciate the aims of the BeagleBoard foundation, but these boards are in a tough spot finding a niche in the marketplace. Beagle boards have a great out-of-the-box experience with a tutorial page and Cloud9 IDE running by default. But as soon as we try to go beyond that introduction, all too quickly we find that we're on our own. The Raspberry Pi foundation has been much more successful at building a beginner-friendly software ecosystem to support those trips beyond the introduction. On the hardware side, Broadcom processors on a Pi are far more computationally powerful than CPUs on equivalent beagles. This includes a move to 64-bit capable processors on the Raspberry Pi 3 in 2017, well ahead of BeagleBoard AI-64 that launched this year (2022). That last bit is important for robotics, as ROS2 is focused on 64-bit architectures and there's no guarantee of support for 32-bit builds.

Beyond the CPU, there were a few advantages to a Beagle board. My favorite are the more extensive (and usable) collection of onboard LEDs and buttons, including a power button for graceful powerup / shutdown that is still missing from a Raspberry Pi. There is also onboard flash memory storage of known quality, which makes their performance far more predictable than random microSD cards people would try to use with their Raspberry Pi. None of those would be considered make-or-break features, though.

What I had considered a definitive BeagleBone hardware advantage are the programmable real-time units (PRU) within Octavo modules, capable of tasks with timing precision beyond the guarantee of a Linux operating system. In theory that sounded like great teaming for many hardware projects, but in Exploring BeagleBone chapter 15 I got a look at the reality of using a PRU and I became far less enamored. Those PRU had their own instructions, their own code building toolchain, their own debugging tools, and their own ways of communicating with the rest of the system. It looked quite convoluted and intimidating for a beginner. Learning to use the PRU is not like learning a little peripheral. It is literally learning an entirely new microcontroller and that knowledge is not portable to any other hardware. I can see the payoff for highly integrated commercial industrial solutions, but that kind of time investment is hard to justify for hobbyist one-off projects. I now understand why BeagleBoard PRUs aren't used as widely as I had expected them to be.

None of the above sounded great for my general use of BeagleBoard, but what about the robotics-specific focus of the BeagleBoard Blue? It has lots of robot-focused hardware, crammed onto a small board. Their corresponding software is the "Robot Control Library", and I can get a good feel for its capabilities via the library documentation site. Generally speaking, it looked fine until I clicked on the link to its GitHub repository. I saw the most recent update was more than two years ago, and there is a long backlog of filed issues few people are looking at. Those who put in the effort to contribute code in a pull request could only watch and sit them gather dust. The oldest PR is over two years old and has yet to be merged. All signs of an abandoned codebase.

I like the idea of BeagleBone, but after I took a closer look, I'm not terribly enthused at the reality. At the moment I don't see a project idea niche where a BeagleBone board would be the best tool for the job. With my updated knowledge, I hope to recognize a good fit for a Beagle board if an opportunity should arise. But until then, my boards are going back into their boxes to continue gathering dust.