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64 Hacker Friendly Single Board Computers (linuxgizmos.com)
An anonymous reader writes: This year, we've seen some incredible price/performance breakthroughs in low-cost single board computers. LinuxGizmos has put together a compilation of 64 low-cost, hacker friendly SBCs that are all available in models that cost less than $200, with many well below $100, including Shenzhen Xunlong's $15 quad-core Orange Pi PC, Next Thing's $9 to $24 Chip, and the $5-and-up Raspberry Pi Zero. Processors range from low-end 32-bit single core ARM chips, to 64-bit ARM, x86, and MIPS parts, and with clock rates from 300MHz to 2GHz. This year even saw the arrival of low-cost SBCs based on octa-core processors, such as the $88 Banana Pi M3.
ie, bug ridden
The whole list on a nicely scrollable single page? Not a forever useless slider? Not a clunky, bloated slideshow across 64 pages of clickbait? A page designed to actually be useful and not put on a millennial libtard SJW "mobile friendly" shit show? I had no idea the web still did this. Oh and happy new year, everyone.
take the tolerance test? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2nXGPZaTKik who are we if not each other?
http://www.up-board.org/
UP board is AMAZING specs.
With increasing backdooring of PC hardware by malicious actors with the resources of nation states behind them (coughnsacough), and the broad acceptance of "features" like hardware level remote access built into Intel CPUs, I wonder if these boards are going to become the last refuge of people who want a system secure from governmental intrusion.
After 6 years with a SheevaPlug I decided to upgrade to a newer batch of 'hackable' ARM boards. Across the board they're terrible with driver and OEM support.
Half are knockoffs of knockoffs made by some Chinese manufacturer. They run a special version uBoot version that is in violation of the GPL. They run "Linux" but what they don't tell you is it isn't a mainline version. It is half full of binary blobs and unsupported past when it was released, despite the board still being sold.
I'm going to try out the Intel Edison next because I've always had good luck with Intel boards, they put development time into making working drivers. (Compare their GigE controllers vs Realtek).
This should be "64 hacker friendly SBCs if your time is free and you enjoy being frustrated by stupid nuances"
The one thing that I enjoyed about the Raspberry Pi is its ability to run the mainline MATE distribution. However, buy the faster versions, or get a more comfortable chair.
The Chinese are very good at cranking out cheap stuff, but without much proper support. Worked my way through a RPi (USB/network nightmare; lousy design, large community though), Cubieboard2 (retired so you're on your own) and the Orange Pi (took me months to get a suitable Linux image working). Yes, the Orange Pi has four cores, but only uses on at a time. You want me to fix that? I bought it to play with IOs and think up nice projects with it, not to fix the core of the beast. They were all disappointing and not at all friendly to deal with. Bad for me, bad for the environment because they will soon end up in the bin.
Got me the old x86 PC from my mother-in-law, stuck Linux on it and it's running happily as a server. If I want to have IO pins I use an Arduino for my projects and let the server do the number crunching. All's well that ends well, but don't get me started about SBCs again.
I backed the Pine A64[+] at the 2GB, $29 level. If it pans out, that is a crazy stupid low price for that much machine. The only part of it that is less than ideal specs-wise is the GPU, but I don't really care about that. It would be daft to not get at least the $19 1GB model, since the plus has the DSI, touch panel, and camera ports as well and it's nice to leave yourself the option. Plus (ha ha) trying to get stuff done in 512MB is occasionally frustrating. It is Allwinner, so meh. But with ongoing pressure from the community, they may make slow improvement which is better than no improvement at all.
The $15 version might be useful for building your own AP, I guess. If Master mode works properly on the wifi chipset, that is.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I was thinking of getting a couple of boards with my Christmas excess. I was going to post here but decided to askl in redit.
https://www.reddit.com/r/MiniP...
Basically the usage. One a email server, and used occasionally for watching videos.
The other for experimentation/learning OSs. LFS, anyone got Haiku running on any of these? BSD. Learning ARM programming.
Also when I need to do secure computing switch out with a special SD card which I take pains to make sure is clean.
So recommendations?
I consider the VIC-20 to be a nice SBC. Heck, I used mine 20 years ago to do some school work in the hardware labs of my college.
It was a lot easier to plug the VIC into the old CGA monitors and use BASIC to drive the user port than it was to use the XTs. The XTs had no HD, so I had to carry around boot floppies, the PC's BASIC didn't let you access the hardware AFAIK, the Turbo Pascal and C we used wasn't that easy either.
Commodore BASIC was in ROM, and a single line of code could create a 256 value look-up table from math and poke it into memory. A few bytes of assembler pumped it out the user port 8 bits at a time. Etc...
Mostly random stuff.
Orange pi has a poor suit of drivers and linux binaries. When I got mine it would not work with any monitor I owned. I finally got it booted on a TV using HDMI but only at 720p. It didn't like all of the class 10 SD cards I tried making it very confusing to figure out which software version was going to work. Finally it needs 2 amps which means most of the USB connectors that are sold to power it work under dubious circumstances (i..e. they may work but you could do something that would require more power than the connector would supply). It's hardware may be cheap but getting the software to work is hit and miss depending on what gear you have to connect to it.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
I ended up using a beaglebone green to replace my pool controller. Analog I/O for temp sensing, cheap, low power and easy to use. I had some raspberries, but went beagle for the built in analog. I could have bought a external A/D, but these things are so inexpensive, figured I'd try the beaglebone to try another platform. I'm pondering replacing my irrigation controller next with either the beagle or raspberry. I guess time will tell how resilient the beaglebone is to being in an outside enclosure environment. Still given that the replacement board for my pool was crazy expensive, I could get a new beaglebone every year and still be ahead moneywise. And I ended up doing an android app to control it so now I can program the pool from anywhere.
Thanks for the tip on the analog I/O. That's been my pet peeve with these things. For any sort of permenant implementation I don't want to futz with hooking up an arduino or other D/A to the RPi, along with powering those. I just want the analog lines part of the main board. Why do all the SoC lack this feature? even cellphones have an analog I/O (the microphone/headphone jack) as well as thermal sensors and battery monitors, so you'd sort of think someone would put analog I/O right into the SoC instead of relying on extra chips on the motherboard. If an arduino can do surely these chips can.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_single-board_computers
Tim
I also have two Odroids (the U2 model) and agree that they are excellent. They are reliable (often get >100 days uptime between reboots for upgrades, and have had no problems over 2+ years), they run ubuntu (server), they idle at extremely low power/heat (2 cores powered, at 200MHz), but using the ondemand governor they scale up for higher workloads (4 cores powered, at 1700MHz). It's too bad that the U2/U3 is no longer manufactured (due to supply issues).
What part of `yes no` don't you understand?
It seems there is not even one ARM or Intel single-board computer that respects your freedom.
https://www.fsf.org/resources/...
Please prove this wrong.