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Comment by Spooky23 | Hacker News Reader

The Target near me has them in stock from time to time.

For projects, try HP thin clients on eBay.

Previous-Gen QuadCore ARM TV boxes are available in masses for 30EUros on European Amazon. Most of them have close-to-mainline, or even mainline kernels available to boot/install a normal debian bullseye.

Somewhat reduced IO interfaces, a bit less RAM, maybe a bit less singlethread perf, but SPI, I2c, USB, HDMI and others are available. Buy 5 for the price of one RPI-SET.

Can you recommend one?

The thing to do here is: Sort by rising price, note the SoC names, look them up on their respective "linux mainline kernel port progress page" (links below), and then look in the vendor sub-folders of the mainline linux Hardware compatibility list (https://github.com/torvalds/linux/tree/master/arch/arm64/boo... /vendorname/) to look for the DTS of the ODM name of the board.

Then you'll need to just figure out a way to bootstrap-boot/install Debian bullseye (ideally with the 5.15 currently in backports) on that board. Just look on the Armbian site for instructions for devices with the same SoC for that.

I have several of each of these bought over the last few years running Bullseye:

Allwinner (sunxi): https://linux-sunxi.org/Linux_mainlining_effort

Amlogic (meson): https://linux-meson.com/hardware.html#support-matrix

Rockchip: http://opensource.rock-chips.com/wiki_Status_Matrix

Similar pages can be found with "MySocName linux kernel mainline port progress" for other SoCs, if the board/family is worth considering.

Depending on your exact needs make sure to get a board with USB3, GE, (supported) Wifi/BT, (well(-ish)) supported GPU.

Just make sure, you get the final boot configuration right, or you'll start over ;)

Thank you, that's really helpful.

An HP Thin Client might be nicer in some ways (x86 instead of ARM, say) but the lack of GPIO wouldn't make them a replacement for some RPi projects (and I haven't ever tried to install Debian or Ubuntu on one, not sure how unusual the hardware is).

> but the lack of GPIO

It's easy to hack a GPIO together using the USB interface or I2C interface that's inside every HDMI connector.

On-SoC based GPIO driven by register access is pretty dramatically different from GPIO driven over a bus in terms of timing.

Also you need a microcontroller at the other end of the USB or I2C. Which means... you need a microcontroller anyway?

You can use a dedicated I2C controlled GPIO expander chip at the other end. For example, [1].

This works in the tens of kHz. Indeed, for high-speed applications you need a different approach. But in that case you probably also want to run a realtime-OS ...

[1] https://www.nxp.com/docs/en/data-sheet/PCAL9538A.pdf

That sounds cool! Any resources for the same?

The HPs are usually AMD SoCs. They ship with a Debian derivative thin client OS or Windows. I have a few running Debian. They are great for home servers; fanless, can support a lot of memory and usually two M2 modules.

Or Dell thin clients. Despite some oddities with the Cherry Trail (?) boards used on the Wyse 3040 series, they are x86 and have similar processing power to the Rpi4. They come with a quad core processor, 2GB of RAM and (usually) 8GB of storage, which I assume is EMMC. Multiple USB ports, gigabit Ethernet, dual DisplayPort out.

You can usually find them for around $35-40.

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