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.
I'm not affiliated with them in any way. They can be found at their official aliexpress shop.
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...
Also a lot of the boards can only be powered by a DC jack, not the onboard MicroUSB.
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.