The BB arrived safely. It was well packaged and it booted up the moment I turned it on. There's a blinking light that tell you if it is working. The instruction sheet is brief but sufficient to get started and there is, of course, heaps more info on the web. I flashed it with Ubuntu: no problems, and installed Seafile to deliver a synched NAS service around the house, as a caldav server (Baikal) as well. All straight forward. The BB can do a lot more than this and I plan to integrate it with some of my embedded projects over the next few months. First up is wireless connection to my letter box. One of the advantages of the BB is it is so low power I can leave it on all the time. I don't even use a disk drive for the NAS function, just a USB stick.

Hmm. I meant to give five stars, but I can't edit that.

It's open. The designers went to great lengths to ensure all the docs for all the parts on the board were available from the manufacturers without an NDA. The same can't be said about the RPi.

I made this cool antique podcast player with it: http://blog.roderickmann.org/2015/01/podtique/

While this board is suitable for a wide array of purposes, and I generally like it for the selection of I/O on the 46 pin connectors, this is one of the more fragile boards I have ever used. The power supply chip on the board is the weak link. Any one of a number of things will trash it. As long as you are careful with the board you won't have problems, but in a prototype environment, sh*t happens, and the BBB is not forgiving. I've also had the board fail to properly boot upon power up (from an SD card). I used one in a project where it was remotely installed and I had to add an external watchdog to reset power if the board failed to boot. I've used upwards of 20 of these boards in a number of projects, and the issues I describe above are not isolated to one or two boards.

I'm using the BBB for a product we are designing and it was working great until I put 5v to one of the GPIO lines and instantly bricked the unit. My stupid fault but I wished there was some type of over-voltage protection on the IO lines.

I got my BBBs shipped within two days. I accidently fried one of my old devices (operator error). I was surprised to realize I could simply put the SD card in, and it automatically booted into the old system I has on the fried Beaglebone. This made me feel happy. 5 stars....but remember, the input pins are quire sensitive to over-voltage. Still, it is an excellent unit and fast enough for my demanding applications.

Good

Thanks for the good-quality and arrived on time, thank you, SparkFun!

We use these boards for product development projects ... those that require the QNX RTOS. We always get quality product from SparkFun, fast delivery, a great price.

Performed as expected!

I'm using this as an embedded linux machine, so I can't comment on the pins. As a linux box, I can run a familiar Debian distribution with 4.0+ kernels. This is a great product for doing heavy computation that an Arduino can't do. One of the most underrated features is that you can also use the beaglebone as a usb client -- great for plug-and-play projects!

I had one BeagleBone Black - Rev. C and need another to test out CAN bus. I love this board as it has a lot of I/O on it. There is so much you can do with this board and would be great as the brains of a robot.

I would get the book "Exploring BEAGLEBONE" by Derek Molloy. This book is a great companion to learn embedded programming.

I bought this to get a better understanding of SBCs on my own time to tinker with. It ran perfectly out of the box, reinstalled my image of choice, and connects to my Debian PC via sudo screen /dev/ttyUSB0 with the tty serial cable that Sparkfun sells. Got the matching 4.3" screen cape. It runs like any other Debian PC.

I had a difficult time with the Beaglebone Black product. The opinion I formed is that product should not be offered as an "big brother" alternative to Arduino for the hobby customers. Outside of the introductory programming environments that are offered out of the box, users familiar with the Arduino system will find this difficult to impossible to make I/O work the way that they are used on Arduino. There is no equivalent of the Wiring system. There is no comprehensive documentation on precisely what to do access the available devices. There are no official tools for configuring the I/O outside of items that require almost a kernel driver level experience. Individuals have produced some tools but these will be touch and go as to their quality. Without much independent research and study into the Cape/Device Tree system and the Linux drivers that one must use to access digital, analog input and PWM, they will not be able to make the BBB do what they want to do. Further, hobby users will be shocked that they cannot obtain high performance that they are used to from their programs. This is due to the overhead that all methods of access to hardware will suffer going through the only sanctioned way- the Linux devfs device drivers.

The BBB is a completely different beast, and I'm afraid it is only appropriate for schooled Linux embedded systems professionals or those hobbyists that aspire to be one.

Drivers do not work with Windos 10 FYI

I use these on my cnc machines and they work great. Received the unit in working condition. The shipping is very slow, but I expected it to be.

This is a great board for more advanced users. The I/O peripherals on the expansion headers are very rich, highly documented, and extremely stable. With the exception of the 3D graphics which is still completely closed source but not required to get HDMI video, all the other components are fully documented and run quite well with the mainline version of linux.

The downside is that compared to say the Raspberry PI(which is still very much closed source) the processor performance isn't that great for the price. Also unlike the Raspberry PI, the BBB has no real standard Linux distro so it can be difficult to setup unless you have very comfortable creating your own Linux images (debootstrap/multistrap) and have a decent understanding of kernel device trees.

One point of the BBB that is often overlooked is the 2 PRU units in this device. There are essentially completely programmable micro controllers on the chip that are optimized for real time tasks such as bit banging custom or unusual protocols or tasks that would normally require very frequent interrupts. These are tasks that are hard to do on the main processor. The PRU are best programmed in ASM IMHO since the tasks the PRU are optimized for tend to require detail to the exact instructions but at the same time don't require much coding.

So to sum up, if you are a more advanced user looking to use this for custom hardware, this is an outstanding choice. If you are looking for maximum processor performance per $$$, buy something else like the RPI 3B+.

In good condition!

Received the the board with a small disappointment, the board was marked with E14 instead of Beaglebone.org, but it seems to be performing up to expectations. Since we are working with several units utilizing the same program, there appears to be a delay in processing speed, although not conclusive.

Our programming demands a lot from the little board mostly due to heavy utilization of 7 of the PWM channels, both EQEPs, and a couple of ADCs as well. So far it has lived up to my expectations and needs for the simulator project. The final test will be how well it communicates data with another BBB and the main server computer.

It does have limitations in the PWM channels as it cannot produce higher frequency PWMs in multitude (3kHz x 6). Dropping to 2kHz cleaned up the signals sufficiently for use. This has not injected any audible noise into the hydraulics.

In all, I am pleased with the selection of the Beaglebone Black for our peripheral control.

As we have toasted 4 of these units due to overvoltage/surge conditions, I highly recommend using isolated circuitry to protect the delicate little critter. We are controlling 12 VDC valve coils, 240 VAC hydraulic pump motor, a 0-5 vdc sensor, 5 VDC quadrature encoders and more all via WiFi. So proper signal conditioning is critical.

It has broad possibilities for application, and I highly recommend it for more complicated projects that require more PWMs, ADCs, and EQEPs that most low end SBCs cannot handle.

Thanks to Sparkfun for carrying it and shipping in such a rapid manner.

You know how you you start your schematics with a top level page and you place a CPU block and a power block etc. Well I'm going to make a Beaglebone schematic object and just bang that on whenever I need a CPU/RAM/ROM in a design from now on. Excuse me now, I'm just going to lie on my hammock for a while.