Beagleboard (BeagleBone Rev C)

If you are looking for an alternative to the Raspberry Pi, keep looking. The software is simply not mature enough to be called suitable for generic use by the average Joe. The USB Ethernet interface decided to take the IP address already used by my Linux PC instead of the one in the documentation. There is a gaping security hole by default, people can ssh as root to the beaglebone without entering a password. I didn't see this mentioned anywhere in the online documentation, just the account for user 'debian'. The desktop feels really underpowered. I started a vnc server on the BBB and connected to it from my PC (using the same network switch). The desktop menu really struggled to keep up although it's supposed to be lightweight. The javascript programming facility on the board's web server didn't seem to work either. The system logs showed a lot of errors while trying to access I/O pins. Trying to update the software using apt returns an error because there are broken package dependencies. And updating the software by downloading an image requires a memory card which is not included. Having said that, the board supports mDNS out of the box, which makes it easy to find it by pinging "beaglebone.local". The hardware seems quite impressive. CAN, SPI, I2C, GPIO, Ethernet, USB (host+client), PWM, HDMI, JTAG... lots of stuff. In short, this board seems to have been designed with hardware in mind. If you want to use it for embedded projects it seems to be a very good choice (I haven't started using mine yet though, so I cannot tell from personal experience). If you want something to replace your generic Raspberry Pi you might be disappointed.