Like most people, I entered COVID as a normal hobby geek with a Linux server I played around with and a healthy hardware habit with a side of home automation and DD-WRT. I emerged from COVID enrolled in college, now with two servers (one new build, one rebuilt from my first one), two Pi, multiple instances of Home Assistant (one dedicated) and putting sensors on everything a sensor could go on and rewiring switches for wifi control of overhead fans, flashing every compatible router I could find on Amazon Warehouse with DDWRT in my home for an ad hoc mesh network (no, it didn’t work, but I didn’t care) while cabling everything to switches and creating a really hilarious network deathtrap tripping hazard, a massive media library (discovered Handbrake and making multiple resolutions) and a Sonos home theatre system. And yes, played an unhealthy amount of Animal Crossing and got an NVIDIA Shield Pro for streaming and Plex, as you do. I’m sure everyone can relate.
SBC’s were the natural escalation; I had credit card bills to pay off and that’s going to take a while.
I gatewayed with Pi like ten years ago but it took off during Later COVID when I noticed my credit score and started testing it as a NAS, Media Server (later: Cassiope Media Server, my second end to end Linux build), then got into learning about the kernel itself. I already had an Odroid (Home Assistant Blue) so why not go on, so project-based SBCs seemed healthy; I had a reason for buying one. This led to more Pi’s–as I couldn’t use Kernel Pi (Eurydice) for it and Andromeda Pi was masking my personal network, then I needed one for a Pihole (Iphigenia, Hecuba), which is how I ended up with a BeagleBone Black (Medusa) for an Open Thread Border Router. Still pretending I wasn’t just collecting them like cats, I networked them together and just enjoyed looking at them and making them matching banners with figlet with the excuse I was learning how to do network-wide deployments over SSH (true) and learn Debian OS (technically, I am doing that) and started PoEing things (my credit card bills may not be getting lower, no).
The count stands at a total of 9: one (1) Pi Zero W, one (1) Pi Zero 2 W, one (1) Raspberry Pi 4B 4G, two (2) Raspberry PI 4B 8G, one (1) Odroid N2+, one (1) Beaglebone Black, one (1) PocketBeagle, and one (1) BeaglePlay. (Other: two Linux machines, Watson and Cassiope). Yes, they all have names and technically, each is associated with a project. The BeaglePlay’s (Circe) associated project is ‘create my own documentation on what it does because Beagles don’t document’.
So which ones do you use, why, origin story, feelings: go.
(I’m moving in a week and half my hardware is being packed. I’m about to have to take down my network and Home Assistant and may be freaking out. I’m not sure I know where any light switches are here, either.)
Oh… that’s a huge question. It’s been a long time now. I have used these in various projects for a lot of engineering, research, home networks, and embedded projects. I almost always run them headless over a serial console then SSH in for management.
- RPi 1 - my son used it recently for the RCA TV out
- RPi 2B
- RPi 3A+
- RPi 3B+
- RPi Zero
- RPi Zero W
- RPi 4B+
- Beagle Bone Black - I ran a pair of these as TOR relays for years. They were tanks.
- NanoPi NEO-LTS
- NanoPi NEO Air-LTS - The current one in service is an OctoPi server for my 3D printer
- Orange Pi 5 (I got one of the 32GB ones! - currently a Plex server with an external SSD and onboard M.2)
- Orange Pi Zero2
- C.H.I.P. Computer - this BTW was one of the best little hacking computers. It was phenomenal to setup and run over the OTG USB console
- Bannana Pi (original) - It was great because it had a SATA port so we used them to back network Linux installs for smart home kits.
I do a ton of other work with embedded microcontrollers too. Lots of ATMega and SAMD boards, plus a bunch of ESP 8266/32 variants.
My dude, that is beautiful I now need to google C.H.I.P to see what’s going on. And yeah, my Black is seriously solid.
I owned several of them from the Kickstarter and second round. I wish I would have gotten the handheld version.
Unfortunately Next thing co went out of business during their second Kickstarter for an in car voice assistant box. I can’t remember the name of that project, but I lost $50 on it. They got sued over the name they chose, my guess is that is what caused them to go out of business.
Yeah, it was sad that Next Thing Co. went under. Aside from running really hot, their boards were impressive designs.
I didn’t know about the second kickstarter. Ah, well.
I did snag the installer and ISO package they released for the C.H.I.P boards. I can still reinstall a barebones Debian variant on the boards if I ever felt like it, though it’s so very very out of date now.
I think, you have a problem.
I can quit anytime I want to.
Of course, with the RPi production and distribution pipelines being so slanted towards commercial/industrial users right now I can’t even get a new RPi board for a reasonable price (if at all) anymore. I picked up the Orange Pi 5 instead of a scalper-priced RPi 4 to give the OPi 5 a try and it’s really good. I like it a ton more than the RPi boards for network services, which should be true given the price differential.
I also have been using the boards as part of university research and engineering projects for years now. Many of the ones I have on the shelf are pulled from projects when they wrapped up.
For SBC, you can’t beat Raspberry Pi. The ecosystem is just there and the support outclasses every other board.
For hardware based on SBCs, Pine64 hands down. Devices like the Pinebook and Pinetab are SBCs in a hardware shell and as such should feel like cheap gadgets, but their build quality is excellent and these feel like premium devices. I have just started messing with the Pinetab 2 and it feels like a device 3x its price, to the degree that I don’t mind that the drivers and software for it are still a work in progress.
God, tell me about it. I did not fully appreciate the Pi until the Beagle, which has an ecosystem that seems to be following some branch of chaos theory when it comes to organization.
Pine64: I honestly regret I didn’t follow up on this more before now because I had no idea about the Pinebook and Pinetab and I’ve been thinking about diy tablets, since diy laptops are still–really not a thing and it occurred to me just recently to see what’s up with open source tablets. I use a kindle for reading but when I went back to school, most of my books aren’t really Kindle-compatible so I bought a Galaxy Tab Ultra (10 inch, as eyesight) both so I could use Kindle search functions and a readable text size and so I blow up the diagrams. It wasn’t as horrendously expensive as it could have been because, like my phone, I trade in yearly to upgrade, not because i need to but because–depressingly–it’s more affordable when I can get max trade-in value and watch carefully for Samsung’s random discounts.
So yes, I am excited about this. My tablet is a very different use case from my phone (which no, no way to switch to open-source or Linux there at this point); migrating to an open source tablet is actually a possibility. So very cool.
Do yourself a favor and nab Pinetab 2. The wifi and bluetooth drivers aren’t ready yet (you’ll need a dongle or to tether a phone,) but that’s part of the fun: you can join the Discord channel and watch the discussions and commits happening in real time.
The shop link is already in my tech shop bookmarks. The price tag is unreal good.
That’s because they sell at community prices for little to no profit, either at cost or close to it. They’ve talked about eventually trying to get their prices into retail outlets with a retail markup, which would also pay for retail-level support rather than community support.
In other words, if you buy community, you’re buying just the hardware, and the community provided the software.
When it comes to SBC, the choice has always been a Raspberry Pi. Why? A Raspberry Pi may not have the best performance. But in return you can be sure that it will still be supported after a kernel update. And that is exactly the problem with many alternatives. They support a certain, mostly old, kernel. And that’s it. Furthermore, the community around the Raspberry Pi is simply huge.
That is a lesson I learned dipping into BeagleBoard and it’s driving me insane.
Like, the BeagleBone Black and BeaglePlay are extremely solid SBCs; the Black, which I run off an SD card, is incredibly solid and the Play is–I mean, reading the specs it may literally be able to do anything. They’re also easy to get and at a reasonable price point. But the ecology and documentation, even the official Getting Started page, are nightmare fuel and by the way, do not use those instructions as they are broken and the associated OS is three years old. If you google enough, however, you may eventually realize you have to go to the forums and find the two threads where the latest OS updates–as in, this month–are being posted or go to the individual documentation linked off of the board, where you will probably find up something like a workflow or will give you enough for some extrapolation.
There are attempts to get the OS and kernel up to date and integrate them with Beagle-specific packages and cape firmware, but this is not just like a whole bunch of separate groups doing different things not talking to each other; it’s like they don’t even know the other groups exist when everyone is technically working on the same projects. It’s depressing.
That explains why I had such a terrible experience with the BBB. Saw how out of date the OS was and assumed it had been abandoned. Guess I’ll hit up the forums!
Main forum: https://forum.beagleboard.org/ for ARM64 boards; https://forum.beagleboard.org/t/arm64-debian-11-x-bullseye-monthly-snapshots-2023-07-01/32318 for the rest: https://forum.beagleboard.org/t/debian-11-x-bullseye-monthly-snapshot-2023-07-01/31280
There’s also a discord, linked in the forum. Hit me up if you want my link collection for Beagle: I started bookmarking literally anywhere that I went that looked vaguely relevant.
Bookmarked. Thanks!
BBB was my entry into SBCs but had to shift over to the Pi as my requirements got complex. Apart from what you’ve mentioned, there’s also the fact that BBB is waaaay less powerful than the Pi, I mean we’re talking 512 MB RAM and a single-core 1GHz processor here.
I don’t disagree on pure specs–because yeah, definitely–but on You Have One Job project level, I’m on the fence. My Black was way more stable running Open Thread Border Router than my Pi was. With the Beagle Play, the eMMC is honestly amazing. I don’t think it outperforms my Samsung Pro 990 on my laptop but it definitely beats the NVME I have on one of my Pi’s.
Got a 3b a loong time ago and I love it, I use it as a jukebox and a tinker station.
Would love to get another one but man are they crazily expensive now. Tried the banana and orange pis and the are like okay but yep, they are different and doesn’t seem to have the same community at all.
Chip shortage please go away!
Edit: I buy old dell optiplexes for like 40€ instead but they do take up quite the space…
I consider SBCs drastically overhyped these days. RaspberryPi was nice enough when it was released a decade ago, but these days you can just get a Beelink or similar miniPC, which is much more capable and often even cheaper. It doesn’t have the GPIO, but even if you need that, you are generally better served with a cheap MCU connected to USB.
My old RaspberryPi’s all just work as webcam these days.
Often even cheaper
Where can I find a cheaper mini PC? They all seem to be like $250+ on Amazon, Beelink included.
Before RPis went up in cost they were $35. Isn’t there anything in that price range?
You can buy a quad core hp t620 thinclient for that. Make sure you search for quad core because they did come in Dual core variants.
Pros: upgradeable, cheaper, standard architecture, comes with everything you need including a power supply, available with a PCI-E slot (Those models are more expensive though)
Cons: bigger than an rpi, no gpio (does have serial port and you can buy USB gpio things), probably uses more power than pi.
For 99% of use cases this is what most people need and not an sbc.
The HP T620 is $275???
A used one from eBay goes for as little as $40. Businesses are dumping their old thin clients by the ton, so you can find them quite easy for cheap. The biggest problem with them is that it’s never all that clear what exact configuration you’ll get (e.g. some CPUs might be more power hungry than others).
They are quite a bit bigger than the N3350-based MiniPCs, but depending on what upgradability and ports you need, they can make a good alternative. It’s after all kind of the fun with the mini PC space, there is a ton of stuff with different configuration and price ranges. And unlike the SBC space, it’s all just plain old PC that you can boot stock Linux or Windows on, no need for special purpose RasbianOS and the like as in the ARM world.
No, and even with the Pis, that woud be only the Pi Zero/Zero 2 range. I bought Andromeda Pi (Pi4 8GB) right before COVID and the board alone generally ran $64 for that model (less for 1, 2, 4 GB) but that was before mandatory accessorise; Andromeda’s kit was $115 therabouts.
The only equivalentish board with low overhead is the BeagleBone Black (~$65 for the board, ~$10 for the case, ~$7 for the power, ~$8 for the sd card = ~$90). It has eMMC but only 4GB (you can actually run from that but only Single Project use cases) or you use sd card. I will say, either sd cards have improved tremendously since I first ran my Pi’s off them or Beagle and Pi Zero 2 are witches, because other than during initial install/updates (which yeah, is slow as hell) or running some heavy work, response time is fine. On my Black, boot is roughly equal to my Pis who all run on the fastest usb drives I could find or a dedicated NVME. My Play is the fastest going off eMMC (it has 16 GB so I can run from it), but that’s ‘holy shit’ territory so I don’t use it as a baseline for anyone else.
In case anyone ever needs this: Silicon Power 3D NAND is almost shockingly fast. I got the rec off a tech website, invested $8, and was indeed shocked. Boot time is great. I haven’t gone above 64 GB cards, though.
I’m testing the SAMSUNG PRO Plus, which also seems to be performing amazingly, but the size (128 GB) is still giving me pause.
Completely subjective experience: above 64 GB, sd cards seem to slow down faster regardless of how much data you actually have on them. I could be imagining it, but that feeling goes back to before Pi’s were bootable from USB.
I consider SBCs drastically overhyped these days. RaspberryPi was nice enough when it was released a decade ago, but these days you can just get a Beelink or similar miniPC, which is much more capable and often even cheaper. It doesn’t have the GPIO, but even if you need that, you are generally better served with a cheap MCU connected to USB.
I would put it another way; they’re ideal for You Have One Vital Job Only projects; Home Assistant and Pihole are my two specific, but robotics, a router, even a dedicated NAS would be a use case. I could run a lot of things on a mini PC with a hypervisor–soon, I shall start be experimenting with that–but One Vital Job Only projects are ones that do their thing without me ideally ever noticing them other than maintenance, if that makes sense. And even more important, things I should not tinker with because they’re just fine, which is why I ended up building a second, dedicated Media Server/media ripping/encoding/NAS machine; once I did that, I finally had a stable media library I could access for more than a month at a time before I got An Idea That Would Be Fun and Oops Time To Reinstall (seriously; before I built that machine, I had to run my media and plex from a Pi (aka One Vital Job) because if I put it on my main machine, I’d tinker it to death; hence, separate everything. I am basically hiding the cookies from a three year old and I am the three year old).
Tentatively–and this applies to a much smaller population–they’re perfect for deconstructing the Linux kernel and operating systems in general because you get to work at a reduced scale. I have the repository for the Pi kernel in my bookmarks and go to just read through it and get familiar when I have some time or if I remember something I want to look for (my usb wifi dongle testing project was invaluable for how much kernel homework I had to do, it’s hilarious). I know and can write in basic C++, I know how to compile, but I still don’t pretend to understand the kernel; with the Pi’s scale, though, I can grasp it, if that makes sense. I can recognize the structure and begin to get how things fit together. I can even–tentatively–find specific parts, identify drivers, especially when it comes to specific removable hardware where it’s fairly obvious and easy to follow (following actual driver files…that’s in progress). My goal before I die is to be able to read and follow the entire kernel end to end; I think I’m going to need to look into the benefits of reincarnation or cryogenics admittedly, but hope springs eternal.
(BeagleBones–if nothing else–has seriously upped my game on Figure It Out For Yourself. Which yes is a very me-specific use case, requires more homework to get context than literally every class I’m taking combined including TCP/IP class, and I literally don’t have time to do in more than sprints, but did lead to me literally being able to making my first Universal New Install Checklist (covers every Linux operating system I’ve ever used including all my personal configurations and scripts, in order, with all exceptions) and my first foray into creating an auto-install-and-configure script I can run on a new machine. Yes, those Beagles had me doing a clean install that many times. No idea what I’m doing there and I really wish there was a universal template for that.)
Having said that, I haven’t jumped into MiniPC/hypervisor culture so I am up for changing my mind the minute I make the leap. And seriously, this thread has moved it actively up my priority list, which I did not see coming, so thank you for that.
I have 2 Odroid C4 SBC’s that I use as desktop replacements and an Odroid C1 that is my pi hole and Quake 2 server.
All very capable for their intended purpose. Very happy with them. I chose them because they were more powerful than contemporary rpi devices.
ODroids are massively underrated. The first Pi we bought is dead. The second one is now so underpowered for what we want that it’s been turned into retro arcade machine. It still finds ways to cause problems too. Whereas our first ODroid is still going strong after many years of faithful service. We added an ODroid toaster to the mix a couple of years ago that’s also given us zero issues and works wonderfully.
Beagleboards are great. Good Support and nice community. Nearly as good as Pi. I used BBB because it was the only open hardware SBC available in my area.
BTW: Please recommend me other good Open Hardware/Open Firmware SBCs. I am always looking for something new. Maybe for a Router or Selfmade-NAS.
I’m watching this thread to see the recommendations. The only SBC I have seen that was designed for routers was a Pi that was on Vilros; you had to get special permission or something to even order it.
I don’t know how well they do as routers, but Orange Pi has at least a few multi-Ethernet port SBC options: http://www.orangepi.org/html/hardWare/computerAndMicrocontrollers/details/orange-pi-R1-Plus-LTS.html
They specifically mention running WRT on the R1 Plus, so there’s at least some path to using it as a router.
I’m using one of their Orange Pi 5 boards as a Plex server running Debian and it’s been a tank.
NanoPi/FriendlyElec has a ton of multi-Ethernet boards. I haven’t had as much luck with their hardware, but they’re still trucking along, so it might work for you.
https://www.friendlyelec.com/index.php?route=product/category&path=69
I initially got a Z80-MBC2, a Z80-based SBC that runs CP/M and other operating systems, as I had developed an Intel 8080 cross assembler and wanted to run on actual hardware the code assembled with it. It was so fun I got a V20-MBC, an SBC by the same maker that features a Nec V20 (8088 + 8080) and can run CP/M-86.
Both SBCs led me down a fascinating retrocomputing rabbit hole.
I installed Arch on all my PIs just so I can reinstall every single one because they have abandoned new packages. But it also was unofficial. Now I just generally want to move to Star64 because Risc-V sounds interesting.
I have my trusty raspberry pi 3b+, 4 years old now and been on 24/7 as a bit torrent box for 3 of those years. Never had it crash once other than deludge gtk having more leaks than a sieve.
My original Raspberry Pi model B I bought on release day, fighting the latency and downtime of the websites selling them. Never did much with it but was my introduction to SBCs.
What I actually use day to day are a Raspberry Pi 3 B+ which is attached to a 3d printer running Octoprint and a Pi 4 running as a small home server to host my NextCloud and IRC bouncer (amongst a couple of other things).
My favourite toy at the moment is actually my StarFive VisionFive 2 RISCV board, its been fun trying it out and getting applications to compile on it which don’t officially support RISC-V.
I started with an RPi 1b to read out my weatherstation (WH1080 clone) and post it online with weewx. Then a Bananapi R1 entered to replace my intel system as firewall/core router (savings on power usage, a lot). The RP 1 got replaced by a RPi 2, and tne 1 moved to the smartmeeter for readout. The main server (huge AMD tower) got replaced by a RPi 3 (again, power savings), Bpi R2 replaced the R1 when bananian development stopped. RPi 3 died on me (sd slot failed) and I got a replacement. As the 1st RPi3 was dead anyway, I tried to repair it (only use of the solderings at the side proved to be to keep the slot in place) and used it to replace the Bpi R2 as support got problematic.
The main server got upgraded to a RPi 4 8GB, with the RPi2 replacing the RPi2 that was handeling my weatherstation. I got an rflink, so I added domoticz and that now powers my kaku (dutch power switching system) in a mixed old/new setup. The RPi3 that was my main router (internet router via fiber) got replaced hh an RPi4 witn 4 GB mem, as the 2 GB mem version wasn’t available. (Not a bad move, with the on-board non-usb 1GB interface and a tad over 2 GB mem use)
The freed RPi3 is now for the smartmeter, so all RPi are 64 bit. (All running aarm64 Debian) Both Bpi’s and RPi 1 and 2 are collecting dust, as I haven’t found a use for them… yet. Looking for projects to use them. As media server they’re to light. (Although, Bpi R2 could be useful for that)
Have an old Pi3b that works as a little 1080p Plex server. Wish I could get a four but I’ll probably get a mini PC when I decide to upgrade.
I was lucky enough to get a 4 before the supply issues. I wish I could get any replacements.
Nowadays I just buy thin clients and pay the 40-50$ premium for projects. Better then than waiting for a pi.
pine64 …never lets me down
My dude, you made me google, but fine; RockPro on Ameridroid is on my short list. I’ve been meaning to follow up on that one, so bookmarked the homepage.
What do you use it for?
i run linux with docker and portainer with lizzys application template list for easier use and also her Dashy dashboard besides the usual containers ppl on r/selfhosted would suggest. right now the pine is out of ram because nodejs is just so bulky. so i run stuff like uptimekuma,pihole,changedetection,unifi, nginx and sometimes start containers like firefly3, jellyfin, searxng or apache guacamole etc… and while both my pi2 and my pi3 at some point just died I am all for pine now. only pi still in service for me is a pi1 with rtl433 to collect data and send via mqtt.
