Raspberry Pi Gets Competitors (hackaday.com)

Hackaday reports that Asus has "quietly released their Tinker board that follows the Pi form factor very closely, and packs a 1.8 GHz quad-core ARM Cortes A17 alongside an impressive spec At £55 (about $68) where this is being written it's more expensive than the Pi, but Asus go to great lengths to demonstrate that it is significantly faster."

And though the Raspberry Pi foundation upgraded their Compute Module, Pine64 has just unveiled their new SOPINE A64 64-bit computing module, a smaller version of the $15 Pine64 computer. An anonymous reader quotes ComputerWorld: At $29, the SOPINE A64 roughly matches the price of the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 3, which ranges from $25 to $30. The new SOPINE will ship in February, according to the website. The SOPINE A64 can't operate as a standalone computer like the Pine64. It needs to be plugged in as a memory slot inside a computer. But if you want a full-blown computer, Pine64 also sells the $15 SOPINE Baseboard Model-A, which "complements the SOPINE A64 Compute Module and turns it into a full single board computer," according to the company...

The original Pine64 was crowdsourced and also became popular for its high-end components like a 64-bit chip and DDR3 memory... It has 2GB RAM, which is twice that of Raspberry Pi's compute module. SOPINE also has faster DDR3 memory, superior to DDR2 memory in Raspberry Pi Compute Module 3 board.

Comments

Da faq?

[Anonymous Coward]

Raspberry Pi had competitors before it ever existed. Are people really this fucking dense around here?

Re:Da faq?

[Anonymous Coward]

Raspberry Pi had competitors before it ever existed.

Had the same exact thought when I saw that headline.

Are people really this fucking dense around here?

You must be new. Yes, the people here really are that fucking dense.

Re:Da faq?

[Darinbob]

They are if they are a blogger or wannabe journalist on the web.

Re:Da faq?

[Anonymous Coward]

This. Getting sick of the "trendy nerds" that know absolutely nothing about what they are talking about. As long as they have the cliche hair, glasses, beard and the regressive-douche mentality I guess anyone can be a "journalist".

We need something like how gamergate brought to everyone's attention the corruption and cronyism of gaming journalism to the tech world.

There are many, many examples I could use but this one for me epitomizes it completely - https://www.wired.com/2014/08/12-startups-in-12-months/

Re: Da faq?

[Anonymous Coward]

very true not to mention already cased super mini computers

Re:Da faq?

[arglebargle_xiv]

The Pi is two things, Pi the hardware and Pi the infrastructure. Hardware-wise, there's a bazillion devices that "compete" with the Pi, many of them much, much better. In terms of the infrastructure, there's nothing that comes close. Until something can replicate and then supplant the entire industry that's evolved around the Pi, you can't call anything "competition". The hardware is mediocre, the infrastructure is unbeatable.

Before I get lots of flames for the hardware comment, it really is. I kinda hate saying this because it's completely changed the industry and totally fulfilled its promise as an educational toy, but dear Ghod you don't want to build a product around it. Compare it to my current go-to alternative, the Odroid C2: It has power conditioning and protection circuitry on both DC in and USB ports, it has a high-current, standard barrel jack connector for power not micro USB (so it can actually power its own USB peripherals rather than needing a hacked-up external USB powered hub or having things fail to work mysteriously), it has a massive heatsink to deal with heat issues, it has proper GigE not pretend USB ethernet (and a 64-bit CPU with 2GB RAM to drive it), it has proper eMMC storage rather than an SD card, and so on and so on, it's actually been designed by competent hardware engineers who know how to build a solid, reliable system.

Oh, and it costs all of $5 more than a Pi.

Re:Da faq?

[amiga3D]

The Pi was designed as an educational prop and hobbyist toy at a throwaway price. It fits that better than anything else out there. If you're looking for professional equipment it's lacking. The Odroid C2 is pretty awesome but it's almost double the price of a Pi3 at 60 dollars on amazon. I have a few of the Raspberry a+ computers I picked up for 25 bucks apiece and got cameras for at 25 apiece. I stuck them around the outside of my house and installed motion on them giving me a dirt cheap way to monitor the area. I'm really blown away by how well they work. I'm sure I could spend 3 times the money and have something a little better but part of the joy is that this stuff is cheap enough that I'm not concerned about it. For things that require a lot of computing power it's not the solution. The things they're doing with the 5 dollar Pi Zero is what really amazes me. It's the culture that surrounds the Pi, the community really, that makes it what it is along with the dirt cheap I don't care if my kids break it price.

Re:Da faq?

[Anonymous Coward]

We need something like how gamergate brought to everyone's attention the corruption and cronyism of gaming journalism to the tech world

Gamergate was about misogyny, not journalism. Of the 4 primary targets that come to mind, all were women, and only one was a journalist.

Re:Da faq?

[arglebargle_xiv]

Sure, and it does a fine job at that. OTOH the price comparison is a bit biased, sure you can buy one for $30-35, but then you have to add an external USB powered hub hacked to not back-power the Pi, and for the 2 and earlier external WiFi, and all sorts of other stuff just to get it up to a usable/useful level. It's a classic case of pay me now or pay me later. Not to mention the fact that they need more care and feeding than a three-year-old, it's only a matter of time before they corrupt their filesystem/flash (because running ext3 on flash on a system with no power conditioning is probably about the worst way you could do it) or shit themselves in some other way, so it's an endless maintenance hassle keeping them running.

(Also, if you're paying $60 for the Odroid you're being overcharged, they're $40 direct from the source. In any case I'm not saying they're the perfect solution, just an indication that you can do things a lot better at comparable cose).

Re:Da faq?

[Mystic Pixel]

Spoken like someone who's never had to design anything for production.

I, for one, would have been SUPER JAZZED to have something as cool as the RPI compule module in 2008 when I needed an embedded linux system in a small form factor. At the time, the only thing available was the Gumstix Verdex - so I went with that. Built a product around it. Was great at the time. Now, 9 years later: still great for what it was, but I'm still stuck on that platform.

Guess why? (Don't bother to answer, you've already shown that you lack an understanding of how the hardware production pipeline works.)

Point being: the recent explosion in embedded compute modules is nothing to be snarky about. Get back to me when you get off your high hobbyist horse and you've invested in validation, procedures, and training for production-level volume hardware, and we can talk intelligently about product planning, support lifecycles, and lifetime buys. (Also, log in, and get off my lawn.)

Re:Da faq?

[Anonymous Coward]

We need something like how gamergate brought to everyone's attention the corruption and cronyism of gaming journalism to the tech world

Gamergate was about misogyny, not journalism. Of the 4 primary targets that come to mind, all were women, and only one was a journalist.

Although on of them had a long history of being a bully and doxing people she didn't like so she didn't deserve much of any sympathy to begin with.

Re: Da faq?

[Anonymous Coward]

you really don't mean "mini computers". Minis were one step down from small mainframes and typically shared similar architecture. Super minis were substantially powerful mini computers from the same manufacturers that were oftern vert powereful. Dec and Data General were some of the more famous manufactures. A raspberry pi is of a category often referred to as credit card sized. Ive no idea if thats an official designation but mini computer was bagged in the 1960s.

Re:Da faq?

[thegarbz]

You missed the point of the summary by focusing on the poorly worded title.

Name one major motherboard competitor that offered anything like the Raspberry Pi until now. They always had competitors in the form of small projects or kick starters or mini embedded systems, but what's new is that a major commodity hardware manufacturer (Asus) is getting in on the action.

The other new thing in the summary is that competitors are now following the Raspberry Pi form factor. There were plenty of Raspberry Pi "alternatives" offering something different, but there were few if any "competitors" offering the same thing.

Re:Da faq?

[Anonymous Coward]

the pi has no competitors, no other board is so cheap, at least virtually

asus should market the board as a 20 bucks board, and then only sell it for that price in one country in the world, and get all the headlines because of the price

cant beleive no one has even tried to do it except for the pi guys, i mean come on, its not rocket science

Re:Da faq?

[serviscope_minor]

Before I get lots of flames for the hardware comment, it really is. I kinda hate saying this because it's completely changed the industry and totally fulfilled its promise as an educational toy, but dear Ghod you don't want to build a product around it.

Depends on the product. Sticking to professional stuff, I've built a custom diagnostic/test device around an RPi. Currently one, but there'll be a herd of 4 eventually. I don't have to worry about people plugging in random USB crap of course. I certainly don't need gig-E (it won't even be on wifi permanently), though I do use the builtin bluetooth, since I need that. Power is provided by a decent SMPS (100-240V of course), so is good quality. I have one custom rider board that connects it up to various bits and bobs. Oh and I use the official screen which is really super handy. It's actually built around that, so everything screws to the screen on a stack, the screen screws into the case lid, and the lid screws to the case, so I can lift out all the hardware very easily. The official screen is very handy.

The SD card is annoyingly slow, but it does make development easy and stress free, partly, in that you can have a production and dev SD card and simply flip the card over to convert the device, and of course with the high speed reader on my laptop, I can duplicate and back up the card quickly and easily.

The downside is it has to be setup as a readonly root, since even with a journalling FS, there seem to be some obscure circumstances which can nuke the SD card. Though isn't eMMC basically the same: it's like the old MMC cards (i.e. SD without any of the dumb crap that no one uses) over a circuit board traces, rather than a fixed socket? I've not really looked into it deeply. On the other hand, r/o root is not a bad idea, generally for kit that some tech might simply yank the cord on at any time.

Given the use case, the RPi was great. It's not cost sensitive, but everything just works out of the box, software wise, and the RPi with its screen is available next day delivery and from loads of vendors. There's also docs on how to do most stuff, which is great.

As usual, horses for courses, etc, etc, but building the current thing I'm on has made me really appreciate the Pi.

Re:Da faq?

[arglebargle_xiv]

Though isn't eMMC basically the same: it's like the old MMC cards (i.e. SD without any of the dumb crap that no one uses) over a circuit board traces, rather than a fixed socket?

eMMC is really bad marketing because with that name you associate it with the pre-SD MMC, where it's really more towards the SSD side than the SD/MMC side, although it's definitely a poor man's SSD. Think of it as an SSD alternative for phones and tablets, which is the most common application area. (eMMC 5.1 is the current standard, with SSD-like speeds possible. They just should've called it nanoSSD or something rather than MMC anything.

Re:Da faq?

[arglebargle_xiv]

The SD card is annoyingly slow, but it does make development easy and stress free, partly, in that you can have a production and dev SD card and simply flip the card over to convert the device, and of course with the high speed reader on my laptop, I can duplicate and back up the card quickly and easily.

I was working on a commercial product based on a Pi 3 not too long ago and... it trashed its filesystem within a few days of setting it up. Interestingly, the manufacturer had anticipated this because there was a recessed area at the bottom of the case that allowed you to pull the SD card out with tweezers for reflashing, and they didn't seem too surprised when I asked them for a copy of the image. Good on them for foreseeing this, but there's no way you can ship something like this to the non-geek general public.

Re:Da faq?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, yes they are. Moreover, if you're talking A17's, they're not in the same domain as A53's in performance...so while that board they're off nattering on about is "nice", it's not really a competitor in the same sense as the Pine64 machine might be considered to be. And with 64-bit distributions (SuSE and Arch...) it's not even in the same ballpark.

I honestly wish /. would quit smoking buttcrack.

Re:Da faq?

[Anonymous Coward]

Define "professional" equipment.

If you're talking more ports, yeah. IF you need them. Many people keep telling themselves it's not "professional" if it doesn't have , with being SATA, etc.

Those people, yourself included, if they don't need that, are DAMNED IDIOTS. If you don't need it, it being there doesn't make it "professional" and you should be fucking ashamed of yourself for framing it that way. As an actual professional in this space with 30+ years, I can tell you "professional" is what you need for when you need it and nothing else- and for some of that, it costs more. Waaay more.

Need industrial temp ranges? (Professional) Pay out the ass to the tune of $100-300 for something like the Pi3 as it offers it's ports.
Need more CPU? Ditto.
Need more RAM? Ditto.

I honestly and fervently wish all the 'tards (yes, and you're one of them) would shut the fuck up about "more or less professional" because they don't have a clue about **ANY** of it based solely and completely on the failure of using the damn term in the first place.

Re:Da faq?

[amiga3D]

If you need all the stuff that a computer has the Pi gets expensive, that is true. For the camera set ups I installed the camera and stuck an 8 dollar wireless N usb dongle in it. I tapped into the power for the outside lights on the corner of the house for power for the cell charger and so the board, camera, dongle and charger cost me less than 70 dollars a piece. The cases are old pickle jars sealed with RTV for the holes in the lids. It's kinda weird looking but under the eaves of the house it's pretty much out of the way. It works way better than I thought it would though and basically all I did was look at dozens of videos on youtube and read about a dozen or so more blogs and glean the info I needed. The A+ is really great for cameras as the Pi zero, while it has a camera port, requires a special cable. I was going to try a pi zero but it's hell getting ahold of them. By the time I was able to buy some I already had the A+ boards up. I'm thinking of grabbing an Odroid C2 though for Libreelec. The Pi3 I have is fabulous with Libreelec but for one problem, X265. No matter how much tweaking I can't get it to play smooth and more and more content I acquire is in X265 and I'm tired of converting it to X264 just to be able to watch it. Not to mention the big difference in storage penalties for 264.

Re:Da faq?

[serviscope_minor]

but there's no way you can ship something like this to the non-geek general public.

No, but you can set up the flash as read-only. I'm not sure precisely why it happens. Something to do with the controller on some SD cards? I think my preferred method would be to have r/o SD, because you have to have the root FS on the SD card and a writable filesystem on an internal USB drive.

Re:Da faq?

[evilviper]

I have a few of the Raspberry a+ computers I picked up for 25 bucks apiece and got cameras for at 25 apiece. I stuck them around the outside of my house and installed motion on them giving me a dirt cheap way to monitor the area.

Why in the world would you do that!? You can get WiFi PTZ cameras for as little as $25 on amazon. Pretty good ones are just a bit more, but easily far under your $50 mark.

Re:Da faq?

[Paul Carver]

It may be better now, but I've got a few cameras that require a crappy Internet Explorer only configuration "web" interface and even if you can get streaming video to work with VLC it's unreliable.

I'm completely unwilling to give a camera Internet access and allow it to connect to its vendor's website. If you are willing to put video of your home "in the cloud" (i.e. allowing someone you don't know to sit in between you and the camera) then you probably have more options since I think there are a lot of cameras out there that want you to interact with them via the vendor's website and phone application.

I don't have any Raspberry Pi cameras deployed, but I'd much prefer a full Linux under my own control than a black box camera OS that wants an Internet connection and can be controlled by the vendor's website.

Re:Da faq?

[evilviper]

I've got a few cameras that require a crappy Internet Explorer only configuration "web" interface

I've seen several that require IE for in-browser AUDIO, but that's all. Every camera I've purchased can do configuration and video with any browser, and you can do audio with native apps on any platform (just not in-browser), going all the way back to Axis cameras just shy of two decades ago.

In fact, it seems ALL network cameras made today support ONVIF, so there's a compatible standard they all support (though maybe not in your browser of choice). There's nothing unreliable about any of them I've used, and I can't even remember user comments anything like that.

I'm completely unwilling to give a camera Internet access and allow it to connect to its vendor's website.

It's true they all OFFER a DDNS option, but you can easily turn that off. And recently a large number of the cheapest cameras require a proprietary phone app for setup, but there are still plenty with web interfaces that setup and work just fine with an incorrect gateway address or firewall rules preventing egress. I just bought a $30 one recently.

I'd much prefer a full Linux under my own control than a black box camera OS that wants an Internet connection and can be controlled by the vendor's website.

They're all Linux under the surface, you just need to look around for instructions on gaining access. Often it's just a one-line change in the firmware image before flashing to enable telnet access, or finding the serial port pins on the board, or similar.

Re:Da faq?

[Anonymous Coward]

I AM... I am that fucking dense...dence... densse...

Re:Da faq?

[tlhIngan]

The Pi is two things, Pi the hardware and Pi the infrastructure. Hardware-wise, there's a bazillion devices that "compete" with the Pi, many of them much, much better. In terms of the infrastructure, there's nothing that comes close. Until something can replicate and then supplant the entire industry that's evolved around the Pi, you can't call anything "competition". The hardware is mediocre, the infrastructure is unbeatable.

Exactly. There are millions of devices that cost around $30 and get you way better hardware.

The problem with them is support. Raspberry Pis have a lot of it - community support has produced lots of tutorials, forums helping people with problems, add on hardware, etc. Not only that, but sofwtare support is impeccable - you can get the latest software for the Pi quite easily.

Compare this with all the other boards out there where the Linux is several versions old now because it was released ages ago, or it can run Android... 4.x. Basically no community formed around them and the manufacturer couldn't be bothered to keep the software stack up to date.

And honestly, having to choose between a support community and better hardware, the support community will win out. Better to have people to help you get stuff to work, than superior hardware that doesn't work and no one around to help you getting it to work.

Re:Da faq?

[arglebargle_xiv]

I'm not sure precisely why it happens. Something to do with the controller on some SD cards?

That's the usual FAQ response, "you've used a bad/cheap SD card", but it's only a contributing factor. Sure, there are people who are going to use the cheapest, crappiest eBey'd Chinese knock-off SD cards they can find, but you find the same problems with good-quality Sandisk cards bought from authorised distributors (so you know they're the real thing, not a clone). In addition where I've seen the corruption (with the quality SD cards) it's at the filesystem level, not the flash block level, so it's not the SD that's doing it.

The real problem is caused by a combination of three things, use of a non-flash-suitable filesystem, use of the flash by the OS as if it was a hard disk, and use of low-survivability software + hardware (so no watchdog, no checking of subsystems with automatic restart in case of problems, no reset capability, no power management, etc), so the only way to restore functionality if there's a problem with the Pi is to pull the power. Combine those three and you've got filesystem corruption at some point pretty much guaranteed.

Again, that's the Pi's blessing and curse, it's as easy to work with as a desktop Linux PC, but it's not actually a desktop PC. It's sort of the PHP or Visual Basic of the IoT world, it's made it accessible to a huge number of people who otherwise wouldn't have access, but you do pay a price for that.

RaspberryPi still has no competitors...

[Anonymous Coward]

No: there have always been other computers at different prices and different specs, but these don't compete with the RaspberryPi.

I don't understand why people don't get this. It's not about price (RPi is cheap), it's not about performance (we have desktops that are fast), it's about everything you get after you have bought the device. Which in the case of RPi is amazing, and everything else has an ancient Linux kernel, and maybe a blob of code to drive the GPU...

Re:RaspberryPi still has no competitors...

[unixisc]

Actually, both Arduino and Beaglebone are competitors. Plus they have more options in terms of OSs that are targeted at them. For instance, Minix is there on the Beaglebone, but not on the Pi.

The good news is that there are a lot of these that are available for a potential IoT market, and hopefully, it'll stay that way

Re: RaspberryPi still has no competitors...

[Anonymous Coward]

They aren't competitors in that they are intended for very different purposes. A full OS is overkill for most arduino type applications. Beaglebone is underpowered and not really set up for a desktop experience of learning to code.

This asus board is in a long line of me too products crapped out without more than a 3 month time horizon for software development. The pi's strength is its community, same with arduino and beaglebone.

Re:RaspberryPi still has no competitors...

[Camel Pilot]

I won't call Arduino a competitor Raspberry pi - different animals. An Arduino is an embedded system while Raspberry is a minicomputer. For example you would not want to use a Raspberry pi in something that will have its power pulled abruptly or on and off - unless you go though a lot of hoops to create a read only file system and even then it is risky to use it for something in the field or embedded in a another system.

Re:RaspberryPi still has no competitors...

[serviscope_minor]

unless you go though a lot of hoops to create a read only file system and even then it is risky to use it for something in the field or embedded in a another system.

The hoops are not that bad. Just mount /tmp, /var/tmp, /var/log, /run and one or two others as tmpfs, and set up a few symlinks, like making sure /etc/resolv.conf points to a tmpfs FS (or just lock it to 8.8.8.8). Once you have it figured, it's straightforward.

There are guides for running debian as readonly root over NFS: most of those instructions (except the NFS bit) apply.

Re:RaspberryPi still has no competitors...

[Anonymous Coward]

> An Arduino is an embedded system while Raspberry is a minicomputer.

Kid, when I was your age, a 'minicomputer' was the size of a refrigerator. Not one of those dorm-room ones, neither.

Now git off mah lawn!

i/o ports and support

[Billly Gates]

The Pie has FreeBSD and other Linux distro support and lots of i/O to hook up other peripherals.

Re:i/o ports and support

[Ungrounded Lightning]

The Pie has FreeBSD and other Linux distro support and lots of i/O to hook up other peripherals.

And I was running Ubuntu 14.04 LTS on a Beagle Bone Black in April of '04 (although its userland was running on a somewhat back-versioned kernel for a couple months until the guy doing the kernel ports got the proper one fully ported).

The Black is not the first Beagle Bone version, either, and it was running Debian Linux from the first time I encountered it. It has lots of I/O hookup opportunities - including onboard USB, Ethernet, video, and lots of GPIOs that can be configured to provide several serial ports and a number of buses, in addition to lots of wiggle wires. And you can stack peripheral boards on it, as well.

Plug in a wall wart, USB hub, keyboard, mouse, monitor, (and, if 4 or 8 Gigabytes of file systems feels too cramped, a USB drive or mount a filesystem from a fileserver). Bingo: a full-blown desktop system with about the power of a cellphone and smaller than a pack of cigarettes (excluding all the stuff you plugged into it, of course).

Which is not to say it's the best choice. it's just one I happen to be familiar with. There are a number of single-board machines out there. Cellphone processor technology is too powerful, cheap, and available to NOT be plowshared.

Re:i/o ports and support

[Anonymous Coward]

I/O sucks though. The USB and ethernet buses are shared, and USB is still 2.0 on today's Pi products.

Competitors don't get it

[goombah99]

Oh so I can pay 2x and get something 2x faster. Wow. And I could pay 2x of $60 and get a whole chromebook or used laptop that was 8x faster. Or a I could buy a cheap android phone and have my rockchip with a touch screen and battery for that $60.

they just don't understand the price point logic of $35.

Likewise going the other way you can buy a cheaper and more powerful board like a Pine or an Orange PI, save yourself $10 in parts and then pay about $300 in time and effort (assuming your time is worth $50/hour) to get a linux distro and and all the needed packages that actually works on it. the orange PI's are junk because a usabale software set only gets ported a year or more after the board has been on the market. I bought one once, and had to download several different distro's for it till I got one with drivers that would support the Key board, Blue tooth, and screen I was using. And even then it was only using just 1 of it's 4 processors and no graphics acceleration from the Mali chip. that took hours to wade through. then when I tried to install other code the libraries didn't compile. Fast forward 3 years, and it works fine now but the rasperry PI 3 eclipsed it.

The whole point of the RPI is a bomb proof little circuit that has loads of well testd software so it's not the project, it's the thing you put into the project.

Re:Competitors don't get it

[PRMan]

This is so true. I got a $5 Raspberry Pi Zero just for kicks. I have spent 10 hours on it and still don't have my bluetooth chip working, and it's a very common chip. Why can't Raspbian come with hardware drivers for the 10 or so most common chips used with it?

Re:Competitors don't get it

[Billly Gates]

It is use cases.

The pie is not a cheap computer. It is for camera, robots, sensors, and IOT type devices. It is sought for due to it's ultra cheap price and GP-IO ports. It is well documented and understood.

If you want to learn to code or browse the web get a 2nd hand thrown out XP box with viruses and do a re-image with Linux. Done. I used to go through garbage in the streets of New York to get broken hardware. I would swap the PSU or hard disk out and put Linux on it for fun projects :-)

If your time is worth something like $50/hr you need a professional system. Go buy one or build one and use whatever OS you want. THe pie is not for you unless you are working at a security company developing a new product or something.

Re:Competitors don't get it

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't listen, but watch what the market does...

Re:Competitors don't get it

[amiga3D]

Bluetooth chip on Pi zero? If you wanted bluetooth the Pi3 has it built in. Any time you run linux you have to be aware of things like which bluetooth or wifi devices will work. Unlike windows where all manufacturers supply drivers a lot of stuff has no linux drivers. You must do research for these devices or you'll end up with useless junk.

Re:Competitors don't get it

[Mystic Pixel]

As much as I like and respect the RPI for what it is, "bomb proof" is the absolute last phrase I would use to describe it.

History lesson, please

The price point is important, yes, but this is the kind of thing that separates hobbyist hardware from production hardware.

Again, to be clear, I do love RPI hardware/foundation/etc but I'm just trying to keep things realistic here.

Re:Competitors don't get it

[Half-pint HAL]

It is use cases.

The pie is not a cheap computer. It is for camera, robots, sensors, and IOT type devices.

The original design brief of the Raspberry Pi was as a cheap computer. If it was intended for cameras, robots, sensors and IoT devices, it would have battery management onboard -- all the use cases you mention are much better server if the device can be powered without wires.

Re: Competitors don't get it

[MarkH]

"so it's not the project, it's the thing you put into the project." Well said and bang on.

Re:Competitors don't get it

[Anonymous Coward]

> The whole point of the RPI is a bomb proof little circuit

Coming to think of it:

An EMP-proof case (faraday cage) would be pretty nifty. :-)

Lots and lots

[darthsilun]

Geekbox w/ Landingship

Someone has already mentioned the Pine64

EXPRESSObin on kickstarter

I'm waiting for my EXPRESSObin boards. They're supposed to be fully compliant to all the uBoot and device tree standards and will run Fedora out of the box. I have a Pine64 and Geekbox, and both will only run custom Ubuntu because they don't have devicetree.

Re:Lots and lots

[KiloByte]

I have a Pine64 and Geekbox, and both will only run custom Ubuntu because they don't have devicetree.

For Pine64, try Icenowy's kernels, they work fine for me. That's 4.9 with devicetree; she hasn't rebased the patch set to 4.10-rc yet, though, and so many A64 pieces went into 4.10 while so many are still missing from mainline that I'm not attempting to rebase it myself. But if "only" 4.9 is good enough for you, dump that 3.10 vendor crap...

Why not an x86 board?

[Anonymous Coward]

It'd be something different than all these ARM boards. An Intel Atom chip could work, but I don't know if AMD has anything of the equivalent.

Re:Why not an x86 board?

[ledow]

Probably the licensing costs are incredibly prohibitive.

And Intel can't really come close to ARM's lower power consumption.

And Intel chips get much hotter than ARM (even the RPi 3 is basically passively cooled).

And modern Intels often need a lot of support chips.

But apart from all that, it's a marvellous idea...

(Intel and ARM target very different markets and use cases. There's a reason that almost all smartphones - including the iPhone - use ARM-based chips).

Re:Why not an x86 board?

[Anonymous Coward]

Intel makes one called the MinnowBoard Max. It's in the $150 price range.

Re:Why not an x86 board?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Intel has parts that would work(albeit a bit light on GPIO); I've got a dreadful little tablet here based on the Z3735G, and they packed that CPU, a gig of RAM, 16GB of flash, a 1024x600 touchscreen, some sort of BT and wifi, and a battery together for under $50.

If they hadn't also burdened the device with some of the more agonizing firmware I've had the pleasure of dealing with(AMI's dysfunctional take on 32-bit UEFI, no compatibility support module, on a 64-bit platform? Sign me up!); it'd actually be a decent little Linux toy, since that Atom is supported by intel GPU drivers, not the freaky PowerVR stuff.

As best I can tell, though, the Z-series Atoms didn't attract all that much interest(they are comparable to ARM devices aimed as similar price performance niches; but not particularly superior); and vendors weren't exactly clamoring to buy the chips; and Intel doesn't really like selling parts that cheap. They'd much rather try to sell you on a Core M or the like.

There isn't a whole lot of reason to do it; or apparent interest; but it could be done.

Re:Why not an x86 board?

[unixisc]

It'd be something different than all these ARM boards. An Intel Atom chip could work, but I don't know if AMD has anything of the equivalent.

Can't the Via Nano be used for something like this? I doubt it would have much use in the mainstream netbook market, given how strongly the Celeron, Atom and A8 chips have been hitting it, but it could find a niche in something like this. And what's even better - it has some very good embedded OSs available, like Minix, QNX and of course every Linux and BSD out there.

Re: Why not an x86 board?

[Anonymous Coward]

The Edison looks pretty interesting but it has some warts. It needs support hardware to do anyhin interesting and Intel managed to revive the f00f erratum so you need to recompile the world with -momitlock.

Re:Why not an x86 board?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

They don't appear to have abandoned the product line; but it's been ages since I've seen a VIA x86 in the wild. HP used to build thin clients around them, after Transmeta died horribly; and prior to Atoms they showed up reasonably frequently on embedded boards(slow; but markedly cheaper than a Pentium M and markedly smaller and cooler than P4); but they don't seem to have done well recently. They were always pretty slow, and ran pretty warm unless clocked quite low, plus their GPU offering is a descendant of the old S3 'Chrome' designs which is...not good...when it comes to software support.

Between Atoms and the AMD G-series SoCs, it was a bit of a slaughter.

Re:mod parent up...

[Billly Gates]

I agree 100% with the parent that RasperberrryPi has no competitors. The pie is for the I/O ports for IOT devices and tinkering with something that well documented and supported with up to date and working kernel and opensource components and working hardware (not buggy).

The Raspergy Orange/zero and the more expensive Beagle miss the point. A faster chip with no or I/.O or proprietary buggy i/O incompatible with the Pie defeats the purpose. The cheaper units lack these and the more expensive units are faster but miss these or run outdated stuff that no one uses when you try to get a IOT camera hooked up.

If it's suddenly a performance arms race

[Anonymous Coward]

then Pi should get its OpenGL display driver fixed aSAP. It's giving slow Rage 128-like results, rather relatively anachronistic to its powerful ARM.

They compete in many projects, share community

[raymorris]

The hardware is vastly different between the Arduino and the Pi, but in neither instance is the hardware the point. The point is all the community and everything which makes them easy to use, even for hobbyists.

At work we had a "show and tell" type event for a while. One guy brought his RPi, which he had hooked up to some triacs (think relays) to allow it to turn 120V devices on and off. I shared that I had built almost exactly the same thing with an Arduino. (I had also done the same with an old Pentium I got from the scrap pile). So same project, he used an RPi, I used an Arduino.

I'm not the only person who owns both RPi and Arduino - they attract some of the same buyers and community members. Sometimes when thinking about a project, I'm not sure at first if I want to do it with the Arduino or with the Pi. The Arduino probably *could* handle it, but there wouldn't be room left to add features later. So this Arduino I have right here and this Pi I have in this red case directly compete for my projects, even though the hardware is vastly different.

Lacking in I/O

[Walter White]

The extra processor horsepower and RAM is nice but it seems like it is not matched by I/O. is the gigabit Ethernet tied to the processor? One of the drawbacks of the Pi (not Pie, BTW) is that Ethernet is off the internal USB2 hub.You could put gigabit Ethernet on a USB2 hub and get no increase in bandwidth. The Tinker has one micro-USB connector for power. Does it support OTG? (According to the Hackaday article it does have multiple USB 2.0 ports.) Sata would be nice too.

The biggest advantage of the Raspberry Pi is the community. It's going to be hard to match that. The RPi has hit critical mass when I can go to my local Microcenter and get a Pi 3 Model B for $30 US or a Pi zero for $5.

Re:Lacking in I/O

[Anonymous Coward]

GAH!! If I keep hearing "lacking in I/O" from people that ought to know better, I'm going to start issuing nut-shots through the Internet.

1) Lacking in I/O is only a problem for someone NEEDING that I/O. It's not intended, nor designed for SATA, 1G Ethernet, and a whole host of things. Worse, most of the devices that "have more I/O" along those lines are using something that can't even LEVERAGE the stuff fully or, realistically in the manner the idiots going on about "lacking in I/O" keep going on about.

2) If your application, at the time you're doing this, doesn't NEED those things, the device isn't "lacking in I/O"

3) I really, really wish people would fucking quit trying to make this or that embeded board be a PC, which is where MOST of the "lacking in I/O" bullshit comes from.

What about the C.H.I.P.?

[Feneric]

A big draw of the Pi is its price point. More expensive devices aren't necessarily competition. Less expensive devices like the C.H.I.P. are the ones I'd expect to take a bite out of Pi.

Re:What about the C.H.I.P.?

[ooloorie]

The CHIP is also nice in other ways: it's smaller, it comes with flash on-board and Linux pre-loaded, and when you power it from a USB hub, you get both networking and serial console support over the same connection.

Re:What about the C.H.I.P.?

[Anonymous Coward]

Less expensive devices like the C.H.I.P. are the ones I'd expect to take a bite out of Pi.

Currently, I'd say C.H.I.P. is pretty disappointing. On the one hand, they do have a pretty much stock Debian system in place so you've got the nice repository of packages. On the downside, there's issues of using too much power over the microUSB (even when using their not-all-out flash image) and risking killing a computer if you're using it as a power source*, the pretty substantial boot time (about a minute), and a really unclear path on what Nextthing plans to do about various issues on the system**. It seems pretty clear they're too busy trying to upsell to the $69 PocketCHIP (which I can sort of understand because presumably that's where the profit is coming from, but a PocketCHIP is pretty crap compared to some cheap Android tablet/keyboard combo).

So, yea, I can't really figure out what you'd want to use CHIP for except as a really overkill microcontroller that has all sorts of basic issues where you'd want to use it as a microcontroller. This may change, but I only see it happening if enough of a community can work around the basic issues and can turn CHIP into a decently basic 8-bit/16-bit gaming system. I mean, the core is there so a third party could probably make a killing flashing and releasing a setup using that.

* The suggestion to use "CHG-IN" and a battery to mitigate the risk is pretty well a joke, IMO. Even if, in theory, it would work it simply should never be the case that it's drawing so much power to actually risk killing a device it's connect to.

** They've got only about alpha level support for 3D acceleration and 2D acceleration is a joke. Trying to use it as an actual desktop computer is pretty useless because Firefox/Iceweasel is ridiculously slow*** and their fork of Chromium is outdated (and single tab) and basically any activity (even moving the mouse) can cause audio skipping (and alsa underruns but then that's still a messy Linux thing I can't wholly fault Nextthing for). And note, this is a 1GHz processor, so there's really no excuse for this in general..

*** I know the link is for PocketCHIP, but it's basically the same horrible performance on CHIP + VGA.

Re:What about the C.H.I.P.?

[Anonymous Coward]

C.H.I.P. ? Is this this fusion power plant? For several years on backorder, alwas shipped "sometime next quarter?"

How Compatible Is It?

[Anonymous Coward]

Can take an SD card from a Raspberry Pi and plug it into this new board and have everything work, including IO pins? If so, then then this is really great news and I'll probably get one.

Faster RAM

[Anonymous Coward]

Who the fuck cares about the difference between DDR2 and DDR3 on an ARM thing that doesn't even have proper SATA.
I'll stick with 8bit microcontrollers for electronic projects and a common PC for my NAS

ODROID C2

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been using a Raspberry Pi for 3 years now and my biggest complaint is that the SD card I have gets corrupted every so often. It's a Sandisk...but I don't think that matters one way or another. When I replace it in the near future, I'll go with the ODROID C2 or whatever follow-on board they release mostly because I can use eMMC instead of SD. I know the hardware is a tad more more expensive but my time is worth something and I've spent too much of it recovering corrupted SD cards.

Complaint #2 is the slow network interface on the Raspberry Pi. That's been complained about enough by everyone else though. The ODROID C2 solves that.

Re:ODROID C2

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes. I've got two C2s. Great little boxes

One is a torrent box that has a bunch of USB drives hanging off it shared with Samba. The extra ram and decoupling of the USB and ethernet make this feasible.

The other is a media player - will play hevc/x265 content at 4K by hardware.

My PC power hog can stay off until I want to work or play games.

Re:ODROID C2

[alantus]

The Odroid C2 also has IR receiver and 2.5 mm ac receiver, and it can run both Linux and Android.

I don't see any reason for using Raspberries instead of Odroids.

Re: ODROID C2

[Anonymous Coward]

The super old kernel that C2 runs would be a reason.

USB limitations

[ooloorie]

Right now, I think the biggest limitation of the Raspberry Pi is probably its lack of USB 3 support; without that, it can't be used as a file server. Lack of OTG support also makes it harder to boot/configure the device.

For the next version of the Raspberry Pi, I'm hoping for USB C support, with high power mode, host mode, and device mode, as well as support for serial consoles and networking over USB.

Re:USB limitations

[supremebob]

The Raspberry Pi 3 also doesn't have Gigabit Ethernet or a SATA port, two more reasons why it doesn't make for a very good file server.

It does make a pretty damn good embedded web server, though. You can install the full LAMP stack on the MicroSD card of that thing right from the Raspbian repos.

Re:USB limitations

[ooloorie]

The Raspberry Pi 3 also doesn't have Gigabit Ethernet or a SATA port, two more reasons why it doesn't make for a very good file server.

Those would also be nice to have, but having USB-3/C would be a good start since it allows you to attach disks and gigabit ethernet.

Re:USB limitations

[supremebob]

Yeah, a USB-C port would be nice as well. I just don't want them to go the Apple MacBook Pro route and remove the legacy USB-A ports as well.

Re: USB limitations

[Anonymous Coward]

The usbs on my last one died prematurely and the internet said I should unsolder some bit of it. FTS. Ended up using it to power the robot concierge in my flying car.

Re:USB limitations

[Anonymous Coward]

No, it shouldn't require dongles for basic stuff

Re:USB limitations

[allo]

The rpi does not have usb at all. It emulates it on the processor level, which is why its slow and instable. I guess USB3 will never be possible this way.

And of course usb3 specs allow a lot more power over usb, which isn't possible with a pi.

Just give me a goddamn audio input jack

[Anonymous Coward]

Jesus H Fucking Christ, is it too much to ask for a goddamn microphone/line input jack?

Does it run a stock kernel and distribution?

[caseih]

Does this new board run a stock, off-the-shelf Linux distribution with a stock distro kernel? Is the bootloader open source and easy to use to boot any kernel and OS? If not, then it's really of little consequence.

I think these devices are neat and have a lot of potential, but sadly until we see the kind of standardization in terms of booting and hardware interfacing, these devices are way beneath their potential. Even the Pi, as popular and useful as it is, is hobbled to a degree without this standardization. I'd like to run the same distribution (whatever that is) on my Pi3 as on my Pine64. Or this board. Or some generic chinese SoC board.

Re:Does it run a stock kernel and distribution?

[supremebob]

The Pine64 has a few different Linux distributions available for it, but the last time I tried them they weren't as polished or had as good of a software selection as Raspbian. That was a few months ago, though, so it might be better now.

Re:Does it run a stock kernel and distribution?

[caseih]

That's not what I meant. I know there are distros for each of these boards. What's lacking is any kind of standard for the platform like we have in the PC world. I don't want to run some custom hack of debian with a special kernel on each board. Arm boards will be infinitely more useful when I can download one ISO from the distro web site such as debian.org, and have it boot and run on each of these Arm boards. Right now there's no standards for boot loader let alone device tree. It's a mess.

Re:USB TV stick was my problem

[shoor]

Yeah, I got a Raspberry Pi because I thought I could turn it into a cheap TV recorder with my USB TV stick. Something low power that I could easily leave on all the time so I wouldn't have to remember to leave my regular computer on just to record some program while I was out of the house or asleep.

Didn't work out. Everything had to breath through that slow USB interface so, while I got recordings, they were all chopped up.

Curriculum

[Cmdln Daco]

The thing I see missing in most of the Raspberry Pi competitors is curriculum. It's all fine and well to pop out a cheap single board computer and then port an operating system or two that runs on it. The part of Raspberry Pi that is missing is the curriculum and the value for education, which is what the RPi is all about.

The Raspberry Pi was developed to be a pedagogical tool for education. The Raspberry Pi Foundation works to get acceptance of the RPi devices into schools, and they help educators come up with curriculum to take advantage of the hardware. To get the hardware into the hands of kids who can then hack on it and learn. The Pi wasn't invented so that neckbeards could use it for their Media Center.

Re: Curriculum

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, schools are a goldmine, they are buying a lot of useless things, as if you can buy brains. Smart boards, Pis, methidoligists. I do hope Tramp would breack backbone of the teachers unions, and stops funnelling the money to Pi foundation . So that kids would study something like math and science and English literature rather than all this coding crap.

Re: Curriculum

[Anonymous Coward]

exactly. but still nice for those purposes too.

Re: Curriculum

[Cmdln Daco]

Trump can't interfere in the curriculum of the schools in the UK, where the Raspberry Pi Foundation does most of their work.

Memory slot interface

[manu0601]

The choice of memory slot interface is odd. Today's form factor will be deprecated within 2 years, making it a headache to use the thing on next new hardware

But I am also curious to learn how host software interfaces with such a helper computer hooked to a memory slot.

Re: Memory slot interface

[Anonymous Coward]

Ffs.
The answer is simple. The article was written by a moron who doesn't know shit.
It uses a sodimm physical connector and socket.
It's not a memory interface on that connector though, and it does not plug in to a normal memory socket.
Sigh

Re: Memory slot interface

[Anonymous Coward]

Also if you try to connect the board into a RAM slot of a computer I'm quite sure you will fry something, either the computer or the "pi-competitor"
for anybody reading the article: DO NOT CONNECT TO THE RAM SLOT OF A COMPUTER!
Just because it used the same instead it does not mean that's electrically compatible. Read the manual!

Pi had competitors before it started to ship

[Anonymous Coward]

Chinese allwinners and rockchip boards always have been cheaper and faster than Pi. Odroid, beaglebkard, all these tv sticks. Like last five years Pi lagged behind these competitors in term so of performance. The only special thing about Pi is advertisement strategy.

Re:Pi had competitors before it started to ship

[Anonymous Coward]

They are also practically impossible to get unless you want to order online from across the world, their software support varies between "spotty" to "nonexistant"... No, they are nowhere near competitors to the Pi. Not even remotely close.

Hardware better? Matter of judgment

[lenski]

Personal note: I have and use Odroid -U2, -U3, -C, -C1, -C2, RPI2, RPI3, and a UDOO (original backer), mostly as micro-servers. I don't require much customization and as long as that remains true, I find them to be great machines.

The Odroids are definitely better hardware, but the story gets more complicated when the question of kernels (and the binary blobs needed for media) are updated to mainline. I've heard but not verified that the original Exynos CPUs in the Odroid-Ux are supported by mainline kernels.

The Allwinner chips in the Pines, Banana Pis, Orange Pis, etc. lack complete HW docs and need critical binary blobs (At least the Allwinner H8 has long needed a DRAM controller library blob, for example). If Allwinner were to clean up their documentation and make truly complete hardware docs available, then the overall product would be better than RPi. Until then, RPi support is so much better than their competitors that it overwhelms the otherwise obvious performance advantages.

Quoting from https://www.phoronix.com/scan....

However, the support isn't complete for the Allwinner A64 and is blocked in part by lack of proper documentation. Andre commented, "Due to a lack of official documentation and hardware availability this doesn't go any further at this moment."

The Allwinner A64 is comprised of the less-powerful Cortex-A53 cores, supports H.264/H.265 video decoding, and is widely talked about as being the "$5 ARM SoC." Hopefully this mainline kernel support will get figured out in time for the Pine A64 shipping.

Re:Hardware better? Matter of judgment

[arglebargle_xiv]

Yeah, the software is always the problem, sigh. What I'd kill for is if someone did deployment-grade Pi hardware, a standard 12V supply with 2.5mm barrel jack connector (so you don't need to hang a UBEC in front of everything using a Pi), proper protection circuitry for power and USB, eMMC instead of a plug-in SD card, a watchdog that works, a reset button so you don't need to power-cycle it when it hangs (which, combined with the lack of power management and use of SD card with ext3 practically builds filesystem corruption into your device), use of JFFS or something equivalent for the flash, built-in heatsink, and a few other things. You'd need to do a slightly custom distro (JFFS rather than ext3), but it should run all the Pi stuff straight out of the box while removing a pile of the headaches that currently come with trying to build a product around a Pi.

Re: Hardware better? Matter of judgment

[Anonymous Coward]

You know RPI is not fully documented either.. Right?

Re:Hardware better? Matter of judgment

[Half-pint HAL]

Onboard battery management with standardised support would make the Pi a real prospect to me. Battery management daughterboards for the Pi are almost as expensive as the device itself and block up GPIO pins other hardware might need. I'm also unclear on whether I'm going to have to roll my own operating environment to take advantage of it.

Re:Hardware better? Matter of judgment

[arglebargle_xiv]

The LiFePO4 add-on is kinda cool, but as you say it blocks pins, and means you can no longer fit the thing into a standard Pi case. Also, a single 18650 doesn't really last that long... that's another nice feature about something run off a standard 12V, you can drop a picoUPS inline to the power with the SLA battery of your choice, or use an 12V UPS targeted for CCTV use if you want a ready-made solution.

Re:Hardware better? Matter of judgment

[lenski]

...Great comments, especially WRT the UBEC. My work is always in a lab environment (or at home, where I use beefy USB chargers...), so it never occurred to me to look toward the RC world for an inexpensive DC-DC converter. Thank you for that!

The RPi is not designed for industrial application, and every one of the characteristics you cite, while being important for "pro-grade" product performance, also add cost that is unnecessary for 99.9% of Pi use-cases. Professional engineering time (that's us...) is precious, so we don't screw around with toys for delivered production hardware. The RPi, Odroids, Pines, Pi-clones, even the Beaglebone Black are all fabulous toys that we use to support diagnostics, lab automation, etc: If a $4.99 SD croaks we image a new one and we're back in business.

Industrial strength hardware (fanless industrial PC) costs about 20x the toy hardware: about 700-1000US but it's still fabulously cheap compared to the way it used to be. (I won't get into the ugly details of trying to talk my management into getting rid of VME hardware and 25 year old designs...)

Especially when combined with trick like RAM-resident root and tmp filesystems, EXT3/EXT4 on modern high-endurance flash is fine, as far as I can tell. I've run endurance checks of our current CF cards (1 or 2 gig, extended-endurance) and they are still just fine after 10-15 years of simulated activity. Our product uses flash only for logging and vehicle reporting. Modern wear-leveling and larger media let us forget the whole endurance question. NO more JFFS2! :-)

Re:Hardware better? Matter of judgment

[arglebargle_xiv]

Hey, glad it was useful. In case others find it useful, here's Arglebargle XIV's guide to strapping enough stuff to your Pi to make it somewhat more workable...

* Run it off a UBEC, specifically off an automotive rather than an RC one. These take 12V in via flying leads and output 5V on micro USB, so you don't have to solder on a tiny plug yourself. The ones I've got are labelled "car power technology" and claim to produce 5V at 3A, I've never drawn that much but they'll provide 1-2A without really getting warm. They're epoxy-potted, so should be fine for use outdoors.

* To get power to them, use an IPxx-rated 12V power supply, typically sold for LED lighting or water pumps in gardens. These are cheap and easily available. The UBEC compensates for any voltage drop over long cable runs, so the Pi still gets 5V even if it's fed from only 11.5V by the time it gets to wherever the Pi is.

* Don't plug the UBEC directly into your Pi, instead get a USB OTG adapter. The OTG part doesn't matter and often isn't OTG anyway, the important thing is that the "OTG" part promises a micro USB connector. These typically take micro USB in and feed it to multiple micro and standard USB outputs. So you plug your UBEC into the input, one of the micro USB outs into the Pi, and use the other USB plugs to power the USB dongles that the Pi can't power itself.

* To do this, there's a hard option and an easy one. The hard option is to build your own Y cables with power from the OTG whatsit and data from the Pi (otherwise you end up backpowering the Pi). The easy option is to use a powered hub, you power it from the OTG whatsit and plug everything else into that. Just make sure you get a hub that doesn't backpower the Pi. The best one I've found is a toroid-shaped one where the USB devices are plugged in around the outside of the toroid. Even the largest SDR has plenty of room there, and it can draw up to 1-2A of power from the UBEC if it needs it.

* If you're running multiple Pis in close proximity, don't bother with Wifi'ing them but get an Edimax 6428 V4, and specifcally a V4, Wifi swiss army chainsaw. This can act as a Wifi bridge and is powered off micro USB, so you can also hook it up to the OTG whatsit. Then each Pi gets a wired connection rather than a flaky Wifi one. This gets around the fact that (a) many Wifi dongles sold for the Pi are compatible only in the sense that when you plug them in they won't catch fire or explode (the Raspbian drivers are broken or missing so you need to build/supply your own, and every time you upgrade the kernel your networking breaks until you disassemble the device the Pi is in and install updated drivers via the wired interface) and (b) Wifi networking on the Pi is pretty flaky anyway. With Wifi done via the bridge, you've now got wired access to the Pi, eliminating a major source of problems.

That's all I can think of for now. One of the Pi's running an SDR has just shit itself again but I'm going to leave crawling out to where it is to fix it until tomorrow.

Re:Hardware better? Matter of judgment

[arglebargle_xiv]

Especially when combined with trick like RAM-resident root and tmp filesystems, EXT3/EXT4 on modern high-endurance flash is fine, as far as I can tell. I've run endurance checks of our current CF cards (1 or 2 gig, extended-endurance) and they are still just fine after 10-15 years of simulated activity.

So there's an interesting experiment, what would you put into a more-survivable Pi while increasing the cost by no more than $10-20 (so you prototype with the Pi and then ship the deployment-ready version)? A partial wishlist:

* Proper power protection circuitry on DC in and USB.

* Barrel jack connector with a standard 9-15V in range, so it'll run from everything from 13.8VDC down to 12V-with-cable-losses.

* Use of the watchdog. Apparently some of the early silicon had problems with this, but even the current silicon doesn't use it AFAIK.

* Use of JFFS or similar, and use of RAM-resident filesystems where possible.

* Addition of survivability features, e.g. if no network packet has been seen for x minutes/hours, restart various d's as appropriate (one of the first things I did with the first Pi I got was write a bunch of scripts that checked network connectivity and other things and auto-restarted/reconnected/rewhatever'd if required).

* Reset button with soft-reset (shutdown + reboot) and hard-reset (whack it over the head) capability.

I'm sure there's plenty more...

The Asu Stinker board?

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't that some kind of Japanese fetish toy?ï

Worse than that!

[Anonymous Coward]

It isn't open source friendly, because it is a rockchip rk3288! If I wanted a 3288 there are dozens of other devices with it already included. All with the same shortcoming! Thanks to ARM being a dickhole about Mali (like Imagination Technologies/PowerVR) there are no actual open source drivers available for ANY Mali GPU newer than the 400 series. Meaning the Pi3 with its mostly open source driverbase is FAR further along towards providing a top to bottom open source codebase than its competitors.

I bashed on the Pi for this shortcoming when it first came out, but all the me-too developers have fallen into the same hole, despite there being three perfectly valid ARM chips available with top to bottom open source stacks (QC Snapdragon/Adreno, Tegra (K1 if not X1) and the Broadcom stuff with the VC4) The latter isn't complete, Tegra and Adreno may have other closed source shortcomings (although nothing major of which I am aware when using a chip with a kernel release for it.) and both have complete top to bottom cpu/gpu/bootloader support available. That is also excluding devices based on the Vivante GC series cores, although I am less sure of which chips are available with it since they are not a single source GPU vendor (and most of the mainstream models seem to be using PowerVR or Mali cores.)

Re:Worse than that!

[Bert64]

So which devices would you recommend with fully open source stacks?

Re:Worse than that!

[Anonymous Coward]

Orange Pi and Armbian

Are they usable for 2d animation rendering ?

[rouhol9ods]

Salamu alaikum, Thanks all for the FLOSS and Open Hardware movements. I'm a normal user of Debian GNU/Linux and GNU/Linux Mint as my main Desktop computer and Laptop, and I own a RaspberryPI3 and BeagleBoneBlack (Raspbian and Debian). Since, i'm creating CC0 educational 2d animation videos like those : https://youtu.be/4MB47oPBp9U (Created with Synfig Studio, Tupe, Libreoffice Impress, OpenShot, Audacity, LibAV, Inkscape and GIMP), And because of the world of on-line content are increasingly created by users, I was wondering if one can use them to create (especially rendering) educational 2d animation videos, and teach people (like Syrian refugees, or african people in rural areas and poor vilages) how to create educational content with FLOSS and those low cost computers ?

What about displays?

[backslashdot]

How about getting the price of a 7 inch display down to under $10 .. then I would be impressed. There is the raspberry pi Zero for $5 .. yay impressed. But how can it be used without a display? Even for many IoT type stuff, displays need to be cheap.

Re:What about displays?

[brad3378]

Why not skip a dedicated display and just remote login instead?

Raspberry Pi is now compatible with Teamviewer!

https://pages.teamviewer.com/p...

Re:What about displays?

[backslashdot]

The remote console needs a display. For my (and I am sure many others) IoT device to be viable it needs to have the touchscreen display cost under $10. Get it done using a robot.

Stop buying into the hype, quote the true price.

[Anonymous Coward]

Except that you can never get the device at the prices promoted in pieces like this. Mandatory postage and handling makes the claimed prices (and wow factor) of these devices a joke. The Pi Zero at $5 comes to mind. In this case a $15 device costs an additional $11 to ship.

And the OS Asus will support is??

[softcoder]

I get SOOOOO annoyed at these hardware announcements from micro to super computer that make no mention of the OS to be used.
If ASUS will only support Windows on this board, then what is the price point? Is Windows included?
If ASUS will be supporting Linux on this board, then why cant they support Linux on their OTHER Mobos, the desktop ones that are used for gaming, etc.
If they are not supporting ANY software then what community do they expect to step up? Martians?
softcoder

Pine64

[Anonymous Coward]

I read that the Pine64 is garbage

Open source solutions

[Anonymous Coward]

Is there a single (not pun intended) single-board computer with open-source hardware? The GPUs are what I'm most interested in, and 99% have blobs for the media decoders (for licensing reasons unfortunately). If there was one with an overpowered (and literally overpowered) GPGPU set-up, I'm sure a number of codecs could be programmed that way, but until we get a board where a) the kernel/bootloader is unlocked 2) the GPU is unlocked and 3) we get analog in/out at least as capable as stereo audio, I have a grim outlook on the future for hobbyist tinkering.

HD-Homerun - HDHR4 is the solution

[Anonymous Coward]

Then the act of recording from a tuner becomes a wget with a timeout.

The only issue becomes network and USB performance to write the data, not CPU. If you get a $20 powered USB hub and connect up normal storage with that (and power the Pi too), then it can work.

# record 1 hr of channel 69.2
/usr/bin/timeout 3600 \
wget -q -O - http://hdhr4:5004/auto/v69.2

It really is that simple.
The power needed by the USB-tv tuner was probably higher than the pi would handle too.

Software is everything

[Anonymous Coward]

To bad that the Allwinner SoC has so bad support for it's own hardware.

too late

[Anonymous Coward]

the faster it gets the less battery life availlable , yes i overclock my PI's for dev , but the goal is to eventually have everything running on a 0 , granted the PI3 compute module is out with pretty much the same dimm form factor and a much better processor then 0