Passionate hardware tinkerers will enjoy reading our latest how-to: Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) for BeagleBone Black – a DIY Project. Have fun!

Please check the Downloads page for a complete, bootable image with Asterisk and FreePBX preinstalled. This image is in fact a BeagleBone Black (BBB) port of the original RasPBX, which can be found on the Asterisk for Raspberry Pi project website. You can read the whole history of this project there.
The name stays the same, meaning there are now 2 flavors of RasPBX, the original Raspberry Pi (RPi) version as well as the new BBB edition. The feature set is identical on both platforms. RasPBX for BBB includes all features of the latest RPi edition including all upgrades.
The porting process was pretty straight forward, thanks to both platforms being very similar. Ubuntu 13.04 has been selected as base distribution. It is widely used on the BeagleBones and therefore well supported. Ubuntu is using apt repositories in the same way as Debian does. This has 2 advantages over any other distro (besides Debian itself of course): 1. The RasPBX apt repository can be used directly, providing software updates and upgrades for both platforms at the same time. 2. All existing RasPBX installer scripts use apt to install software. They are working in the same way now on the BBB platform as well.
As the BeagleBone Black is pretty new at the time of this writing, so is the Asterisk distro for it. Please provide us with feedback if there are any issues coming up.

This project intends to bring Asterisk and FreePBX to the recently announced BeagleBone Black. It is a spin-off from Asterisk for Raspberry Pi, where more than 1 year of experience has been collected in running low-cost, low-power Asterisk based PBXs on the Raspberry Pi (RPi) hardware platform. The BeagleBone Black (BBB) has obviously been created as a direct competition to the RPi, featuring better hardware performance with a price tag of only $10 more. Having the application of a VoIP PBX in mind, several improvements of the BBB compared to the RPi look promising:

1. The Cortex A8 processor (ARM v7) with a clock speed of 1GHz compared to the 700MHz clocked ARM v6 processor of the RPi provides more than twice the performance.

2. Badly regulated power supplys have been a frequent cause of crashes or data corruption on the RPi’s SD cards. Having a well regulated power supply with enough available current is key to reliability on the RPi. The BBB includes better power management on the board itself, thus improving the situation a lot.

3. The BBB has 2 GB of storage memory on it’s on-board eMMC, while still being equipped with a micro-SD slot for memory expansion. The RPi instead has to boot from the external SD card, making it vulnerable to issues with low-cost cards.

Whenever users experienced data corruption with their RPis, in almost all cases it originated from either the power supply or the SD card itself. On the BBB this situation should improve considerably, making it an excellent choice as low-power PBX platform where reliability is key when running it 24/7.

Additional postings will follow soon on this website, once more experience has been gained with the BBB. Stay tuned!