Single Board Computers Introduced in 2017 | Hacker News Reader

Single Board Computers Introduced in 2017

eetimes.com

89 pointsbcaulfield57 comments

To save others the pain of EETimes' annoying ass ad exploits:

  1. Raspberry Pi Zero W -- $10
  2: Asus Tinker Board -- $54.99
  3: Marvell Espressobin -- $79.99
  4: 96Boards HiKey 960 -- $239.99
  5: PINE64 Rock64 -- $24.95
  6: Orange Pi R1 -- $13.90
  7: MYIR MYS-6ULX -- $24.80
  8: LeMaker Banana Pi Pro -- $47.99
  9: LattePanda -- $209
  10: Sparkfun BBC micro:bit -- $17.50

There's also a print version of the page:

https://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1332763&print=ye...

Micro:bit seems a bit expensive when you compare its features with the other options.

I think it's intended as more of an all-in-one board for the educational purposes (specifically educating children, I believe). It has a couple of buttons, an LED array (basic display and light sensor), compass, temp sensor, an accelerometer and some edge pins that you can use alligator clips with. It might not be the best and/or most affordable platform for general purpose stuff but I can't be certain as I've only used it for teaching kids how to program.

BeagleBone Blue was also released for sale this year, https://beagleboard.org/blue

> BeagleBone® Blue is a complete, Linux-enabled robotics computer. Community-supported and fully open-source, the real-time performance, flexible networking and rich set of robotics-oriented peripherals make building mobile robots quick and affordable.

Unlike the Raspberry Pi line of single-board computers, the BeagleBone line is completely open source and permissively licensed. The design files for Blue are at https://github.com/beagleboard/beaglebone-blue

UC San Diego is developing coursework based on the Blue, https://www.ucsdrobotics.org/

IMO: with the exception of the "cheap desktop computer" use case, the beaglebone series of SBCs is better for pretty much anything than the raspberry pi.

The Raspberry Pi is pretty terrible for "cheap desktop computer". It's better for a lot of graphics and video-related things than the Beaglebones. And the newer Pi's have more RAM and faster CPUs than most of the Beagles.

The PRUs and huge GPIO count are the good things about a Beaglebone, IMO. It seems like there's less documentation and pre-built libraries out there for them than for the RPi computers, which is a shame.

RPi wins out on price and community.

The community docs for Rasperry Pi do win out for the moment, and so do product and accessory availability.

Long-term, it seems like the goal of the BeagleBone foundation is to support each board for a number of years in order to allow for text books, curriculum, and other support material to emerge. Their focus seems to be on robotics and headless embedded systems rather than trying to duplicate the "cheap desktop learning computer" objective of the R Pi. It will be interesting to see if they're able to achieve that goal.

I do think the BBB model for open source is the most comprehensive model so far. I'd be very interested to hearing of other open source hardware models. The Open Compute Project hardware licenses were promising, but I haven't seen much action on them since the request for comment in 2014... http://www.opencompute.org/blog/request-for-comment-ocp-hard...

Wasn’t sure what made the BeagleBone Blue variant variant good for robotics until I read about the 8 servo drivers and 4 DC motor drivers built into the SBC! That’s going to be really handy for lab robotics projects. Buying a servo hat for Raspberry Pi’s or wiring up my own driver chips for one off projects has been annoying. Thanks!

Question, do you know if the UCSD course is using the PRU’s and/or porting ROS to the PRU’s? That’d be really excellent.

And of course there’s the Pocket BeagleBone [1] that was released this year. I just preferred 4 for prototyping, primarily since they have the onboard dual 200 mhz real-time processors, are in stock, and have really good support and design specs.

1: https://beagleboard.org/pocket

Unfortunately, I'm waiting on the publication of the MOOC and course materials to find out.

It looks like the latest book, "BeagleBone Robotics Projects, 2nd Ed", https://www.amazon.com/BeagleBone-Robotic-Projects-Second-co..., came out in June and I haven't had a chance to look through it. The 2014 book, "Mastering BeagleBone Robotics", by the same author walked through multiple robotics examples implemented using Python and didn't involve the PRUs. Using only Python, there were examples of a rotary aircraft, fixed wing aircraft, sailboat, wheeled vehicle, and computer vision tracking.

My understanding is that TI only recently began improving the PRU documentation to make it more accessible and that Code Composer and other tools TI has created for working with the PRU are maturing slowly. I've never tried using it. Here's the PRU page on the BeagleBone wiki: https://elinux.org/Ti_AM33XX_PRUSSv2#C_Compiler

Another thing I've never tried, but that might be of interest to HN readers, is the Nerves project for Elixir development on single board computers including BeagleBone Black. https://hexdocs.pm/nerves/targets.html

How do people deal with the software side of these boards? AFAIK, Raspberry Pies are the only ones with good support, plus there are a few boards that have Tier 1 support on NetBSD. The rest seem too risky to rely on if you don't want to live with vulnerable kernels after a year or two.

There are a number of Freescale and NXP SBCs that have good software support (including Mbed support, Yocto recipes and Github kernel repos), but they don't catch the interest of hobbyists like these other boards do.

I've been looking for a SBC with at least 2 gigabit Ethernet ports to use as a router, firewall, and netflow generator on my home network.

I almost bought an Espressobin, but English-language websites only had the 1GB version and I just couldn't figure out Taobao to try and order the bigger one.

At this point I'm probably going to get a PC Engines APU 2 board, which is a quad-core AMD Geode processor w/ 4 GB of RAM. I can get it with a 60GB mSATA drive, a case, a wifi miniPCI board, and all the wiring for external wifi antennas for $243 shipped. That's a little steep but the other advantage is that the x86-64 architecture should make OS support easier, unlike all these little ARM boards that get one hacked-up kernel release and no updates after that.

You may be interested in UBNT’s ERLite 3. It runs a fork of VyOS on MIPS, and is a really nice product. I’ll never build my own network box again (and pfSense has ceased to exist in my universe).

I came here to say this! There is also a newer (cheaper) ERX, but some of the specs are not as good.

I can recommend and own a SBC/router made by https://www.gl-inet.com/

I have the GL-MT300-A and it's actually an upgrade over my older router. It runs OpenWRT, and has enough power to run a couple extra services. At the time of purchase, it seemed like the best deal (~$30) for the feature set it had.

They have a few different models with different options depending on what you need. They also seem responsive to questions on their support forums, and have their products available via Amazon if you want it faster.

1. Terrible website, Safari complains about unsafe form submit attempts on every page.

2. They omitted at least

* nanopi neo2 (my favourite). 40x40mm Allwinner H5 (4 cores A53), gigabit Ethernet.

* nanopi A64, 64x60mm Allwinner A64.

1. Same on Firefox and Edge.

It would have been nice to see the updated version of the C.H.I.P. Pro from Next Thing on the list. It's a fairly capable board at a good price, and it's more open than the Pi and other ARM boards.

https://getchip.com/pages/chippro

The Intel Atom board looks like a good foundation to build a customized portable computer; AFAIK there's no IME mess involved and it can run pretty much any Linux or BSD OS out there. I'm thinking it would make a great base for a portable OpenBSD machine.

Also omitted and finally out this year was GRiSP (Erlang-based) board: https://www.grisp.org

What? No mention of the single board relay computer?

http://relaysbc.sourceforge.net/

I sold 8 fully assembled computers and 20 bare boards in 2017.

Wonderful! Thank you for showng us.

For anyone looking for cheapest SBC. Best I've found was Orange pi zero at $6.99 for 256mb version. That includes wireless wifi onboard.

I'm not affiliated with them in any way. They can be found at their official aliexpress shop.

Be advised that Orange Pi have many different boards with similar names, but vastly different specs. The $6.99 model is for 256MB RAM and a Allwinner H2 chipset.

Also a lot of the boards can only be powered by a DC jack, not the onboard MicroUSB.

> Be advised that Orange Pi have many different boards with similar names, but vastly different specs.

How is this any different than the general SBC market? You could make the same point about the "Raspberry Pi" which has:

* Raspberry Pi model A/B

* Raspberry Pi 2 model B

* Raspberry Pi 3 model B

* Raspberry Pi Zero

* Raspberry Pi Zero W

> Also a lot of the boards can only be powered by a DC jack, not the onboard MicroUSB.

Almost all boards can also be powered via 5V GPIO pins, so you can wire a DC jack to that to avoid using micro USB.

Yes, the Raspberry Pi models are a little confusing, especially with the '+' versions and PCB-revisions. But I don't think the purpose of the parent comment was to say that it was worse than others, more of a heads-up to someone looking to order a model to take a second look and verify the specifications.

If you have a MicroCenter close by, you can get the Raspberry Pi Zero W for $5.

$6.99 + the cost of an SD card. Same with the Pi.

Caveat emptor, you get what you pay for as the Linux support for the Allwinner H2/H3’s that power the OrangePi and NanoPi boards are hit and miss at best especially for the WiFi chips. Up until recently you had to either use a somewhat sketchy ancient fork of a Linux 3.x branch that wasn’t maintained or patch the mainline kernel.

The folks over linux-sunxi.org have been doing good work bringing various Allwinner SoC support to mainline Linux. Particularly the EMAC (ethernet) driver looks to be merged soon [1]. The driver for the XR819 WiFi chipset still appears to be up in the air, though good patchsets can be found for it [2].

The last I used the WiFi driver for the Allwinner H2+ SoC earlier this year on the (equivalent) NanoPi Neo boards it was regularly dropping packets. I suspected it was causing issues with other WiFi clients as well but couldn’t figure out how to test that. Still it’s a decent little SoC and both the OrangePi’s or NanoPi’s are handy little SBC’s that I’d use for a project that needed basic WiFi support. If anyone’s good with WiFi drivers and wants to help make it more solid the XR819 driver could use some TLC. It’s outside my expertise though.

1: http://linux-sunxi.org/Linux_mainlining_effort 2: https://www.cnx-software.com/2016/11/10/allwinner-h2-linux-a...

All on one page for those that hate the “here’s a picture with some text, now click ‘next’ 10 more times so we can artificially boost our page views” approach: https://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1332763&print=ye...

It’s not mobile friendly (viewport issues) but if you use reader mode in it becomes great.

Checkout the fitlet2 for those wanting an Intel J3455[0] based platform.

I'm waiting for stock to show up at Amazon so I can upgrade my pfSense machine.

[0] https://fit-iot.com/web/products/fitlet2/

I thought Intel were getting out Atom chips. I'll be looking to upgrade my C2758 NAS at some point - maybe there's some hope after all.

It is unclear, but there will be lower power equivalents even if not Atoms, they are talking about 4.5W non atom chips.

Intel is pouring fuel on the fire for the C3000 chips with features like 2x 10 Gbps network interfaces on the SoC.

Checkout SuperMicro's C3000 offering: https://www.supermicro.com/products/nfo/atom.cfm

For some reason the SOHO / lower end SuperMicro gear is almost impossible to get in Australia.

Quick glance (click PRINT instead of 10 sub pages) and memory capacity is wrong in almost every single listing.

I expected better from eetimes (owned by Arrow, serious Fortune 500 electronic components supplier giant).

I like the sound of the Pine64 ROCK64 one, with the 4k HDMI, USB3 port and 1Gbps ethernet, does anyone have that board, I'm curious how the software support is?

Same here. I’ve been thinking of setting up a fanless, low power personal workstation that is little more than an X and RDP client driving a 43” 4K monitor, and I’m curious to know if the 4K display is at least 60Hz and if it can run Remmina and Firefox at a useful clip.

That's definitely the most beefy Single Board computer I've seen to date, especially with 4GB of RAM, should be able to run a browser at a reasonable performance.

Anyone know of a FAST eMMC card?

eMMC via the ZIF connector on the Rock64 is a bit of a pain to get setup, involving a serial console and uboot commands, but I see better than 20MBps on an A1 class uSD. I use a USB3 SSD for my /home, it's even faster.

As one of the suckers that preordered the 4gb version, I'd strongly caution against getting one.

I've tried every OS released for it, and they're all rife with bugs producing kernel panics aplenty. This makes running the unit as headless unfeasible. I drawer'd it and replaced it with a tried-and-true Odroid c-2. Btw if you're looking at SMBs, check out dietpi.com, its well maintained and brings a world of functionality to SMBs

Thanks a lot for your reply! This is exactly the kind of thing I was worried about and is one of the reasons I do like the RPis I have so much which seem to have very decent OS support.

I have had a decent experience with the 4GB ROCK64. Armbian provides a reproducible build that I've found to be perfectly stable in practice, and while I have yet to try booting the image, I was able to build the 4.4.x kernel version I'm running, on the device at that.

There's mainline kernel support in 4.14, but I'm unclear as to whether it supports USB3, which, behind the price point and the 4GB of RAM, is the main draw.

I only run the device headless, so I can't speak to the behavior or interactions associated with the graphics engine.

I am looking for a 4k single board computer to run a cheap 4k Arch Linux i3 workstation (mainly for Vim and Chrome). Any ideas?

Depending on how tight your budget is, an Intel NUC might fit the bill.

I have no clue, though, if their GPUs support 4k. But they are small, silent, and cover a relatively wide range of performance. Low-end models start at € ~120 (NOT including HDD/SSD!)

Something like this would probably fit the bill and be pretty fast:

https://www.gearbest.com/tv-box-mini-pc/pp_562952.html (2G ram)

(youtube reviews seem to imply ram is usually upgradeable, with laptop DDR3 sticks you may have lying around)

or just go straight to 4G ram

https://www.gearbest.com/tv-box-mini-pc/pp_635382.html (4G ram)

These are intel boxes, support linux better than most laptops, have slow SSDs (which are still far faster than normal disks, and also usually upgradeable).

They are especially far, far faster than most boards listed here, and they support a lot more software. (including portal 2 which is incredible and on sale: http://store.steampowered.com/app/620/Portal_2/ )

Previous discussion from last week:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15975229

The Marvell board looks pretty interesting. Would be nice to get FreeBSD or OpenBSD with pf up and running on it.

I'm looking for a cheap-ass VPS setup at home. Need 2 nodes with 16Gb each. Any recommendations?

This is off topic, but here's the site you're looking for: https://lowendbox.com

Thanks, but looking to host my own hardware. Maybe that wasn't clear.

Depending on your definition of cheap, I can highly recommend the HP ProLiant Microserver - it's small (about one cubic foot), an entry level model with 16 GB RAM (without HDDs/SSDs) is about € 300-350.

I have used it as my home server for the last two years, and it has worked very well for me. Quiet, reliable. The Gen8 which runs on an Intel CPU can be equipped with a low-end Xeon, if needed, but that drives up the price accordingly.

I like the Gen8, limited to Intel Ivy Bridge at best but I have a Xeon E3-1230v2 in mine with 12GB RAM and it works great. If you can find a cheap license for iLO Advanced the remote administration is really useful too.

For the price, it is amazing how much server HP managed to cram into that little box. Mine has Celeron CPU, 16 GB RAM, runs FreeBSD, is mainly a file server (ZFS w/ 8 GB ARC) plus a few virtual machines via bhyve. The entire machine, including HDDs was about € 800,-

CPU-wise, performance is not exciting, of course, but disk- and network-performance is totally sufficient to serve a small home or office network. Which is what they were made for, I guess. ;-)

In two years, this little box has not let me down once.

I love my little microserver. I've ran Ubuntu for a while, then FreeNAS and now Alpine Linux though I've been playing with FreeBSD on my second laptop and am tempted to try running it instead. I'm already using ZFS for storage (migrated the pool between each OS).

FWIW, mine runs FreeBSD, and it has not given me any trouble. Virtualization support is present even in the Celeron GT1610, so bhyve works as well. Jails and ZFS play together very nicely.

An Intel NUC is a decent way to go. The gen 7 NUCs are pretty beefy (up to 32 GB RAM and plenty of storage options).

If building multiple of these, I would go for the lower end i3 (NUC7I3BNH) which comes with a Kaby Lake i3-7100U that supports VT-x and VT-d extensions. (Currently $230 at MicroCenter.)

Just add RAM and an SSD, and you're all set.

This article has been here recently although I can't find it

Reply on news.ycombinator.com