Over 10 years later, I can say that the original BeagleBone was far more reliable than the original Raspberry Pi. The Texa Instruments specifications & documents for the processor were far better as well. I've had several Raspberry Pis just randomly die, but every one of the Beagle Bones are still going. I've heard similar feedback from people with IOT startups. RPis work great until some just randomly die.
Today I find the quality of the Raspberry Pi is dramatically improved, the tooling to help a beginner get started is amazing, and of course there's just simply a much larger user base that have likely resolved the problems you'll encounter.
However the real magic of a Beagle bone is listed in this features:
Arm Cortex-R5 subsystem for low-latency I/O and control
There are many use cases such as robotics, where there is a need real time control and Beagle bones have this capability built in, whereas with Raspberry Pi you'll see people connecting an Arduino and a Raspberry Pi together to meet this requirement. Its kludgy, burns tons of time, and it also adds up cost wise.
In any case if you're just starting out, and you ever get interested in these things, know that you'll likely end up with many of them over the years. RPi is great for beginners, but if I was deploying something into the field as an IOT startup etc, I still prefer a Beagle.
Today I find the quality of the Raspberry Pi is dramatically improved, the tooling to help a beginner get started is amazing, and of course there's just simply a much larger user base that have likely resolved the problems you'll encounter.
However the real magic of a Beagle bone is listed in this features: Arm Cortex-R5 subsystem for low-latency I/O and control
There are many use cases such as robotics, where there is a need real time control and Beagle bones have this capability built in, whereas with Raspberry Pi you'll see people connecting an Arduino and a Raspberry Pi together to meet this requirement. Its kludgy, burns tons of time, and it also adds up cost wise.
In any case if you're just starting out, and you ever get interested in these things, know that you'll likely end up with many of them over the years. RPi is great for beginners, but if I was deploying something into the field as an IOT startup etc, I still prefer a Beagle.
My 2c