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Comment by DoofusOfDeath | Hacker News Reader

Seconded. I have a rpi4 for a small home-automation project that I haven't really started.

If anyone knows of an alternative that's in the $100 (US) price range, runs linux, and will make my life easier, I'm grateful for suggestions.

Oh, and it needs to play nicely with a USB-to-ZWave dongle and one of the major open-source home-automation packages that can do lighting controls.

EDIT: I forgot to mention that I want it to reside in a closet that has very little ventilation. So I'd be leery of deploying a cheap used x86 system, even if the price way right.

EDIT2: Holy crap I'm being high-maintenance here. I should just do a damn Google search like everyone else.

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Beaglebone Black ($43) or even Beaglebone AI if you're willing to go to $127.

The power system doesn't suck like the RPi series. The chips are all well-documented with the possible exception of graphics. It has eMMC so you don't have the microSD idiocies if you don't want them.

And if you need genuine real time, it has two RISC cores (4 on the AI) that operate in actual real time as opposed to Linux kinda/sorta/when-it-works/maybe real time.

"But the RPi is cheeeeeeaaaper!" <grumble>

> The power system doesn't suck like the RPi series

Bullshit. The beaglebone can be permanently damaged (not just filesystem corruption!) BY BEING UNPLUGGED: https://elinux.org/Beagleboard:BeagleBoneBlack#Improper_Powe...

Never had crap like that happen to a raspberry pi.

> Never had crap like that happen to a raspberry pi.

Uh, yeah. A failure mode so rare that they can't isolate it.

RPi--the system that overdraws every USB interface on the planet and requires special power supplies. RPi--the system that couldn't even get USB-C right. RPi--the system that shuts down when you fire off a flashbulb (not their fault--but still a power failure). RPi--the compact system that needs a heatsink or it shuts down.

RPi has lots of things going for it. The power system is NOT one of them.

(If you want to pick on Beaglebone power systems, pick on the PocketBeagle. It has some truly stupid failure modes.)

I use the Beaglebone Green and Beaglebone Green Wireless due lots of projects at work. They're nice boards.

My main frustration with them is that there's a ton of outdated documentation around how some of the software stack works. It's changed quite a bit over the last 5 years and you can easily go down pointless rabbit holes.

for similar money your could have the PCEngines APU2? why would you pick one over the other (GPIOs might be one reason?)

GPIOs and functional units. Also total power.

The Beaglebone series really does lots of I/Os well.

Dont listen to the hype. Get your home automation setup with what you have today and get something working. You don’t need a Jetson or and Intel NUC to get started. My uptime was 100% with my home automation until a hurricane came.

Worry about a better product for your next build.

There's also the Pine64 stuff nobody seems to be mentioning.

Also, like the sibling said, just do it. If every option is ARM, there shouldn't really be much of a difference if you swap the underlying system.

Cheap used x86 is often the best answer.

Couple years ago I bought a pile of barebones ex-Datto Alto, NUC-style, AMD GX-415GA systems on eBay for sub-$5/ea and I reach for one of those for pretty much anything that doesn't Actually Need an RPi. RAM runs $5-$10 for 4GB, $20 for a 2.5" SATA SSD. They boot much faster than a Pi, idle around 7w, and run fine in my "network closet" that gets over 100F in summer.

Those exact systems aren't plentiful on eBay any more but there are tons of NUC-alikes, actual NUCs, and Thin Clients in the $40-$75 range with low-TDP CPUs of comparable performance.

There is so much x86 stuff alone that will easily run linux and outperform a Pi4 for that budget, used and new.

Pi 4 as home server value proposition gets bad fast for me at least once cases, power supplies, storage etc factored in.

I would love to hear suggestions for x86 stuff in that budget. Bonus points for PoE.

Check eBay for corporate standard desktops which are dumped on there regularly. Dell OptiPlex is a good starting point, scale the price with age and you'll still wind up with a lot of compute for not a lot of money.

APU2 is slightly above that price range, but incredibly good in basically every respect.

APU2 is 3x the cost, which isn't really "slightly" in the space that the raspberry pis play in.

second vote for APU2. or APU4.

I've got more than a thousand of the previous unit in production. just ramping up on APU units. yes they are higher power than a Pi, but still very low. easy to develop for (amd64). tons of Ethernet ports. easy to use reliable storage. USB3, SATA, mpcie ports, SIM slots. openly available schematics

Not a lot not to like!

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