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Comment by epx | Hacker News Reader

My dream board would be a full Raspberry with an Arduino-like µC included on the same board, for easy I/O.

That sounds like a Beaglebone Black. It has "programmable realtime units" built in, which are basically microcontrollers. They are well-integrated with the host computer; there is a mailbox passing messages between the host machine and the PRUs. No need to invent a serial protocol for communicating -- just put your c struct in there.

+1 for the Beaglebone Black, a great little board that doesn't get as much publicity as the Raspberry and other boards.

Plus, Beagle is 100% open source. Want to mod and etch your own PCB? You can.

Texas Instruments AM335x the BeagleBone uses is also fully documented. There's a huge PDF manual publicly available that describes every functionality. It's such a welcome change from Raspberry Pi's mostly undocumented Broadcom SoCs.

I think this was (one of) the things the RP2040 was designed to do; they know that a lot of people strap an Arduino to the Pi as an IO expander or to handle real-time elements, so they've built their own.

They already did a peripheral chip for the RPi. Now they have their own microcontroller. I suspect in a few revisions they'll have their own host processor to replace the Broadcom one ...

It's a great achievement for a very small team.

>>> a lot of people strap an Arduino to the Pi as an IO expander or to handle real-time elements,=

Including me. I actually prefer this to the GPIO, though it adds one more component. An advantage is that I can move my hardware projects between RPi and other computers in the house including my nice comfy and fast desktop workstation. With a bit of care, my Python support software runs the same on RPi and Windows with no code changes.

Also, if you keep things within the Arduino ecosystem, it's easy to upgrade or downgrade your microcontroller as needed, with only minor changes to your embedded code. What I'd like to know is if the development environment for this board is as nice (or better, can always hope) than the Arduino environment.

That's an interesting idea. I think this could work great in the Pi Zero format - compact, wifi + mass storage if needed and with the right wiring you could even flash the controller remotely via wifi.

Could be a nice mix for projects where the size of another PCB would be problematic. The target audience would probably be smaller and I doubt the RPi Foundation would be interested considering their focus on education, but I would probably buy one.

There are several DIY drone boards that have this kind of setup. Usually it is an arduino mounted to a Raspberry pi with an i2c channel for communication, but they seem to be getting more and more popular.

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