Possible for Beaglebone Blue to support a non-wireless Ethernet connection?

[n feehan]

Hi, I'm looking at buying the Beaglebone Blue, after prototyping with the Beaglebone Black. I'm making this change because my application needs hardware support for four quadrature encoders and not three.

However, my application streams this encoder data as fast as possible over UDP as an OSC message - when I use a wireless connection anywhere in my OSC path, I see the data rate reduce drastically, to the point where it's not suitable for my application.

My questions are:

* Does the Beaglebone Green support four quadrature encoder channels?

* Is there a way to get wired Ethernet (ie, cat5 cable) out of the Beaglebone Blue?

Thanks for any help / info you may be able to provide!

AKA

[Przemek Klosowski]

On Thu, Nov 16, 2017 at 1:02 PM, n feehan <nfe...@gmail.com> wrote:

However, my application streams this encoder data as fast as possible over UDP as an OSC message - when I use a wireless connection anywhere in my OSC path, I see the data rate reduce drastically, to the point where it's not suitable for my application.

My questions are:

* Does the Beaglebone Green support four quadrature encoder channels?

What resolution and speed do you need? I think you are asking about the available QIP(?) pins but you can do quadrature decoding in software, perhaps on PRUs, so you have three choices, ordered in decreasing performance: hardware decoder, PRU-based software decoder, ARM-based GPIO software decoder.

 

 

* Is there a way to get wired Ethernet (ie, cat5 cable) out of the Beaglebone Blue?

You can use USB ethernet dongles---will be slower than built-in but probably less latency and jitter than wireless

[Adam Saenz]

You can also get a Robotics Cape for your BBB and it will give you all the features of the BBBlue except for the WiFi.  You'll then maintain your Ethernet interface.    

By the way, the BBBlue uses a PRU for the 4th encoder.  It may be possible to use the Robotics Cape software without a Robotics Cape and use the appropriate pins on the BBB headers for the 4 channels of encoder (3 hardware, 1 PRU).  You'll just need to do some level shifting if your encoders are higher than 3.3V logic.