Sequent Microsystems' Beagle-Pi "Raspberry Pi Emulator" Offers a Stopgap for Shortages
Designed to adapt HATs to the BeagleBone Cape format, this low-cost board swaps a hard-to-find part out for one in ready supply.
Sequent Microsystems has launched a stop-gap for anyone struggling to complete projects designed around the Raspberry Pi amid continued stock shortages: the Beagle-Pi, a "Raspberry Pi emulator" built atop the BeagleBone Black Industrial single-board computer.
The Raspberry Pi's low cost, broad ecosystem, and enthusiastic community have contributed to its success over the ten years since its launch — but industry-wide component shortages mean that getting your hands on a board for anything close to its recommended retail price is a struggle. It's for those staring down lead times in the year-plus range that Sequent Microsystems has come up with its BeagleBone Black Industrial-based alternative.
"Is BeagleBone a low-end competitor to Raspberry Pi? Probably, yes," says Sequent Microsystems' Mihai Beffa. "But lately there is a great differentiator: BeagleBone is in stock in many places, at an affordable price. BeagleBone is not hardware compatible with Raspberry Pi. The plug-in cards for Raspberry Pi are called (sometimes wrongly) HATs. The cards for Beagle are called Capes. Would it be possible for a HAT to function like a Cape? The Beagle-Pi solves the puzzle."
Designed as a passive bridge, the Beagle-Pi is a BeagleBone Black Cape, which takes the two 23-pin general-purpose input/output (GPIO) headers and converts them to a single 40-pin header matching the Raspberry Pi pinout — while adding a connector for an LCD panel, too, as an added bonus.
"The Beagle-Pi routes the I2C, the SPI, four serial ports and all the Raspberry Pi GPIOs to equivalent function pins on the BeagleBone," Beffa explains. "It fits snugly on the BeagleBone, creating a Raspberry Pi look-alike. There are four mounting holes for connecting to the BeagleBone, and four more for connecting Raspberry Pi HATs."
In testing with Sequent Microsystems' own HAT hardware, the Beagle-Pi proved fully compatible: Software compiled on or for the BeagleBone Black worked without modification to the source code.
"Our business is very dependent on the Raspberry Pi," Beffa adds. "We all hope that the current shortage is short lived, the Pi will be back in stock soon at affordable prices and nobody will need the Beagle-Pi. Until then, buy your insurance and try the emulator."
The Beagle-Pi is now funding on Kickstarter at $18 for a fully-assembled kit; delivery is expected to take place in April.