Agreed with your general sentiment, but the BeagleBone Black is still quite lacking when it comes to documentation.
I'm a very experienced web developer, but am new to programming for embedded type devices. While the BeagleBone Black in browser development environment is quite nice, the lack of documentation makes it hard to figure out fairly basic things like reading values from a gyroscope/accelerometer/magnetometer. A lot of this hardware has existing libraries for Arduino, which is why in my opinion the Arduino is still a superior platform for anyone who is somewhat new to embedded computing.
I agree. I'm the opposite: a very experienced embedded developer but relatively new to web development (though my BBB is currently serving up a page monitoring my mechanical room).
It's like pulling teeth to find out any but the most basic specs of the BBB. I haven't used it much because a lot of what I wanted to do would have required so much experimentation to figure out stuff that should already have been documented. I just don't have that kind of time these days.
It's been a while since I looked at it. IIRC, the main problem I had was that many of the IO lines had shared/multiple functions and I couldn't find any documentation that explained how to switch them.
e.g. (contrived example), if a bit was MOSI for an SPI interface or DIO on port C, I had no idea which one it defaulted to and how to use it for the alternate function.
I got it to work for basic I/O, but it's obviously capable of much more.
I'm a very experienced web developer, but am new to programming for embedded type devices. While the BeagleBone Black in browser development environment is quite nice, the lack of documentation makes it hard to figure out fairly basic things like reading values from a gyroscope/accelerometer/magnetometer. A lot of this hardware has existing libraries for Arduino, which is why in my opinion the Arduino is still a superior platform for anyone who is somewhat new to embedded computing.