ZeroPi – $9.99 SBC with 512MB and Gigabit Ethernet | Hacker News Reader

ZeroPi – $9.99 SBC with 512MB and Gigabit Ethernet

friendlyarm.com

I get why $RANDOM_OEM wants to start making these boards for hobbyist and profit from the market research that was done for them by the Raspberry Pi foundation.

But the reason folks buy Raspberry Pi's and not some $RANDOM_OEM board with better spec is that they know that the Raspberry Pi foundation has a great track record of documenting the platform as much as it can and shipping software updates, unlike $RANDOM_OEM that will stop responding to calls once they roll out $Board_V1.1 and already collected the cash for $Board_V1.

Trying to infringe on the branding is just the cherry on top really.

Thanks for pointing out that it's not actually a Pi product. I thought this was a variant of Raspberry Pi Zero, and of course it isn't.

Adding to that, another big reason is the community. Raspberry Pi has the biggest community, and majority of people interested in tech have probably at least heard of it, if not even played with it.

There are numerous blogs posts and tutorials available online, and there are many modules and additional boards made specifically for various Raspberry Pi boards.

Then again though, there are lots of things that RPi doesn't do, and I wish some China-based OEM would do. I'm not opposed to people coming up with variants, it's just that the current crop of variants don't fix real problems.

Like fix the stupid I2C clock stretching bug. Reverse engineer the Broadcom chip, clone it, and fix the bug, because the lazy asses at Broadcom won't do it.

Or make an RPi with a rich plug-and-play CSI camera ecosystem with hundreds of sensors and lens mounts to choose from, all connected via the camera connector.

Seriously, screw the RPi "high quality" camera and it's teeny useless sensor -- I want 35mm full frame, 20-50 megapixels, in CSI with a python library for exposure control, and I'm willing to pay maybe half the cost of a full frame DSLR to get that.

Nobody sells such a thing at the moment, and it would be an awesome thing to have.

You may underestimate how expensive imaging sensors are in low quantities, a sensor available in single quantities at mouser is the cmosis cmv1200 apsc sensor for $1600-1800 a piece, full frame cmv5000 is $5000+ afair. A whole ecosystem probably wouldn't get the quantities.

If they want to play that nasty game, maybe the suppliers could buy stock cameras for $1000, desolder them, and reassemble them into hacker-friendly boards for $1200, and then resell the rest of the stock cameras for spare parts (e.g. mechanical shutter assembly) at 1/2 the cost of OEM service. Even if they can scoop up the huge graveyard of e.g. Canon 60Ds that photographers will turn over for $200 a piece, or 6Ds for $500 a piece, reverse engineer them, and recycle them into a Raspberry Pi module, that would be amazing.

Even with the CMV12000 though, someone should make a RPi module that "just works", or an alternative RPi that allows it to "just work", for those of us who want to spend our time working on the actual imaging and software ... it's kind of sad there's this huge graveyard of good sensors out there that just can't be used by imaging experts because electronics people gatekeep the industry and only release them at reasonable prices inside consumer devices, which isn't what those imaging experts want at least in terms of programmability, communication, and mounting options.

Yea, I would love a high quality sensor that's "programmer accessible". Too bad that nobody besides raspberry pi foundation even attempts that.

Try looking at astrophotography cameras. Many of them have ASCOM drivers which allow pretty much full control of everything.

https://ascom-standards.org/Downloads/CameraDrivers.htm

Thanks, I just did!

Looks like a ZWO ASI294 MC could be interesting. It's "only" Micro 4/3 and $700 in the cheapest config but having USB-3 and drivers may be what I was looking for.

Full-frame astro cameras are unfortunately around $5k+ (albeit with a resolution similar to a $3.5k A7RIV).

If you're willing to pay several times the cost of a full frame DSLR and have an order quantity of 100 to 1000 or so, the scientific camera companies (for microscopes, telescopes, etc) are used to that sort of quantity and quality and would probably spin you a custom camera.

It's been a while since I've been in the industry but I can try to hook you up if you're serious. Email in profile.

Unfortunately that's too high of a cost; this would be mostly for serious hobby / side project use and the stock cameras are extremely limited in programmability.

Yeah, I’ve bought a couple of other non-raspberry SBCs and the quality just isn’t anywhere close to the RPi stuff. I had one board that would randomly fail to boot and the devs acknowledged it as a known issue but never patched it afaik.

Try HardKernel ODROIDs, they blow RPis out of the water in terms of performance, price and support.

Odroid Go Advance is still stuck at a RK 4.4 kernel, which is very disappointing at least for me.

Nah, Olimex rulez. Lime2 has 1Gb memory and 1Gbps networking and runs A20 using mainline kernel with a few tweaks.

Odroid C2 has no mainline support for HDMI output yet.

> Odroid C2 has no mainline support for HDMI output yet.

Yes, it does: http://www.linux-meson.com/doku.php

Same here!

I have OrangePi Zero v1.4 and it have some overheating issues that didn't present in previous releases.

Also it freeze on 14 days uptime. Sometime even earlier. More strange is that this is with kernel panic. Sometime it freeze and i can't SSH to it, but i can ping device! I couldn't figure yet why. Maybe i finally should get some RS232 USB connector and connect with serial.

On other side - i have few RPi's that works with month without issues.

I had a Pi clone which froze every week or two. Turned out the USB "charging cable" had 1 Ohm resistance!

Swapped it out for a proper one, and it's been rock solid for months now.

Worth checking if you haven't already.

WOW!

I will test this too!

So far i test underclocking, playing with different SD cards and so on.

> Trying to infringe on the branding is just the cherry on top really.

Or the raspberry, as it were.

It doesn't help that the capabilities of this board are significantly different from the Raspberry Pi. In particular, it lacks any form of video output, which could be a nasty surprise for someone expecting something they could use as a computer.

These Allwinner boards arguably have better mainline support than the Raspberry Pi.

This. I think the large community and ecosystem around the raspberry is what keeps at the top spot. I do however think there's a lot of room for improvements. At this point all the raspberries are pretty powerful. I mean I'm running a k3s cluster on a gen2 raspberry pi and it's handling it well. What I'm really hoping to see is bringing this power to something even smaller. I have so many ideas for something the size of a regular SD card with the specs of a raspberry pi zero.

I agree RPi has the best support in all ARM boards, but, still way worse than x86 boards (I know they're more expensive).

Some example, to get decent video playback performance on RPi4(which has 4K HEVC hw dec), your only choice is LibreELEC, which is a specialized distro which I've had enough with, with x86 you just install any distro you like, and pretty much any player you'd like (mpv for me) will work out of the box.

I'm not well versed in the whole distro-verse.

What is it about LibreELEC that makes it have good playback performance while others don't?

I'm not sure, I guess it's some non-standardized hardware decoding API, which LibreELEC supported.

There's also a lot of inertia behind the raspberry pi at this point. Everything supports it; when people think aarch64 (up until pretty recently with arm macs etc.) they think of the raspberry pi.

It took me a few seconds to figure out that this isn't a "Raspberry" product. I don't know if the "Pi" name is protected but even if it isn't it's pretty misleading to use it.

Especially as there already is a PiZero https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/raspberry-pi-zero/

Maybe confusing, but it's standard at this point. See RockPi and OrangePi.

I think the issue comes from the fact that rpizero is an actual raspberry thing, so zeropi is 90% of that name in a different order. Pretty confusing tbh.

If you omit Raspberry, sure. If you're going to truncate the whole thing to rpizero, the rpi being first, is quite important.

From 36,000ft, there's perhaps a similarity if you squint a bit, but as soon as you see the product, you know it's not a Raspberry Pi Zero. And that matters even if you don't know what a Raspberry Pi Zero looks like, because you have no frame of reference to confuse this with (everybody who's heard of a Raspberry Pi Zero, knows what it looks like).

"Pi" is the new "-ola" [1]. But I agree, very confusing since there is already a "Pi Zero".

[1] http://www.friendsofthephonograph.org/Factola/Factola%20Defi...

NanoPi and Banana Pi as well.

Let's call all the rest Clone Pi, there are so many and it's hard to count.

To be fair, Raspberry Pi got its idea from BeagleBoard then Beagle Bone along with Arduino, small ARM boards with Linux.

The problem with Clone-Pi series is that none of them are FCC-certified, while Raspberry Pis are.

What does it mean to be FCC-certified?

I believe it means you can manufacture products that use them.

exactly, currently those clone-pi are sold as a devkit basically, but they're essentially used like an official product which is 'illegal', I never got the idea why the vendor did not certify their boards, it is really not much when they are shipping (tens of) thousands of these boards.

They're probably trying to make them as cheap as possible.

And LicheePi Zero, LicheePi Nano...

I forgot about the Banana Pi. I was using one as a router for a while, but it kept crashing and the whole thing turns into a switch when it can't load an OS (not great for security):

https://battlepenguin.com/tech/banana-pi-bpi-r1-fails-into-a...

This isn’t uncommon. Other non-raspberry SBCs use the pi suffix. RockPi and OrangePi are a couple that come to mind.

"ZeroPi" is not just a "pi suffix". It is too similar to the name "Raspberry Pi Zero"...

...and they all get cease-and-desists.

Somehow, I doubt it, seeing they're all still active.

You'll be shocked to learn that people don't always do what you want.

Actually I'd be shocked more if the sites were offline. Trying to prevent the use of the "Pi" suffix seems like a waste of time.

As a trademark holder, you have to make reasonable attempts to protect it, or you risk losing it.

"Raspberry Pi", yes. But they don't have a trademark on "anything Pi".

Yawn.

It's a bit misleading to call this a $9.99 SBC when the cheapest shipping option (to Eastern USA) costs over $25. For that price, there are plenty of better deals available.

Seconded, this seems highly disingenuous. Raspberry Pi models are generally speaking highly available for the advertised price if not less!

> the cheapest shipping option (to Eastern USA) costs over $25

Why does it? It seems so small it could be sent for much cheaper.

This looks almost identical (though maybe a bit more stripped down, haven't looked closely) to the Orange Pi Zero which has been on sale for a few years at a similar price.

http://www.orangepi.org/orangepizero/

This one has a gigabit port, Orange Pi Zero is just 100 MBit/s (but adds wifi). The Orange Pi also seems to be a bit more expensive (close though).

I'm kind of curious, what would this do which actually requires GB ethernet? Seems like processing limits and SD card speed would get overwhelmed quickly.

Does this have enough HP to work as a caching proxy or mini firewall?

It has 4 Cortex-A7 cores with up to 1.2GHz. Given the kind of stuff e.g. OpenWRT usually runs on, I would say it has more than enough power.

For simple workloads (e.g. serving static files via HTTP) I'm pretty sure it could saturate a gigabit connection.

You can even find pre-made travel routers with the Allwinner H3: https://www.amazon.com/Portable-Allwinner-Quad-core-high-Per...

A single gigabit interface is such a pain for anyone wanting to build a router. The best option seems to be a USB 3 gigabit ethernet interface, which may be usable, but isn't ideal. And wouldn't work on this thing, since it only has USB 2.

Anyone know of an SBC that would be better than a Raspberry Pi 4 CM on an I/O board with a PCI gigabit NIC?

https://wiki.friendlyarm.com/wiki/index.php/NanoPi_R4S might be closer to what you're looking for.

(there are a few SBCs with dual gigabit if you look around, including others in the NanoPi R series)

Thanks. Those do seem like a good option if Ubuntu works well on them and they're reliable. They claim to support full gigabit speeds on both NICs. It doesn't look like one can actually order the 4 GB model right now though.

4gb seems pretty much overkill for a router though.

New release, so better to wait to see how something like armbian comes up on it:

https://forum.armbian.com/topic/15932-nanopi-r4s/

In general, if you're looking for semi-decent 'off-brand' SBCs, I think your best bet is to look at the armbian support:

https://www.armbian.com/download/

https://www.armbian.com/download/?tx_category=networking

(this will not only see if there's a reasonable distro, but let you know if the support for the chip is in the mainline)

Site is currently down:

https://web.archive.org/web/20201229204523/https://www.frien...

Anyone remember the Linksys NLSU2 it was the RaspberryPi of its day! Should have thought of the mass market back then... and crowd funded it...

Is it still possible?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSLU2

I'd really like someone to move slightly higher end. The sub 50 dollar sbc market is absolutely crowded, but nothing really exists above it outside maybe Jetson. Give me an sbc I can use as a desktop. The newest Raspberry Pi 8GB is close, but not quite there yet.

buy an intel nuc, take it off the case, you've got a single-board-computer that you can use as a desktop.

look out for my comments for more free tech tips.

Funny you mention that, NUC is my dev machine. I've been wanting to tinker more with ARM I guess. I'm thinking there's probably a sweet spot halfway between NUC and RPi. In a small board configuration, the amount of cool embedded things you could do would be interesting.

Edit: To add, apparently other people desire such a thing. All my searches for such a device only lead to other people asking the same question, and sometimes being told to buy a NUC just the same.

I wonder if it could run Wireguard well. I've been too cheap to replace my Raspberry Pi 2 with a Raspberry Pi 4 for my Wireguard router. My Pi 2 is struggling to saturate its 100/100 interface.

Doubtful. Like the RaspberryPi 2, it also has a quad core A7 CPU.

If you are looking for a bit more power, you need to consider something with A53.

That said, I'm surprised you are having issues, considering I have done over 200Mbps using a MT7621A with its 800MHz MIPS CPU.

Yeah, I remember reading that people were getting better results than I was. Not sure really what's the issue. I am doing some IP translation to have kind of an alias subnet for my home network when going through the VPN. So maybe that's the issue. I did note that the CPU was getting hit hard when I was running iperf, so I've assumed that my bottleneck is there.

I think I was hitting 60+ Mbps though, so it wasn't all bad. However my home connection is 1000/100, so going above 100+ isn't going to mean much. Which is why I've been too cheap to invest in a Pi 4; not too great of an improvement for 55+ EUR investment.

I use one for pihole (with DoH) and wireguard. For pi-hole, i filter around 10 devices, but i do only one wireguard connection at time. CPU usage is really low. I can have full bandwitdh usage on my 200/80 connection.

Check out the nanopi r4s instead for that kind of use

The Ubiquiti EdgerouterX can run wireguard beautifully with an easy to install package from github. $60 from most retailers.

It really can't run Wireguard beautifully. I have one and it's the reason why I'm now running Wireguard on a Raspberry Pi 2.

Hmm. We've had a pretty good experience with it on somewhat large deployment in the field. What issues did you run into? Just not fast enough? Or functionality/configururation issues?

Not fast enough. And the last time I went away from home for about a week, the Wireguard tunnel on my EdgeRouter X broke so bad on the second day that the router interface became completely unreachable, the static host mapping broke and connected clients were having DNS issues. It needed a hard reboot, which was hard since I was hundreds of kilometers away.

I can't say for sure that it was because of the Wireguard tunnel, but considering how low my Wireguard usage was before without issues, it's my main suspect. After I got home, I hard rebooted the EdgeRouter and then migrated my DNS and Wireguard off of it. I've decided that the less things that my EdgeRouter X does, the better it is. I've also decided that if I get a new Raspberry Pi for my Wireguard duties, I'll leave the old one as a backup because you just never know.

I wonder if it's possible to power one of these boards off ethernet?

I don't know about this board, but there's an official kit for doing that on the Raspberry Pi:

https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/poe-hat/

Don't seem to be able to buy it, it blocks being able to actively cool the cpu and no idea on fit with 3rd party cases, but it looks small enough that it wouldn't be an issue with many.

I kind of wish they'd have a new release with a form factor for those wanting to play with a pi cluster, all the i/o on one side, and PoE on board.

Don't know much about it but wouldn't that be something more in line with the pi compute module?

I know there are boards that take 4 compute modules for instance. They might be better to stack as well.

Why can't you actively cool the CPU? It has its own fan.

because the board covers the pi board underneath?

Plenty of room for the air to escape from the sides though.

Official board is horribly noisy when the fan is running.

Basically the fan's too small (despite their being room for a much larger one)

I'm hoping for a POE board for the new compute module - I want ethernet (w POE), USB and storage in a small package, something the size of original Ubiquiti Cloudkeys would be ideal.

Gumstix have a POE board for the CM4 but it comes with a Coral chip also but it's out of the price range for what I need - https://www.gumstix.com/manufacturer/raspberry-pi/cm4-poe-sm...

Having got one of these and a PoE -> ethernet + microusb power splitter for my 2 pis, I have to say I've been much happier with the splitter than the hat - the hat uses space that could be used to install other things and has quite an annoyingly noisy fan.

I have not yet seen a pi or pi-related board that supports 802.3af right into the jack and right out of the box. A few support surprisingly large add-on boards that connect to the GPIO pins and to a set of pins near the RJ45 so you can still use the built in jack for data and power. You can always use a non-standard or even standard injector/tap but that's probably not what you're after.

I have a side project where I disassembled a 802.3af tap and USB ethernet board and wired it all directly into a PiZero. The POE tap and USB ethernet boards are pretty small internally. The POE tap has a cat5-like header that comes off I just wired straight into the pads the ethernet controller was using while removing the RJ45 plug on the board. https://imgur.com/0gBj23G

There's also the NanoPi R2S[1] which instead of USB3 has a second Ethernet port, so you can run it as a small router.

I recently picked one up but haven't had the time to play much with it except to measure that it does indeed come close to line speed using iperf3 on both ports.

Apparently gets hot so the alu "heatsink case" is recommended.

Been running PiHole on a ZeroPi for a few months now, on top of Armbian. Rock solid so far.

[1]: https://www.friendlyarm.com/index.php?route=product/product&...

>There's also the NanoPi R2S[1] which instead of USB3 has a second Ethernet port, so you can run it as a small router.

And Nanopi R4S from some OEM...which is better suited to router duty.

...mine should arrive and day now. Jury still out as to whether it can do gigabit throughput

What will you run on it?

Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these!

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