Pi Stays Sky High In 2015 Hacker SBC Survey

DeviceGuru writes: The results from the 2015 Hacker SBC Survey cohosted by LinuxGizmos.com and the Linux Foundation's Linux.com community site have just been announced and, not surprisingly, RPi won two of the top three slots. With 1721 voting in the survey, the ten most popular single board computers turned out to be the Raspberry Pi 2 Model B, Beaglebone Black, Raspberry Pi Model B+, Odroid-C1, DragonBoard 410c, Odroid-XU3, Parallella, Arduino TRE, Edison Kit for Arduino, and Odroid-U3. The report includes scores for all 53 SBCs that were listed in the susrvey, along with data on feature preferences, targeted applications, and the nature of participants' use of [SBCs], and more.

Comments

My vote would be for Beaglebone

[Anonymous Coward]

It's much better than Pi just spend a few extra bucks, it's well worth it.

Re:My vote would be for Beaglebone

[Jamu]

Odroid-C1 (#4) looks very nice in comparison to the Raspberry Pi 2 Model B (#1). Same price and almost the same specifications, except 1.5 GHz clock instead of 0.9 GHz, Gb Ethernet instead of 100 MbE.

Re:My vote would be for Beaglebone

[geek111]

I use both the Raspberry Pi 2 and oDroid platforms. C1 is nice and has 'pseudo-compatibility' with pi GPIO. (many pi hats will work on the C1.) But even though it's close to the same form factor there are some notable differences. The C1 uses a micro-HDMI connector so some HDMI shields won't work. Also the C1 does not have dedicated camera ribbon connector. If you need a camera you just use a USB webcam. It's also not physically compatible (i.e. a Pi case generally won't fit a C1.)

Having said that the C1 has some serious things in its favor- it's faster than a Raspberry Pi 2, slightly cheaper and unlike the pi, it has three ANALOG inputs. That alone makes it an awesome little SBC. But on top of that there's one more trick up its sleeve- It has an eMMC slot. So instead of relying on (slow) SDHC for your storage, you can have the OS boot from MMC. This makes the C1 boot and load applications noticeably faster than the Pi 2.

Oh and did I mention? - the C1 can run Android...

Re:My vote would be for Beaglebone

[drinkypoo]

I'm more excited about #10, the U3. It's by far the cheapest thing available worth buying with 2GB RAM which I've found. I don't really need more CPU or GPU than the original R-Pi, but I do want a lot more RAM.

Re:My vote would be for Beaglebone

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh and did I mention? - the C1 can run Android...

Can but, thankfully, doesn't have to.

Re:My vote would be for Beaglebone

[aXis100]

I have both and they each have their own pros and cons.

The Odroic C1 is far more powerful and has gigabit ethernet. This is very usefull and I have two at home running as small file server and a Zoneminder security camera server. Unfortunately, it's not built as well and is not as reliable:
1) It doesn't seem as well sheilded and is a bit sensitive to touch. The reset pin is especially bad, connecting a wire to it (even floating / ungrounded) or touching it with your finger is enough to reset it.
2) Some of my units have a problem booting when standalone, but when I connect a serial monitor they boot fine every time. I'm thinking it's a grounding issue somewhere.
3) It's got incompatibilities with various MicroSD cards, mine works most of the time but from time to time there are I/O errors in the dmesg logs. It makes me worry if i'm corrupting my filesystem.

The RPi2 on the other hand is a bit slower and only has 100MBit ethernet, but is far more reliable. It's much better suited as an embedded controller.

From the headline

[erice]

So, is it up to 4 now?

Not surprised.

[RyuuzakiTetsuya]

Something that small and aerodynamic you could easily get maybe 20, 30 feet if you really threw it hard enough.

Re:Not surprised.

[Megane]

I should make a hairspray-fueled Raspberry Pi launcher out of PVC pipe, controlled by an Ardunio. The folks at Hackaday will just go nuts over that.

Wow

[Archangel Michael]

With 1721 voting

Confused

[zmooc]

I'm confused. The title mentions a 1998 movie while the summary talks about a mini computer. What are we talking about?

Re:Confused

[Anonymous Coward]

Your mom.

Raspberry PI as an SBC

[Anonymous Coward]

While An RPi could probably act as a session border controller, I wouldn't recommend it.

Most other boards miss the point

[EmperorOfCanada]

Most of us tinkerers with this sort of stuff can't afford $100 boards, especially if we are going to be leaving them behind in projects, or damaging them when our robotic submarine sinks, or our robotic plane flys over the horizon. Plus we might do nothing with them. Or we might ruin them while tinkering.

Thus offering a "better" board for only $20 more or $80 more is just stupid for the vast majority of those who are going to use the Pi. If anything the Pi is mostly going to be used as a really powerful Arduino.

Now I did read about one competitor who is planning on a $9 board that looked pretty competitive. But we'll see. The other thing that I think that people love about the Pi is that it is pretty damn open and boring. Some of the other boards just have a hint of trying to pull you into an ecosystem. Galileo would be a near perfect example of this. Instead of open and for everyone they played all kinds of games where they tried to get it into schools and other restrictions on the initial signups. I could just see some marketing person with their powerpoints behind that one.

I personally have exactly one complaint about the Raspberry Pi. All the main companies selling them use UPS to ship to Canada. UPS wildly rips Canadians off with crazy unannounced "brokerage fees" and often charges crap terriffs that I don't think exist. Because of this I would not be surprised if Raspberry Pi usage in Canada is unexpectedly low.

Re:Most other boards miss the point

[ArcadeMan]

All the main companies selling them use UPS to ship to Canada.

Sadly, I didn't even have to read the rest of your post to know you were going to talk about the brokerage fees. It really is insane.

I don't know why companies are so keen only offering UPS, FedEx, etc for delivery. Not everyone wants to get his orders "right fucking now", some of us prefer to pay as low as possible as long as the package arrives in good shape.

I would bet the Arduino and clones* are extremely popular in Canada because of the Chinese vendors on eBay. Free shipping, most orders arrive within two or three weeks and I only ever got duty fees on one package in over a decade, and it that was over 75$CAD in declared value.

An "Arduino Pro mini" is around 2.50$CAD, shipped. If you don't need a serial port in your project and you can use the ISP pins to program it, it's perfect for embedded projects, USB HID devices, etc.

Re:Most other boards miss the point

[ArcadeMan]

I forgot to mention, NewEgg.ca does have the Raspberry Pi, I just don't know if they ship them from a Canadian warehouse or not.

Re:Most other boards miss the point

[thermowax]

A thousand times this. My boss (don't get me started) was denigrating my excitement about the B+ because it was still too slow or some nonsense. They're not compute engines, you idiot. They're cheap and fully capable (albeit a little pokey) unix machines.

We're on the same wavelength- I generally use Pis for things that need just a little more capability than Arduino. Primarily a real multiprocessing OS, and often scripting-type capabilities, rather than fighting with timer interrupts or hacking code into Arduino IDE quasi-C. (It's fine, just not that versatile).

Plus, I can do development on any unix box- that is, at work. :) And yeah, I got a Galileo at MicroCenter and returned it. Not worth the effort, not to mention the price.

    **And, as you correctly point out, it's cheap enough that I don't care if I blow it up.**

Re:Most other boards miss the point

[serviscope_minor]

I use a pi happely for putting a cheap web front end on my 3D printer (via octopi). It basically needs to run a web server and spit out GCode over a USB TTY. The Pi basically works perfectly. A more expensive machine would be overkill.

Raspberry Pi 2 A+?

[ArcadeMan]

Anyone knows if a Raspberry Pi 2 model A/A+ is in the works? The Pi2B is too big for my project and the Pi1A+ is too slow.

take it with a large grain of salt

[Anonymous Coward]

The #5 device on the list is not yet available for purchase. How it managed to get more votes than other devices that actually exist is a bit baffling.

No surprise the Pi does well

[jandrese]

The Pi hardware isn't the best, nor is it cheapest, but the community has a lot of support built around it. There are pre-built images for all sorts of tasks and people have gone and done a lot of the hard work on it. I have a Pi and a BeagleBone and the BeagleBone, although slightly faster, has some braindamage that is hard to ignore. It has a built-in version of Linux, but it's hard to update and the eMMC space is a little too small to be really useful. So you boot off of SD instead, but that requires you to hold down a button while it is booting to bypass the eMMC. But then you notice that it doesn't have as many packages available as the Pi. No Chromium for instance, so you're stuck with the really stripped down and mostly broken browsers. The worst part is that by industry standards, the Beaglebone is above average. You can pick up one of the many much more powerful and featureful AllWinner boards, but find yourself utterly stymied by the horrendous state of the documentation and lack of community. It's really hard to get real work done if you have to do all of the groundwork yourself.

Re:No surprise the Pi does well

[Anonymous Coward]

As far as I know for $35 + shipping (MCM Electronics among others) the 900 MHz "modern" quad core ARM, 1 GB RAM Pi 2 is the cheapest. The closest
competitor is the ODROID C1 (1.5 GHz quad core ARM, 1 GB RAM) which I have not found for less than a couple of bucks more which with the higher speed ARM core and with the only real drawback being the lack of a (non-USB) camera interface (will the Pi LCD interface ever be used?) may be worth it.

After making a great impression with the opening up of the Broadcom GPU hardware, the only ARM SoC to do so, a giant step backward as since the
B+ they have stopped providing schematics with no real explanation as to why. A partial schematic of the changes from the B to B+ was made public,
but it does not include any of the new 4 port USB interface. Inquires at the Raspberry Pi Foundation and Element 14 are routinely ignored.

Another big problem for me with the Beaglebone Black is the single host USB port especially since it also lacks any kind of camera interface. I need
WiFi and a camera and for power considerations a USB hub is not and option.

Re:No surprise the Pi does well

[fnj]

it's [Beaglebone] hard to update

No it isn't.

the eMMC space is a little too small to be really useful.

No it isn't.

So you boot off of SD instead, but that requires you to hold down a button while it is booting to bypass the eMMC.

No it doesn't.

Zero for three.

Re:No surprise the Pi does well

[Bing Tsher E]

You need to show your work to get credit on the question.

Re:No surprise the Pi does well

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think the original poster showed work either though.

1) Hard to update.
what is hard about writing image to sd card and boot with user/boot button on
2) eMMC is too small
this is a qualitative judgment i think. I think 4GB is plenty to boot off of. If it isnt then linux people always claiming windows is bloated better be ready to apologize. SD card can be used as extra storage
3) boot off of sd card requires holding down a button
You can remove a file in the eMMC that forces booting from sd card, so no need to hold down a button.

I'm with the replier, the op is 0 for 3

Re:No surprise the Pi does well

[gl4ss]

if you just want a desktop replacement, take the pi2.

if you want to drive actual robotics, 3d printer, cnc or whatever like that, take the beaglebone and it's not because of pure cpu speed either why you would want to do this(it's the extra chips that you can use to drive steppers at steady rate - unlike the friggin Pi which sucks for that kind of things.. you're really better off using an 8 bit atmel than pi for motor control).

Re:No surprise the Pi does well

[jandrese]

Mine has a 2GB eMMC slot, which is too small for a standard Debian install, and you can't put the standard Debian on the eMMC you have to hack it to make it work.

Why Galileo?

[spire3661]

Where are the cheap Bay Trail/Cherry Trail SoCs?