Raspberry Pi 3 Is a Nice Upgrade, But Alternatives Exist With Faster Performance (phoronix.com)

An anonymous reader writes: With the Raspberry Pi 3 now available, benchmarks have been done comparing the Raspberry Pi 3 to other ARM SBCs. The Raspberry Pi 3 was found to be a faster upgrade compared to the Raspberry Pi 2, but the ODROID-C2 is a much faster alternative. For only $5 more than the Raspberry Pi 3, it includes twice the amount of RAM, Gigabit Ethernet, and a faster SoC. The ODROID-C2 also has HDMI 2.0 and superior Ethernet while the Raspberry Pi 3 has an advantage of 802.11n WiFi. The ODROID-C2 also has a heatsink for ensuring the SoC doesn't get as toasty as the Raspberry Pi 3.

Comments

When will people learn?

[Dutch Gun]

It's not always about raw performance vs price. Apple wouldn't be kicking the crap out of all the other mobile players if that were true. Years ago, I remember hearing lots of disparaging remarks (here on /. mostly) about iPods, and how xyz brand was so much better because it could play Ogg Vorbis, and was hackable, had more storage for less cost, etc, etc. Where are all those players today?

Performance/price is important (although at that price point, do you really think people care all that much?), but don't forget about other factors: compatibility, community, mindshare, design, ease-of-use, reliability, and so on...

Re:When will people learn?

[serviscope_minor]

Computers like the Raspberry PI are great for start-up companies who can't afford to go to a manufacturer and have their own custom electronics made

Hi, hardware startup guy here. I'm going to come out and say that tautologically, if you know what you're doing, then doing custom hardware yourself is actually not nearly as difficult as you think.

First board design is cheap and easy. I'm using Eagle which has a free version if you want to get started, and a reasonably cheap version for smaller stuff. Everyone keeps telling me that KiCad (free) is now better than Eagle. There's of course a barrier to switching, but either way the software is cheap and easy.

Unpopulated boards are cheap to buy. There's places like Hackvana (my personal choice), OSHPark (ever used, but friends of mine like it), PCBPool (choice of a different friend, more expensive, larger minimum order than hackvana, less nice boards I think but free stencil which evens out the cost).

Either way, you can get a bunch nice double sided boards for easily under $100.

For soldering there's a bunch of choices. Best thing to do if you're interested is read some ameture tech blogs on the subject. Amazingly you can actually solder QFNs with an iron (heat gun needed for the middle pad). I didn't know that until I saw it.

I personally prefer using a stencil and solder paste. Took me about 4 hours of pasting and repasting to get the hang of it, but I can now paste cleanly every time. Then just plonk the components down and stick it in a reflow oven. If you're being cheap, a heat gun (852D+ gun/iron combos are cheap and very servicable), or a toaster oven will do. I forked out the $200 for the lowest end reflow oven (T962) and it's super easy to use. Apparently 3rd party firmware exists which improves it greatly.

I personally prefer solder paste and stencil, a reflow oven and a vacuum pickup tool (pedal controlled is much easier to use) and tweezers. That's the method used professionally for very small runs, as defined by people I know who are professionals. I know a small engineering company where they make all their custom kit like this in house, though they have spiffier irons and reflow ovens than me. Other people get by just fine with various combos of soldering irons and etc. Those are fine, but can get trick for some packages, especially larger ones.

I've been working with 0402 passives, small DFN, QFN and LGA devices and a larger CPU module (bluetooth: module because various reasons mostly FCC and time related). Others at my local hackspace have been doing double sided boards equally small with MCU, QNF and of course 0402 passives, and doing it with an iron.

I am not a pro. I did a degree with some EE in it 15-18 years ago. This is my first electronics since then and my only foray into anything more advanced than .1" DIP and a PIC mucrocontroller.

So, getting boards made is something you can do pretty cheaply and easily. If you don't feel like soldering them your self there are places that will populate them for you, though that's more expensive for short runs, but it's not bad. I got a batch of 30 small boards made, populated, shipped and exported all in for about 2 grand.

Getting started is hard. The easiest thing is to find a vendor who makes a devkit that does what you want, make sure you can get up and running on that to some extent, then base a design off the devkit. Include LEDs in the same place and once you have the LED blinking on both, you can start using your peripherals.