Any tested single board computers?
 

Hello everybody. It seems single board computers are gaining popularity. With so many to choose from. Which is good. However I would like to hear from real users who could recommend which one to use. So feel free to post your reviews on your single board computers. And also what distro(s) you tried out. Thanks!

Hello Mill J,

question is, what do you want to accomplish with these exactly?

While the most recent Raspberry Pi 3 and its cheap China clones can indeed be powerful, don't expect performance any near modern desktop computers or even laptops.

I used a Banana Pi long ago as a temporary desktop replacement while my computer was broken, it was enough for chatting, to listen to music and to do some classic games or office.
Anything that requires more hardware power however needs either dedicated distributions such as OpenELEC or RetroPie though, the one being a small multimedia distribution dedicated to run Kodi as good as possible to make single board computers a good media center, the other being one nice made front-end for a ton of emulators that run mostly great on those SoCs.

A Raspberry Pi 1 is also part of my collection along with a Pi2, the one acting ever since as a small file and media server for my home, the other replacing my house mate's DVB-T1 antenna with IPTV being enabled so he can still watch all the shows he likes.

With the help of a friend of mine, I also plan to place a Raspberry Pi Zero inside some old SEGA Dreamcast arcade controller in order to use it with RetroPie which I mentioned before.
Those small devices are really meant for dedicated projects and to learn computing more than anything.

If you're one of those who don't need much however, you of course can still take a look for those gadgets.
The LattePanda runs some X5 atom x86_64 processor and comes with USB3 and more RAM than the Pi ottb if I recall correctly, you'd have to replace Win10 on it with your favorite GNU/Linux distro though if you're going that far.

Hopefully this helps.


Kind regards,
WaterCatapult

Thanks for the fast response.
I was just wondering what was the pros and cons of different boards. Of course like most people I keep looking at prices of cheap boards and wonder if they are as good as they sound. Which is the reason for posting.

A timely posting - I have just ordered a (Raspberry) Pi3.

It's a 64bit ARM quad core processor running at 1.2GHz with 1GB ram, which is plenty for general computing with Linux, with built in wifi, (& bluetooth).

I ordered mine as a kit with a Kodi micro SD card, but have downloaded other O/S'es to try as well, most likely will end up with Rasbian, as I've been a Debian based user for years.

Buy the proper adapter for video & sound if you want to use a VGA monitor with it, otherwise you will need an HDMI cable to hook it up to a flat screen or TV.

Looking forward to receiving mine. :)

I use a pi3 as a firewall/router in "front" of my home router. Means I can use one set of rules for the whole network, Win10 included.
I chose it because it was cheap and well supported, and it is quiet (no fans) and uses little power. I have a bunch of old machines I could have used instead, but those last 2 considerations were paramount to me as it stays on 24/7.
I use Arch because it's light-weight and I'm used to it. Similar to the sentiments expressed above.

Thanks. Sounds like raspberry pi3 would be a good move. Does Anyone know of any other they would recommend?

You might check out the Odroid C-2. I have a Rpi3 currently but was looking for something with a little more power and this looked like a good option. I haven't bought it yet but probably will be picking one up in the next month or so. You can see it here http://www.hardkernel.com/main/products/prdt_info.php

Thanks for sharing, that does look like a reasonable board!

That Odroid C-2 actually raises my attention too, has anyone tried this thing yet?
I'd give different boards a try myself but I don't like to end up with another of these cheaply Chinese made RPi clones, I had another BPi once that blew up on me because I accidentally decided to connect my smartphone to it.

Another reason for why I couldn't recommend the Banana Pi without lying to myself.


Kind regards,
WaterCatapult

RasPi!!!! I've 6 of them!

• Picade Console - Pi3 - Mainly MAME games but runs RetroPi distro so has LOADS of emulations.
• EyePi - Pi3 - Used with a USB power-bank as a mobile device that automatically uploads (to web server) pics taken with WiFi enabled DLSR cameras. Currently being rebuilt to have an LCD screen to make it easier to display status, monitor uploads on the move, etc.
• PiNAS - Pi3 - A NAS with web front-end to act as a movie / TV show downloader.
• Backup server - Pi1 - Does dirvish versioning backups of production server at home.
• Manic Miner - Pi1 - With an LCD screen on the top which ONLY boots in to a ZX Spectrum emulator to run Manic Miner - Why? Because!!!!!!
• Halloween - Pi1 - Uses the GPIO to switch relays that turn strobe lights on and off. A bash shell script plays a loop of MP3s of thunder storms through the audio output and while the MP3 is playing it randomly turns relays on and off that are linked to cheap strobe lights. A nice thunder and lightning effect for halloween.

Thanks. Sounds interesting!

I have a pi B, pre-B+, and sometimes use it. It's nice to have if you want to format and check usb drives / sticks and don't want to tie up your main machine for that.

Various arm, mips, risc-v, and x86 boards out. The mips I6500 might prove interesting later this year. It would be nice to have something like the amd 6700T boards for < $200 even if it's not x86. IMO once you crest $200, you might as well get a laptop, or a NUC. But I'm probably not the target market for most of these SBCs. If the pi 4 has gigabit ethernet, I might buy more than one of them. I like my B, but I can't even stream my 720p webcam (raw data, no compression) on 10/100 ethernet without opting for one of it's lower resolutions.

Another board I find really interesting for a while now is the UP-Board.

It's as small as the Raspberry Pi but uses gigabit ethernet, USB3.x and features an Apollo Lake x86_64 ATOM processor with 4-8G DDR3L or LPDDR4 RAM.

Granted, the device cost a three times the price of a stock RPi but otherwise the specs a quite impressive.

A downer for me is however that I'd have to import it and German customs are just a pain to deal with.


Kind regards,
WaterCatapult

Thanks for sharing. I like to idea of an Intel cpu. You could use the same distro version that you run on your pc!