Adding Beagle bone to the mix

I was recently contacted by someone who was interested in using the SDI-12 USB adapter on a Beagle Bone Black single board computer. I’ve never used a Beagle Boards but I know that they are ARM-based computers running linux thus should operate similarly to the Raspberry pi boards that I’ve been playing since 2012. So I took the dive and got a Beagle Bone Black from MCM electronics and gave it a try. Right out of the box the board boots into a version of Linux. I was able to test its connectivity with the SDI-12 USB adapter successfully using the “screen” command. Later I ran a simple Python script under Python 2.7 and got very nice results:

There are a few differences that I noticed while exploring BBB:

1. There is a “serial” module included in Python that is not available on other platforms, such as windows, linux, Mac OS, or Raspberry pi. It functions like the pyserial module used on all these systems.
2. The board boots much faster than raspberry pi 3B, maybe in 15 seconds. RPI 3B takes about 30 seconds. This is a good thing.
3. There are a lot fewer instructions on basic operations for Beagle boards than Raspberry pi, which was the primary reason I got my raspberry pi B instead of Beagle board back in 2012.

When I have more time, I will test my open-source python data logger on BBB to make sure it works just as it does on all other systems. For now, one more box is checked: “compatible with Beagle Bone Black”.