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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.
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.
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"
I've got three x86 PC in my closet. I've refrained from using them for one reason. Noise. Those things were very loud, and I have no idea how to make them quiet.
A quiet CPU cooler costs more than buying an ODroid or Raspberry Pi, or backing the Pine A64+. And their power budget is comparatively negligible. You're best off donating (or recycling) those things and buying an ARM SBC.
If you do the math, if you live someplace where power is expensive and you regularly use a notable amount of it, then it's actually cheaper to replace those machines than to plug them in and leave them running. That's only become true recently with the ultra-cheap SBCs; they used to come at a massive price premium, but the proliferation of cellphones has made powerful SoCs cheap.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
How do you add a HDD though? I've got several SATA drives lying around, but SoC with SATA seem to be expensive.
For ~$25 you can buy a brand new in box Pogoplug V4 which has 1xSD, 2xUSB3, 1xUSB2 and 1xSATA, plus 1xGigE. It's not really good for anything other than storage, but it's a great cheap way to stick a disk on your network. They run some crippled little Linux out of the box, but you can upgrade the u-Boot to let you run Linux from the SD slot or whatever. I run it from the SD slot and have u-Boot configured to not actually be able to boot from anywhere else, so nothing I can plug in will interrupt the boot process. The usual thing is to run Debian on them, but you can also run Arch and maybe Gentoo. They are surprisingly solid little pieces of hardware and I get tolerable throughput to Ye Olde MyBook 3GB from my Win7 PC through my cheapass Dlink GigE switch, somewhere 20-25MB/sec. I have only used the SATA on occasion and never with a device even as fast as that, only with a laptop disk. Still you can not beat it for SATA on an ARM SBC; not only is it cheap, but it's a professional product with a quality case, and a decent ethernet cable and wall wart.
Right now I am using a Fire TV stick in the living room because the MK908 never became convenient enough to use. I may try again with PineA64+, assuming that even pans out. But my Pogoplug faithfully shovels bytes out to that, running Kodi.
There are many other revisions of the pogoplug hardware; I recommend none of them. I never had much luck with them being stable. I have also never used any other Sheevaplug-based or -descended hardware, so I can't speak to any of those, just to the pogoplugs. I also have a dockstar, which is just a tiny pogoplug, and it was never very reliable either. The V4 pogoplug on its original wall wart has been great. You will need at least a 2GB SD card and I suggest at least 4GB (for elbow room) for your Debian volume. I am using ext3 for boot and ext4 for root, with great success. I'm running both samba and nfs, and I can use both at once and nothing craters, which is pretty much the total use case for the device.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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.