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Comment by goodpoint | Hacker News Reader

$40 is too expensive

It's pretty much the minimal cost for the form factor and accessories. It would be cool if they could make a $20 version with a lot less connectivity in a smaller form factor.

Check out the the Bouffalo Labs BL808 or Sophon SG2000 series. They are a system-in-package products that contain a RISC-V CPU, RAM and flash memory all in a few mm square package, for a few dollars. Pine64 and Milk-V both have breakout boards for under $10.

They only have RAM and flash in the hundreds of megabytes, not gigabytes, but they can run full Linux and are as capable as many household Wi-Fi routers. They include USB, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and wired Ethernet ports, and even have MIPI CSI and DSI interfaces for cameras and displays.

The SG2000 is pretty interesting. I do wish they had gone with a more homogeneous architecture (4 identical cores like the pi 2 zero), and it's RVV 0.7, but the next generation of this could be really interesting.

Depends what you're using it for. A lot of people tend to buy pi-likes as servers which is absolutely bonkers. If you time eBay right, $50 would get you a fairly powerful intel NUC with much more performance and peripherals

I don't think it's bonkers. For running a true home server sure, there's more powerful things out there. But for hosting something like a ZigBee and Z-wave coördinator a Pi makes much more sense. Electricity is expensive, yo

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