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Comment by mayoff | Hacker News Reader

What is the advantage of this over a Raspberry Pi?

Gigabit ethernet that's not dangling off the USB bus, lots of I/O, a realtime micro that's well integrated into the board's architecture, USB OTG, analog inputs. This board seems much more useful if you need lower latency timing, where the Pi seems more useful if you need a small board to stick somewhere and do a bit of number crunching.

The page seems to only say 10/100. Is there a correction somewhere else?

You're right. It looks like they're not using the onboard ethernet controllers for whatever reason, and instead dangling ethernet off of USB. So now I'm grumbly about that because the onboard ethernet is much more powerful.

I find it sad that RPI managed to suck the 'educational' market because of the price point, when the design is extremly obscure. Unless they planned to turn teenagers into hardware reverse engineer...

There are several advantages:

- both 5V and 3.3V logic, meaning you can use pretty much any part without level shifters

- analog inputs (which are really lacking on Raspberry Pi if you want to use sensors)

- 4 USB host ports (only the Pi 2 has as much)

- the simplicity of Arduino for electronics, coupled with a Linux for other tasks

On the other hand, I expect it to be more expensive, and probably less powerfull than a Raspberry Pi. It is definitely aimed to big electronics project that requires both a lot of GPIO and a full-fledged OS, for which you would formerly use a board running Linux + an Arduino

also: 7 hardware PWM outputs (the Pi has one)

You can sort-of do analog input-output via the audio ports on the pi, right?

Cool, didn't know that.

Seems like the hardware has to be modified and it only supports 0-1V though: http://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/questions/8757/using-pi...

PWM is useful because that can be used to drive servo motors and brushless DC motor controllers and other gadgets. It can't be easily replaced with analog output, e.g. from audio ports. OTOH, audio ports are a lot more useful if you need actual analog output.

PWM could be done with an op amp, a triangle wave generator, and a handful of discrete components. It's how the front-end of a Class D amp works. Would definitely be more of a pain in the butt than having pwm ports directly, though.

"both 5V and 3.3V logic, meaning you can use pretty much any part without level shifters"

Are you sure about that? It can provide different voltages in different pins, but the ATmega32u4 will work with 5v logic (if it is like the Leonardo, at 16MHz will be 5v), so you're in the same situation really and you won't be able to use a lot of 3.3v logic ICs without a translator.

I can be wrong though and this one operates in a different way, but doubt it.

EDIT: ignore me, the page says it has 3.3v logic pins.

EDIT 2: right! they're provided by the Sitara processor and not the AVR, so I wasn't 100% wrong after all ;)

See: https://github.com/CICCIOSGAMINO/arduino_TRE

Pi 1 B+ has 4 USB ports as well.

Arduino has more digital I/O pins and 6-7 pins that can do analog output (via PWM). This new Arduino has even more pins and can do both 3.3V and 5V logic, though I fail to see the advantage of mixing those up. Overall, Arduino draws lower power too.

In any event, if you're looking for something with more pins, beaglebone black or olinuxino have them.

https://www.olimex.com/Products/OLinuXino/A20/A20-OLinuXIno-... (that one has 1GB of RAM, gigabit ethernet and SATA2 capable of running a small laptop HDD off the board's power)

Two I can think of ... it includes a low cost Atmel microcontroller so it can be used for prototyping low cost/low power usage applications, in the same way as the original Arduino. Its compatible with Arduino shields.

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