Folks, this is a family of boards with the same CPU but different capabilities. Just because there's no PHY on the smaller board doesn't mean the SoC doesn't support it.
I was just joking. I know about the BB family; what I meant is that such boards support, contrarily to the rpi3, EITHER wlan or ethernet out of the box; not both. I think it's quite a shortcoming for a modern board with such price tag.
And, as I said above, Beaglebone boards should be the means for your project, not the end.
If you're new to embedded and your design philosophy to date has been "squeeze the RPi into whatever I'm making", then Beaglebone (and other embedded EVKs like this) are going to make you grind your teeth and complain about the cost/feature vector instead of figuring out how to use it to help your final design.
I have worked with rpis, BBB, and custom board basted on the latter. I understand what you're saying, customizing a RPI requires working with an external partner. At the same time, I don't agree that such solutions won't work for a final product. There're many untapped opportunities in the embedded/iot space that benefit from a stable, tested, prebuilt solution that you can buy at will even in small batches. In that context, I'd like a full-fledged, highly flexible solution with many features instead of having to choose one or another.
I don't agree that such solutions won't work for a final product.
You would seriously pin your production on the availability of a board from a single vendor and an SoC from a company that won't even talk to you or sell their parts on DigiKey?
We all want a $25 board that does everything. We all also want a pony. The unsubsidized reality is that things cost a bit more than the RPi spectrum in the real world.
> You would seriously pin your production on the availability of a board
If I need >10k pieces, possibly not. If I need 500/1000/5000 pieces... yes, sure. I'll buy a buffer of boards to handle possible upstream production issues, and live happily ever after.
My product is tied to an OS, and my software is got a decent layer of abstraction. If, tomorrow, my supplier stops giving me what I want, I'll switch to a different hardware and I'll retain the same software. Or, I should say: IFF my supplier stops.
https://beagleboard.org/black
Folks, this is a family of boards with the same CPU but different capabilities. Just because there's no PHY on the smaller board doesn't mean the SoC doesn't support it.