For those of us who love open hardware but need more cycles and memory, can you please do the next MakerShed project with the Beagle Board?

Mojave,

The Arduino is a single-board computer (with a lot of I/O board add-ons) which is all open-source designed, hosting an 8-bit microcontroller with a kilobyte of RAM and a half-kilobyte of EEPROM. It can do about 1.6 8-bit MIPS.

The BeagleBoard is up to 4,000 times faster for less than three times the cash, and ships with 128 megs of RAM, a quarter gig of flash, and advanced I/O built in. It runs two very nice GUI Linux distros, and is based on the Texas Instruments OMAP 3530 CPU, which is really one of the very nicest chips out there right now.

The Beagleboard does look pretty cool, but I don’t make that less than 3 times the cost of an arduino.

The price on the front page of beagleboard.org is $149. There are Arduinos for less than $20, which would make the Beagleboard more like 7 times the cost.

Are there lower-cost options I’m missing somewhere? That is entirely possible, after all…

20$ for a gps add on???
USB???
Ethernet???

Want Now!!!!

The GPS shield doesn’t include the GPS module, so don’t get too excited. It’s still pretty low-cost, though.

I was looking at the $65 starter pack which I see now is not the cheapest way to set out with Arduinos. But based on the Beagle’s I/O support, I don’t feel like it was too much of a mistake — for example how much would it cost to get video out of them….

The thing that got me about this thing is its got all these add ons for ultra cheap. If it has an open community around it for development, software, and hardware, then that’s a bonus too.

It’s not simple about how much it costs in a catalogue, but whether there is a library of open stuff to work with. Perl is an OK language, but CPAN.org (comprehensive perl archive) turns perl into a kick-butt platform.

The BeagleBoard is …

that’s pretty good too.

And again I think it’s the community (or lack thereof) that leverages something like that into something truly amazing.

I might have to do some reading up on both Arduino and Beagle.

@js7a – $65 is for a starter pack, it comes with a lot of things. if you just want to play around you can get started with arduino for $20 or less.

Alas no. “…Plug in a supported GPS module and run any of the example Arduino sketches for parsing GPS data (NMEA sentences)…”

This is a platform to allow you to use a GPS module. The suggested EM-406A GPS unit is an additional $60 at adafruit.com.

The idea is to have a little processor hooked up to a random number generator, have it dump that data two two secure digital cards (identical copies to be used as onetime pads), have it read analog data from a microphone, maybe compress it, encrypt it with the one time pad, then send it out as data via bluetooth, wifi, or ethernet (an encrypted version of skype). If it would work with a cellphone for the data transmission, that would be great.

http://www.maxim-ic.com/appnotes.cfm/appnote_number/3469

The idea is to redesign one of these to 2008 technology

http://www.boingboing.net/2008/11/25/phone-scrambler-of-1.html

:)

Otherwise, looks pretty cool.

The main thing is the community, though. There are plenty of embedded processor boards. it’s the community support that says whether you’ll actually be able to get anything done or not.

Will poke around some more…

As for other modules, it really depends on what your goals and applications are. You don’t need high clock speeds to blink a led, or open a door.

if you’d like to help out with a PIC guide drop me a note!