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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.
So, is it up to 4 now?
Something that small and aerodynamic you could easily get maybe 20, 30 feet if you really threw it hard enough.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
With 1721 voting
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
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.
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...
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.
I read the internet for the articles.
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.