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, li...@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-boun...@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



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