64 Hacker Friendly Single Board Computers (linuxgizmos.com) 86
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.
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Re: Hacker friendly (Score:1)
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All it needed to do is to perfectly emulate an Amiga at at-least 68060 speed
Nothing perfectly emulates any Amiga. UAE is amazing but it's not 100% and it's unlikely that it ever could be. There's probably still tons of Amigas lying around in people's sheds and attics, I know I have one.
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Why does Slashdot treat me as logged out?
I've got three.
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Meaning, "well documented, easily programmed and has unused general purpose IO." (By "easily programmed" I mean placing the firmware program onto the chip without spending a bunch of money on expensive hardware programmers)
They're not very buggy because A) they're mostly CPUs from the 80s that are out of patent and require very few external components and B) they're mostly a blank slate, just a CPU and motherboard. But the board doesn't do much, because the CPU (microprocessor) has its own storage and memor
Orange pi disaster (Score:2)
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 powe
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hacker friendly == some assembly required
The whole list on 1 page? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Yep, the web still has linux. Just a little glimpse into the lives of nerds. ;)
If you run enough ad blockers and processing-request-deniers and other grumpy stuff, you can have almost all sites either give you the content, or a blank page that can be quickly closed.
Signal quality relies heavily on filtering.
Re: The whole list on 1 page? (Score:2)
Now we just need it compiled in to a spreadsheet with all the various features indexed across the various boards and life would be good.
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I'd love it if there were an associated table which was sortable by a number of criteria; say cores, MHz, RAM, Flash, Price, etc.
You forgot one (Score:1)
http://www.up-board.org/
UP board is AMAZING specs.
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http://www.up-board.org/
UP board is AMAZING specs.
"What's up-board?"
"Eh, not much, yeah I'm kinda bored."
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That does look sexy. In fact, it looks so sexy that I just ordered two. My son piqued my interest and gave me a reason to consider delving (back) into this subject just yesterday. What is that reason (you neither asked nor care)? Well, err... I might be 58 but I'm not much different than a five year old. I am going to build not just a robot but I'm going to turn it into a media server robot. Yes, yes I am. No, no I have no good reason. No, I do not expect good results. Yes, I expect to enjoy myself.
Oh, it's
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> I may even make it follow us around the living room and get in the way and be otherwise annoying.
--Maybe you should call it " TWIKI " ;-)
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That's not a bad idea! By the way - I've not forgotten you. Heh... You're the RPi/SoC/SBC/embedded guy and person I'm gonna potentially bug if I get stuck. It looks like there are scripts and programs to do pretty much everything I can think of. (Yes, yes I have been researching.) Since I last bumped into you, I've meandered down the East Coast (wanderlust), bumped into a young lady - and she stuck, and decided to spend the winter in Florida.
I ordered the Up (two of them) and I've found a couple of robot bo
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--That's good news, I had been wondering if the two of you were still together. I still see your posts in various articles :)
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http://www.up-board.org/
UP board is AMAZING specs.
Agreed. This looks like the perfect upgrade from the Raspberry Pi, assuming they get it right. A quad-core 64-bit CPU with USB 3.0 and Gigabit Ethernet are exactly what I'm looking for. And I'm sure the Intel Atom's USB controller won't be broken, unlike the one contained in all the Broadcom SoCs used in the various Raspberry Pis. Software workarounds never solved all of its problems.
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There are sufficiently few people who care about privacy to make them a mass market success.
And the ones that do care about privacy can be more easily tagged.
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Absence of something can be just as effective as presence when harvesting information and profiling. And you really can't block tracking. If you did, you can never get a response from a web site or anything. How would they know where to send it? And the back and forth will tell them exactly what is being blocked, by the lack of response to their trackers.
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I've been thinking of one for myself for secure computing for a reason.
Create an image.modify it for your interactions while having perfect opsec. Backup your image.
Only use the image when you want to do unsecure computing. Either use another computer, or use a different SD card.
Monthly restore the old ( signed image ).
NOT hacker friendly. (Score:5, Informative)
After 6 years with a SheevaPlug [wikipedia.org] 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"
Re:NOT hacker friendly. (Score:5, Informative)
Which SBCs, specifically.
As for being "made by some Chinese manufacturer" - you've just described 90% of the world's consumer electronics. Most of which is excellent.
Re:NOT hacker friendly. (Score:4, Interesting)
That isn't what these are for. These are "hacker friendly," not "miniature laptops without a screen." As in, single board computer, not miniature personal computer. If you're wanting random-desktop-distro to work, you're wanting a different product. If you're wanting automated distro updates, you're wanting a substantially different product.
These not doing what you ask for... well gosh, that might be a feature since those things work better on a full system. ;) These are designed for other uses, ones which benefit from NOT having all that extra computer.
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Yes but you want the baseline drivers and linux install to have some level of "perpetual" support otherwise the board isn't going to last very long for you or allow you to customize it without diving into too low a level in undocumented details.
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One of the neat things about hardware; I only need support one time. The documentation won't change, because the hardware doesn't change either; it is all soldered into place.
And these boards are all based on commodity chips. The circuit designs are close to what it is in the data sheets for those chips. If you're "customizing" it, that means running different software, or plugging in different daughter boards. You can do that from the documentation provided by your vendor, or using the documentation by the
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Cubieboard 4 (CC-A80) [cubieboard.org]. There's some stuff at Sunxi Linux [linux-sunxi.org] page. A10-OlunuXino-LIME [olimex.com] as well.
My SheevaPlug is still easier to use than both of them.
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I just ordered two of these about five minutes ago:
http://up-shop.org/up-boards/1... [up-shop.org]
I have no idea how well they will work but I followed someone's link up-thread, read a bit, and ordered two for a silly project that I'm going to work on while I waste the winter away in the Floridian warm climes. I'll almost surely leave said project here, where it will irritate and confuse my children when they come here to make use of the property. It will keep itself charged while I am away.
Anyhow, I may well write up my
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So apart from the sweeping generalisations, would you care to substantiate some of those claims?
I'm not the OP but my experience with Orange Pi is exactly as described. I got one half assed non-standard linux distro working that comes not from the manufacturer but some dudes personal blog, it would not support all my class 10 SD cards and wouldn't boot on any of several monitors (vga, DVI and HDMI 1080) that I owned. Finally found a keyboard monitor and SD card, and distro version that would work. But it seemed hardly worth investing further effort in that since who knows if the software had a path
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Orange Pi PC model to be exact.
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odroids (Score:1)
SBCs: total waste of time and money (Score:1)
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
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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.
Re:SBCs: total waste of time and money (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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How do you add a HDD though? I've got several SATA drives lying around, but SoC with SATA seem to be expensive.
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https://mqmaker.com/ [mqmaker.com] sells a SBC called the WiTi for $69 and it has 2 SATA ports.
Re:SBCs: total waste of time and money (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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Dumb question time...
With these things drawing so little power, can they be powered over USB yet?
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With these things drawing so little power, can they be powered over USB yet?
Many SBCs have USB power, but realize that's just a 5VDC connection with a funny plug which takes up space in your build. If you're lucky they also take power via a header pin, like the Pi. What you really want IMO is power over ethernet, which virtually none of them support. You would have to add a power supply before the device on some of the ethernet wires. However, that's fairly well irrelevant in the case of a storage server, where you'll need power for the disk anyway.
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The way it normally works on the R-Pi is to use two USB cables, one from the device to the hub, and one from the hub to the device. You can also just buy Mini- or Micro-USB connectors as appropriate and then solder power wires to them for those devices which lack header connectors for power, they are cheap on eBay. It is possible to hack a hub to feed power back to the Pi over the USB connection to the hub (normally it goes the other way, right?) and hack Pi to get that power from the hub, but then you'll h
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Sweet - thanks. I've favorited this so I can take a look later. I did just order two of those Up Boards. They look really nice. They're a little pricey for what they are but I don't mind. They have a lot of the work done for me for a different project that I have in mind. Meh, something to keep me busy. I'm probably going to winter here in Florida though we may head off to Henderson, NV after a little while. It depends on if we get bored or restless. I've a small ranch out there that I've not been to in alm
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My understanding of the Pogoplug is that it can only handle 2.5" drives.
Is that just the form factor of the case? Or can't the device power a 3.5"?
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New power supply.
My friend has an expensive digital audio workstation, that internally has an old computer inside. It was too loud, you could hear the fan hum over the microphones! lol All we had to do was install a modern power supply. The old ones just ran at a constant speed, which had to be the speed it needed to be at max load. But a DAW doesn't run at max load while recording. (If it runs at max load it is doing post-processing) So a modern power supply runs really quiet, because they control the spee
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I thought the Pi was made in Wales? Their national nickname is "China of Europe," right? No?
These products are targeted at people who don't usually want a bunch of "support" from the device maker. They're not well positioned for it, because their natural motivations include PR and things and the CPU designs are mostly based on old tech that is being made to a modern small size resulting in very low power operation. So in that environment, the vendors don't have more knowledge than the community. If you need
I backed Pine (Score:2)
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 press
So recommendations? (Score:2)
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... [reddit.com]
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?
What about the 35 year old one? (Score:2)
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-u
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BASIC lets you do direct hardware access. PEEK and POKE give you direct memory access, and most systems have memory-mapped registers. On the Apple ][ that was the easiest[sic] way to use "high res" graphics; directly writing numbers to the video memory with POKE. In 8th grade I had a splash screen that wrote the whole screen a pixel at a time that way. I mapped the numbers by tracing the source document onto graph paper, and manually digitizing it. The nice thing is, you can make all the dithering decisions
Luv these things (Score:4, Informative)
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.
the Missing Analog option (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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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?
If you're reading analog sensors over long distances, you're better off running the digital lines for the long distances, and reading the analog sensor close to the actual sensor itself. If you're reading them over short distances, then as you say, you want the A/D onboard. Most cellphones have little need for A/D outside of the audio hardware, though; these days, instead of having to read a PWM signal directly from a sensor, you just get everything as I2C or whatever. So the cheap SoCs only have digital I/
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I've had good luck with the Odroid product line. The closest match to (what I asssume are) your needs is the Odroid C1+, which has PI-like extensibility, a much faster processor (faster than the Model PI 2B) which probably doesn't matter much, and built-in analog input. Note that the analog input is 0-1.8v.
http://www.hardkernel.com/main... [hardkernel.com]
If you're in the U.S., the easiest supplier is Ameridroid:
http://ameridroid.com/products... [ameridroid.com]
I have and used the Odroid-U2, Odroid-U3, and an Odroid C1 (before the C1+) They
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I've thought about doing something similar. What were you using the analog I/O for measuring? Insolation, air & water temperature? I figure for temps the 1-wire devices from Dallas/Maxim would work. Not sure I'd even need insolation as my current system doesn't.
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I used the original air/water temp probes (these are 10K thermistors). The original thermistors are in plastic and have a pretty slow response, so I also use 2 vishay 50K thermistors which have quick response for extra air temp probes. None of these are isolated as the water probe is encased in plastic so no electrical connection to the water and the air probes do not touch the water. Note that the power converter is isolated, the power itself is on a GFCI, and of course the relays are isolated. So it is pr
They hate your freedom. (Score:2)
It seems there is not even one ARM or Intel single-board computer that respects your freedom.
https://www.fsf.org/resources/... [fsf.org]
Please prove this wrong.