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Ringing In 2015 With 40 Linux-Friendly Hacker SBCs
DeviceGuru writes As seen in this year-end summary of 40 hacker-friendly SBCs, 2014 brought us plenty of new Linux and Android friendly single-board computers to tinker with — ranging from $35 bargains, to octa-core powerhouses. Many of the new arrivals feature 1-2GHz multicore SoCs, 1-2GB RAM, generous built-in flash, gigabit Ethernet, WiFi, on-board FPGAs, and other extras. However, most of the growth has been in the sub-$50 segment, where the Raspberry Pi and BeagleBone reign supreme, but are now being challenged by a growing number of feature-enhanced clones, such as the Banana Pi and Orange Pi. Best of all, there's every reason to expect 2015 to accelerate these trends.
SATA
and
USB.
I gfigure USB is common but SATA is hard to find.
There is no technological solution to the insider threat.
Lot of effort and $ in trying to minimize it, though.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Granny box sounds like an insensitive name for a casket. This nickname for a type of computer will not catch on, especially amongst grannies.
You know that sounds really obscene and really really weird..
But can we turn them in Hackintoshes?
Where are the really high power ARM architecture computers?
Isn't there anything that can compete with current x86 processors?
I'd very much like a normal desktop computer with an ARM cpu.
Looking for people to chat about multicopters, coding, music. skype: gtsiros
Why no neat plastic cases housign the SBC ?
I know they arent really aimed at consumers, but still, why not have an optional case to give it some pretection and make it look good.
Look, I am just your Joe Computer User.
What useful stuff can I really to with these things?
What have those more skilled than myself really done with them? Anything?
Not the original AC, but *swoosh*.
is the right expression?
cubietruck has SATA also.
http://cubieboard.org/2013/09/...
Are you wanting a normal desktop, for normal desktop work, or the world's fastest per-thread CPU, regardless of cost, for benchmark bragging?
My work desktop does a great job simultaneously running a couple of IDEs, three browsers with many tabs, Outlook, and various utility programs on its dual core, 3Ghz CPU - made in 2008. Therefore when you say you're looking for "a normal desktop" AND say "compete with Intel's latest chips" I'm not sure what you want. Do you want to do desktop stuff, or do you want to "compete" in single-threaded benchmarks?
nVidia's new ARM processor, with seven-stage pipeline, has performance similar to a Haswell. That's more than enough for MY desktop work.
There are many people on slashdot. The people using the term "hackers" correctly may be different from the ones using it incorrectly.
You can of course use Google to find hundreds or thousands of example projects. They tend to fall into two categories: low power, fanless PCs, and interfacing with real, physical objects.
Examples of the first group include media PCs / DVRs, because you don't want loud CPU, case, and power supply fans in your living room, and network appliances such as network storage, high deluxe SOHO router / firewall boxes, etc.
The other group involves automating and programming the physical world, by connecting motors, relays, etc. That includes autopilots for RC planes and drones and all of the "smart house" stuff. If you wanted a programmable device to feed and water your cat while you're on vacation, while running the self-cleaning litter box, these are the right platform to build something like that.
If you click on the link to the article and ctrl-f sata, you'll find the thirteen that have sata, of the forty mentioned in the article. Some desktop standard sata, some are msata or esata.
My 70 watt AMD "house server" has been turned off since early November to one of those sucky 5 watt Banana Pi boards, and a 3 watt R-Pi B+ for OVPN duty... Not a single problem so far...
This seems like a no brainer to me and I don't know why none of these builders haven't done this: a SBC with 2 ethernet interfaces... I've always been pretty entertained with and learned a whole lot about Linux by making household gateway/NAT router boxes... ya know.. something homebrew to replace your store purchased router. i.e taking a Linux box running your favorite distro, adding a network card and using it as your home's internet gateway, connecting it to your switch+wifi access point, etc. And you could take it well beyond that. But a normal computer is a "big box" for that.. you could do the same thing with a tiny SBC!! I always thought it would be cool to take one of these those SabreLite boards with the PCIe connector on it and wire it up to a PCIe ethernet adapter and porting OpenWRT or Yocto to it. Gateworks has something like that $$$. Complete that task and you'll learn a whole lot of good stuff about Linux and various open-source projects!
The Jetson boards are pretty easily obtained now that they are on newegg.com and a few other sites. They are real beasts, quad 2.3Ghz cortex-A15 and a GPU capable of doing compute (CUDA mostly, but OpenCL appears to be available now too). Pricey but at least they include 16GB of flash (eMMC-based) instead of forcing you to boot off a microSD card like the cheaper boards. It's a much bigger board than a RaspPi, Beaglebone or Hummingboard so probably a big turn off for some. And not a lot of case options out there, so I stuffed mine in a small plastic box meant for sandwiches.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
I was actually looking at several of these boards recently, trying to find all the multi-core options at/below about $100. I put together a Google Docs spreadsheet comparing various specs (#/type/speed of cores, RAM, Flash, network, SATA, USB, RTC), I've got 18 on the list so far. Looks like I have a few more to add...
https://docs.google.com/spread...
IMHO, there's too much focus on highlighting the fact that there are a lot of boards under $100 and not enough focus on products/companies that sell stuff that won't take six months to figure out how to work with. If you think about it, if it takes a reasonably experienced Linux developer a lot of time to figure out how to build kernels and build a development environment, are you really saving that much. When your goal is to make product, do you really want to waste time on low-level stuff just to get to the point where you can start working on your high-level application?
Examples of the first group include media PCs / DVRs, because you don't want loud CPU, case, and power supply fans in your living room,
To be fair, there are a lot of silent PC case/psu combinations out there. I have my MythTV system in an Antec NSK2400 with (something like) a Zalman CNPS8900 CPU cooler/fan and the whole thing is dead silent.
I spray painted the front silver bezel matte black and it looks like a high-end A/V unit - scroll down to photo on the Antec link. I installed a two-row CrystalFontz (blue back-light) LCD display in the top slot and the DVD drive in the bottom.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
If you just want a computer for editing office documents and you want to carry it in your pocket, the RPI will do this for you easily. All the "expertise" you need is to buy the plastic case for 5 dollars/euros. And a USB power supply with 1000mA output. Of course the incumbents of the PC business hate everything which could threaten them and the RPI clearly is a wholly different class of computer because it can be carried in your trousers. The RPI massively downsizes computing and the incumbents hate it therefore. IBM hated the small computers and they are now irrelevant dinosaurs. And surely they also spread tons of FUD against Unix and Windows. Go extrapolate !
What is wrong with using a cheap computer to replace the proverbial "TTL grave" ? The pupils still need to understand how a resistor and a diode works on a basic level, otherwise they will kill the diode. And that is already MUCH more than 95% of humanity know about electronics. Or is it 98% ? An AVR processor with true realtime is of course better suited for this job, but if you can do it on and RPI, you already have some useful skills which can be easily transferred to a realtime PLC or microcontroller. Engineering is also about economics and definitely not about preserving some outdated practice. If you really need logic gates for performance, you would use FPGAs these days. But 99% of industrial control can be done in software, just for starters.
It sounds like you put together a nice system. Of course, you chose to spend more on your CPU fan alone than most of these ARM SOC systems cost. Different strokes for different folks.
I had a garage sale P4 as my DVR for a couple of years. You could tell something was using too much CPU when the fans became as loud as the TV AMD the room got warm.
I speak from experience. The development tools and support for many of these products is mediocre at best. Good luck trying to get support for one of the pure Chinese offerings. There are better solutions from domestic manufacturers and you can actually call them on the phone with tech support questions. Of course, you're going to pay a bit more for that. Not a lot. My point is that from a development cycle point of view, if you have to pay one or more engineers for six months of work just to figure out how to build the foundation instead of building the actual product, that cost is likely offset by a more expensive, well-documented, domestic product.
It sounds like you put together a nice system. Of course, you chose to spend more on your CPU fan alone than most of these ARM SOC systems cost. Different strokes for different folks.
I'm not sure that is the actual fan w/o opening up the case, it *looks* like that though. Don't think it has a heat pipe... What ever it is, it's quiet.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .