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Comment by aidenn0 | Hacker News Reader

There are a lot of cheap linux dev boards out there now, to the point where I had trouble finding a list of boards that met my requirements[1]. There is almost certainly a sub-$20 board out there with what I need, but I ended up using an RPi just because it was "cheap enough" and had what I needed.

1: In this case, analog audio out, 1 host-side USB port, and 6 GPIOs.

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The Pi Zero W is my default for the same reason, and most of mine were all of $5 due to sales at Microcenter. It's pretty hard to beat that unless you need more CPU power.

Add an industrial MicroSD card for ~$15 (to prevent the infamous SD corruption) and it's still at the $20 point but far more reliable and versatile than many of the alternatives.

Even some of my microcontroller boards cost more than that, and you can still program the Pi boards "bare metal" if you really want to, because they're popular enough that people have already done the work to make that possible.

P.S., even with a Pi Zero (W or not), you can hook up a tiny I2S audio codec board for a line level[1] or amplified[2] audio output.

[1] https://www.adafruit.com/product/3678

[2] https://www.adafruit.com/product/3006

Thanks, I didn't know the Pi Zero had I2S pins brought out; kind of funny that the unamplified board is more expensive (though just from the picture it's easy to see why; the amplified board is relying on the inductance of the load for filtering and it lacks the phone jack).

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