[time-nuts] Raspberry Pi Competition...

gary lists at lazygranch.com
Mon Jan 21 17:10:59 UTC 2013


It is all a matter of time versus money. There are community projects 
for the Panda, Beagleboard XM, and Raspberry Pie. People you can bug. If 
you get really serious on these SBCs, it would pay to learn the 
cross-compilation techniques. Some of the distributions uses an arm 
emulator (i.e. run on intel or AMD hardware), so it looks like they are 
compiling on arm. Others have real cross-complies.

It took a few hours to compile all the software defined radio code on 
the Beagleboard XM itself. Three different archive methods (git, svn and 
plain downloading gunzips) and three different versions of make 
(regular, cmake, and qmake). For someone who is not a programmer (me), 
this is really frustrating.

Incidentally, and keeping with the topic of time, the Beagleboard XM 
doesn't ship with a battery for the RTC. In fact, you need to solder one 
to the PCB and pull a resistor. It runs NTP, though I haven't got around 
to evaluating how well. NTP was in the opensuse OS.

Regarding that competition board, two USBs is cutting it close. I've 
been using my KVM, so keyboard and mouse take one port. The RTL device 
is another port. I suppose you can always add a hub if bandwidth isn't 
an issue.

Personally, the only competition I see to the Beagleboard XM is the 
Panda. At least at the moment.

On 1/21/2013 8:30 AM, Bob Camp wrote:
> Hi
>
> Freescale has had K60 modules out for several years now. No usb ethernet and they do have 1588 built in. Depending on just when and where you catch them they can be pretty pricy or about half that...
>
> Bob
>
> On Jan 21, 2013, at 10:54 AM, lists at lazygranch.com wrote:
>
>> It is hard to say which Arm is best for time nuts. The Cortex-A8 is  what the Beagleboard XM uses. That CPU has "neon", which is Arm's version of MMX. That is, not fully kosher floating point, but fast parallel processing good enough for DSP. The Raspberry Pie uses a fancier GPU and a simpler CPU (no DSP in the CPU). If you are compiling your own code with gcc, there are many options specific to the "neon" architecture. (It is on the TI website.) I've been doing some SDR on the Beagleboard XM, and the difference can be a factor of 3 in CPU utilization.
>>
>>
>> ------Original Message------
>> From: Rob Kimberley
>> Sender: time-nuts-bounces at febo.com
>> To: 'Discussion of precise time and frequency measurement'
>> ReplyTo: Discussion of precise time and frequency measurement
>> Subject: [time-nuts] Raspberry Pi Competition...
>> Sent: Jan 21, 2013 7:26 AM
>>
>> http://www.electronicsweekly.com/Articles/28/09/2012/54676/raspberry-pi-gets
>> -a-competitor.htm
>>
>> Rob K
>>
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> time-nuts mailing list -- time-nuts at febo.com
>> To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts
>> and follow the instructions there.
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> time-nuts mailing list -- time-nuts at febo.com
>> To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts
>> and follow the instructions there.
>
> _______________________________________________
> time-nuts mailing list -- time-nuts at febo.com
> To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts
> and follow the instructions there.
>



More information about the Time-nuts_lists.febo.com mailing list