My SBC Collection

A few years ago there was a kickstarter for https://parallella.org/

I think mine arrived like a year late as I recall but the hardware really appealed - a zynq dual core arm + FPGA - these are more popular now but back then this was the first I heard of these chips. The board came with the verilog for the hdmi out implemented on the fpga- as I recall there were some challenges building a bitstream like they provided from their source but it was so long ago I don’t recall the specifics, it did eventually work. I never succeeded at evolving their hdmi out into an hdmi in though, it turned out to be way more complicated to bring in an hdmi signal than to generate one - I’m not even sure if it’d be possible on the size of fpga provided.

Anyway that was all a sideshow - the real deal was the epiphany chip. I’m going from memory here so I could have this wrong but as I recall each core had a little ram and a fabric connecting it to other cores, so you could choose to use it like gpu compute - although that model wasn’t a great match because each core could branch independently without any real hassle but that then opened up the puzzzle of how to keep each core fed. Another strategy could be the deep pipeline approach like you’d take with an fpga. Treating it as you would a multi core cpu never really made much sense to me because of bandwidth limitations of the fabric.

It used to overheat quite easily but I just soldered on a tiny dc fan to the incoming barrel jack and that did the trick for me, if a little loud.

Anyway, a cool little chip. I still have the code as far as I got with my image recognition application, I was reading road speed signs and vehicle registration plates from images, I think I know what project I’ll have a play with this week!

No one remembers the GuruPlug, or better yet - the GuruPlug Server Plus, When RPi 1 just came out this little gadget ran x86 Linux (!) and had hdmi out that could handle 1080p video, a feat that only RPi 4 can repeat.

A bit off topic, but I have recently acquired a PCB which uses a Conexant CX92755. It is kind of supported by the Linux kernel, but I am completely unable to find a user manual / proper datasheet for this chip. If someone happens to have it stashed somewhere, I'd be super grateful as it would give me a few week ends of hacking with the board.

The number of affordable still very powerful SBCs has grown to the point we probably need something like the rosettacode (.org) site, but aimed at comparing ways of obtaining the same tasks in a few chosen languages but on different hardware, for example how to flip a gpio, how to send a pwm signal to a mosfet, how to read this or that sensor, how to draw on graphics LCDs, communicate with RF modules, etc. followed then by a list of boards and method to accomplish the task on all of them using similarly named functions and variables when possible to make comparison easier. In some cases the code will likely be identical, while some lower level or optimized stuff will need to be more specific for a given hardware. A site like that could quickly become a place to go when looking for ideas and/or compare different SBCs. Opinions?

Odroids were amazing. At some point I had 16 of them spread out in various homes plugged behind routers scraping Amazon. They all reverse tunnelled their ssh ports to a public beacon for access. This went on for years until I didn't need them anymore. I still remember zeroing the sd card of odroid14 remotely because the owner had to move out and forgot about it. Sad times.

Can anyone recommend an SBC with >=16 GB of RAM that has been confirmed to run stably with the mainline kernel?

Edit: to be clear, I specifically need ARM CPUs. Headless is OK (although a basic console over HDMI would be nice). To answer myself, an Orange Pi 5 might fit the bill but I'm not sure how stable it runs at 100% continuous load (on a mainline kernel).

My favourite will always be the C.H.I.P. by Next Thing Co[1].

I still have one. They were priced towards 9 dollars, had on-board bluetooth and wifi when the Pi didn't and was significantly smaller. Sadly the company couldn't make it work. They also had a "Pocket C.H.I.P." which was a small display and keyboard you could plug your C.H.I.P. in.

Some company did buy their work and is planning to sell the boards and some variants as as the Popcorn Computer, but it has lost quite a lot of its charm.[2]

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CHIP_(computer) [2]: https://popcorncomputer.com/

I too am an SBC hoarder. It has gotten bad. :D

I bought the original Raspberry Pi 2b as part of a homebrew NAS. Later I bought the Pi 3, Pi 4, Pi Compute 4 + board, Pi 5, 2 RISC-V boards, and a bunch of other boards. I don't have a need for them, I just enjoy collecting them.

Currently the only one I'm using is a Pi 5.

Wow, almost all of my SBCs are 8-bitters. uKenbak, Digirule 2U, PAL-1, 6502 Membership Card, dozens of ATMega boards. Plus the VIP2K, Altaid 8800, and 1802 Membership Card are all technically 2-board computers, but that’s only so they can fit in an Altoids tin.

EDIT: Timex-Sinclair TS1000, Commodore 64, VIC 20, Apple IIc, Apple IIgs, Macintosh SE, Macintosh LC II… do these count?

Nice.

I have an OrangePi 5 (w/ SSD), a Lichee Pi 4A RISC-V (POE+modded case), and 6 RPi 4B (4 powered by POE+ booting from SSDs on powered USB hubs).

AmateurTip: Don't get a ROCKPro64 because they're paperweights due to a dead fork of Linux. ]:

And assorted non-Linux MCUs: ESP8266/32/32+LoRa, Arduino UNO/Mini/Nanos, MSP430, STM32, BASIC Stamp, and various PICs.

I also have a bunch of SBCs lying around waiting to be used, and also an ODROID HC2 which has been in use for years. I only dislike that it's not powerful enough for encryption--LUKS + samba could not read/write at disk speeds and was unreliable in my testing.

Really wish there would be an upgrade to the HC2 with about three to four times the performance.

I started out with Linksys NSLU2 (even ran my site off one for a lark), then moved to ODROID, Raspberry Pis, etc. These days I've got a few Rockchip variants around, and it's pretty amazing to consider how things evolved over the years (even without mainstream Linux support for some of the chips I've used).

Fun post. I have also accumulated a huge collection of SoCs, SBCs and OTS/Custom/Production PCBs that came about from Client projects over the last 16 years. I love this space, if a project comes up, I usually support it.

As a slight tangent, does anyone know any tiny soc modules with USB C display out, and can decode h264/h265 video at 120fps?

No nvidia jetson (nano Xavier etc.)! Add it to your bucket list.