The Bay Area Maker Faire is just around the corner, but I find myself casting my mind back to something eye-opening I saw at this year’s Embedded World conference in Nuremburg this February.
BeagleCore were showing an industrialized SoM version of the popular BeagleBone Black platform. BeagleBone probably runs behind only Arduino and Raspberry Pi in terms of sheer popularity in the Maker scene. This, of course, implies an extremely active and devoted development community ensuring a plethora of up-to-date tools, drivers and libraries, and example projects or how-tos of just about any project you could dream of. A company building an industrial-spec module that could leverage this extraordinarily active community is, possibly, a very compelling move indeed.
This is not an isolated example, either. Raspberry Pi introduced their Compute Module in 2014, and in the recent Raspberry Pi 3 announcement indicated they would be releasing an update to this with the new Broadcom BCM2837 system-on-chip featured in the new Pi. Additionally, the new Arduino | Genuino MKR1000 has a form factor more reminiscent of a SoM than a development board. Combined with features like a built in Lithium Polymer battery connector and there’s an obvious intent here to build a device that can be more easily utilized in projects beyond just the prototyping phase.
The questions of reliability and supply chain guarantees, and the decades of experience brought by the traditional industrial embedded compute market, are still very relevant. Some applications will continue to have demands that rule out these community platforms – but for many, Arduino, Raspberry Pi, Beaglebone or others will satisfy that ‘good enough’ criteria, and at that point their accessibility and ease of use become serious competitive advantages. It will also be fascinating to watch how this influences the traditional embedded Single Board and module market – from my observations at Embedded World I’d say it already has, and to the advantage of developers and designers using these devices.
In San Mateo next week, at the Bay Area Maker Faire, I expect to see the usual fantastic set of projects existing at the cross section of art, multi-disciplinary engineering, practicality and fun that defines this movement. I’ll also be keeping an eye out for further signs that ‘Maker’ platforms are maturing, growing up and perhaps looking to further disrupt the incumbents in both old markets and new.