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I'm starting to think RPi owners just don't want to acknowledge that there are other embedded linux-capable dev boards out there that can do all the things they

I'm starting to think RPi owners just don't want to acknowledge that there are other embedded linux-capable dev boards out there that can do all the things they want (eMMC, PCIe, multiple USB3, eSATA) without going through all of these insane hacks. If it's for the adventure, cool. If it's because you are pissed at the RPi folks for not including it then holy crap widen your horizons....

ericcholis 6y ago
I think the "spirit" of the RPi is what encourages this hacker/maker mentality....which is perfectly fine by me.
- joezydeco 6y ago
  Funny. I thought the original spirit of RPi was to be a BBC Micro to a new generation of schoolkids and let them explore a modern desktop programming system for cheap. The "let's hack this into a Beowulf cluster!" stuff was secondary. Now it seems to be primary and the education stuff is, um, not even mentioned anymore?
  - pjmlp 6y ago
    It is still mentioned, in the context of UK education.
  - mikepurvis 6y ago
    The education market may have been seen as larger and more "addressable" when this was all in the planning stages.
  - iNate2000 6y ago
    This is what happens when you let people explore something for cheap: they do all kinds of things you didn’t expect. The outcome couldn’t have been better.
    - HeyLaughingBoy 6y ago
      This is exactly it. There's a group of guys I build hardware/firmware for. They are experienced engineers, but their expertise is in machine tools. We met because they made a post on an Arduino forum a few years ago basically saying "we need to do X. We know it has to be possible in a cost-effective way because of all the cheap Arduino, Raspberry Pi, etc. hardware we keep seeing for sale but we don't have any experience on those platforms. Can anyone help us?" This illustrates a point that a lot of people don't see: while Arduino or RPi were released for a specific purpose, the absolutely massive ecosystem that grew up around them enabled a slew of entirely new classes of applications that weren't feasible before due to cost. Back to "my" guys. If I quoted them an upfront design for what they needed, starting from scratch, it would have reached into the five figures easily. Instead I was able to say "hey, I'm working on something that has a lot in common with that. I'll build you a prototype of what you need for the cost of the hardware" and we went from there. Now that project makes me a few $k per year.
  - bityard 6y ago
    > Now it seems to be primary and the education stuff is, um, not even mentioned anymore? Except at the very top of the website?
  - ashika 6y ago
    i think it still is that, but achieves it so easily as to be unremarkable. rpi has probably introduced many people to linux and debian. it might seem trivial, but anything that gives ordinary people a good experience with open computing should be considered a massive victory.
zakki 6y ago
Do you mind to name the brand/series of the products in the same price range? *really wants to know, not trolling
- joezydeco 6y ago
  Yeah, I know you're not trolling but that comes up every.single.time. alternatives to RPi are mentioned. We get it: it's cheap. I can get a running Linux board for $30 so kiss off. There's no other board in this range because the other chipmakers aren't subsidizing their boards or ecosystems in this fashion. So there's no answer to that. But I know what my time is worth and I'd rather spend $150-$200 more on a Beagle X-15 or Boundary Nitrogen or Toradex Colibri and get the documentation and schematics and all the source I need to make it do things like eMMC and PCIe. If I spent more than 2-3 hours on hacking chips into the board I've already lost.
  - jstanley 6y ago
    Well, for hobbyists just messing around on their own time, "just pay $200, your time should be worth more than that" isn't really a sensible answer.
    - simias 6y ago
      If you're a software engineer with the skills to mess with low level interfaces like that, $200 doesn't seem that insane, especially since those are general purpose boards that can easily be repurposed. I mean of course I realize that for many people $200 is a lot of money but I'm willing to bet that for the average HNer it's really not that big of a deal. Besides TFA's chip requires desoldering and resoldering an SMT chip from the RPi's tiny and densely populated motherboard, not exactly Soldering 101. Moreover if you're really just starting with low level programming, want to mess with basic electronics and things like that then don't get into PCIe, actually don't even get into Linux. Just get a cheap-o ARM microcontroller board, a multimeter and a $10 saleae digital analyzer clone from ebay and play with that, you'll learn a lot more that way.
      - 6y ago
justin66 6y ago
The software support and community of the Raspberry Pi is several orders of magnitude better than anything that exists for the other boards you're mentioning. "Embedded linux capable" is different than having many linux distributions, and other operating systems, treat the boards as a fully supported target. It's true that RPi owners don't know about a lot of that other stuff, but there are reasons they don't know about them.
- joezydeco 6y ago
  And it kind of has to be when Broadcom won't answer their pleas for help, right? I've worked with Broadcom and they won't even pick up the phone unless you're moving 100K EAU. (and, protip: when you do get technical help or source it's complete crap)
  - justin66 6y ago
    Your case is maybe kind of illustrative of what I was talking about. The number of RPi users who work at the level where they might have questions for Broadcom is vanishingly small, and that's okay. Almost all people want to write software in userspace, even if it's software that does cool embedded, IoT type stuff. What's the best right now in terms of openness and support for someone working at the driver level?
    - joezydeco 6y ago
      I've been a Freescale/NXP customer for decades and I like their stuff. Their documentation is comprehensive, their technical notes and errata are free to read. They're not perfect but they work at it. Their Github presence is decent. iMX is a good line for Linux, LPC for microcontrollers but the new iMXRT parts are looking great for FreeRTOS. I don't work as much with TI but I've used Panda in the past for OMAP4 and some personal work with Beagle/AM335x and it's solid stuff. I'd like to think Beagle's community is as good as RPi's, just a little more low-key (and the chipmaker participates as well)
      - 6y ago
mysterydip 6y ago
I haven't found anything that's been able to match the price point of the pi for the amount of things you can do with it. I'd love an x86 system of similar footprint and cost. Are there some I don't know about?
- thinkmassive 6y ago
  Here's a great place to start your search https://www.hackerboards.com/ https://www.hackerboards.com/
  - gregmac 6y ago
    I think this actually highlights part of the problem. There's certainly a ton of capable products there, lots of stuff that looks very fun to play with. You can probably find something with whatever specific combo of features you need for your project. However, there's two big issues: price and availability. Price is obvious. If you want to spend $200 or more you have a massive number of options. However, this is a far cry from the $35-75 for a Pi, plus for both you still need a power supply, case, etc. I can also order a Pi from a couple different sites, and probably pick one up locally in a pinch, too. It seems like there's lot of other boards where you can't actually buy one. Some are in the category of "how many thousand would you like?" It's just a totally different world than the Pi's distribution and ecosystem, to the point it's not really fair to consider for the average hobbyist. There's dozens of readily available case options and other add-ons for the Pi. I also know if I build software for the Pi I'll still be able to buy another one anytime I want for the next few years, and due to its popularity chances are for the next decade (if not a real Pi, someone will make a clone). It's great there's options, but the fact a product merely exists doesn't instantly make it a viable alternative.
    - GordonS 6y ago
      The sheet quantity of boards here is another problem - I'd personally much prefer a curated list, with recommendations for different use cases.
nacs 6y ago
I'm sure a person who does this amount of work on the project did a 2 minute Google search for similar products even if they somehow weren't aware of other boards. Also, did you forget you're on HackerNews? Sometimes people do things just because it's interesting or they're curious.
simias 6y ago
I think it's like Arduino. If you're not well versed into the world of embedded boards it can be tricky to navigate all the offerings. RPi is popular, massively well supported, you can find tons of projects online using it for almost anything, it seems like the safe choice. I mean, I have the strong suspicion that the vast majority of RPi owners wouldn't be able to cite the name of a single alternative. Not a one. RPi's popularity eclipsed everything else (like Arduino in its heyday). And even in your comment you haven't mentioned any alternative yourself, only that they exist. If you care about people using alternatives you should start with that. Actually, I should too, but the only Embedded Linux boards with a PCIe interface I've used are super expensive FPGA-based ones, so not really in the same category.
- monocasa 6y ago
  Even as someone well versed in the embedded world (my previous job had me as a lead for a proprietary high availability RTOS, which I personally ported to several ISAs), I still prefer RPi to the other boards. I normally get these boards with an endgoal in mind that isn't just "play with the board". While none of these boards have anything approaching the real support you'd get as a first rate developer, at least the RPis have an ecosystem of exactly the kind of stuff in the article so you have an equivalent to support. The Pine64 peeps seem close, but I haven't dug too deep there. Everything else seems to be "oh look, you can technically run Linux, but don't touch anything that the vendor provided for you".
  - elcritch 6y ago
    Exactly, I tried using Omega Onion’s but it turns out you can really only use their version of Linux. They claim support for booting from an SD card, but not really. The Chinese based Orange/Nano’s use Allwinner soc’s and the mainstream Linux support for those have gotten better, but nowhere near the pi’s. Though must say TI AM3* boards (beagle’s) have good mainline Linux support and they appear to do all their work on public got repos. Now the iMX* boards seem nice but I haven’t really found a maker board variant.
  - koffiezet 6y ago
    Have you ever looked at beaglebones? TI's support is pretty nice in my experience, and the hardware is a LOT more solid and reliable. Certainly the USB stack has been a weak point on the RPi, which is problematic since the ethernet adapter is USB. For most embedded work which needs to be reliable, the RPi is to much designed to a price, with enough tradeoffs making it an unattractive and ultimately more expensive option. In a PoC we did, we had to replace RPi's weekly in the field, racking up intervention costs. This completely disappeared the moment we switched to beaglebones. I quite like the RPi for what it is, a cheap & fun platform offering a lot of possibilities to the masses, but I wouldn't consider it to be a serious embedded platform to target you can depend on. But I've used it as a video/slideshow player in real-world situations, where if they'd drop out, there aren't any real consequences (which most of the time were cards failing, and yes, the root-fs was read-only...)
m0xte 6y ago
Worth looking at NUC and second hand Lenovo M600 fanless units as well. 900% less crap and I reckon 90% of users don’t plug anything directly into IO ports on their Pi.
- blacksmith_tb 6y ago
  But then you're looking at double or quadruple the price of even a fancy RPi. Even something like the Odroid H2plus[1] is going to be pretty spendy once you add ram and a ssd (though it's x86, so I would expect it would need a lot less fiddling with) 1: https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/odroid-h2plus/ https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/odroid-h2plus/
  - m0xte 6y ago
    Yes but the amount of time you’re not wasting is worth it.
    - Thrymr 6y ago
      Perhaps for you, but 2-3x the cost is an entirely different product.
      - m0xte 6y ago
        You tend to have to buy 2-3 times as many SoC boards in the same lifetime as the other item from experience. Thus the savings up front are artificial. I’ve got two dead pi’s here ceased to function while in unattended operation.
craftinator 6y ago
I don't think you'll see much positivity with your comment. This is old school hacking in the new age of computing; I have this one thing, and I want to hook it to another thing, let's figure out how to do that. I think it's amazing, and shows just how flexible and hackable the Pi can be. Of course we can throw bookoo bucks at a problem to make it disappear, or buy a specific built machine to do what we want. But there's no challenge in that, no engineering, and it's a bit of a cop out to lament that people are hacking hardware this way...
- joezydeco 6y ago
  Yeah, I know. I always regret commenting on RPi projects because when you do this kind of stuff day-in-day-out for a living you want to suggest alternatives that could save people a lot of busywork and lost psychic energy. Because that's what I would do for my coworkers. But I'm pissing into the wind at this point. Got my cheap ARM board, fuck you. And that's fine. Enjoy the adventure. I'm all for hacking, but reinventing the wheel isn't my thing.
  - turtlebits 6y ago
    The Raspberry Pi just works and there's tons of documentation. It's not about cost. I don't want to spend my time digging into the ins and outs of a specific board, which is exactly saving me a bunch of busywork and time. If there is a new version or my existing one breaks, I'm relatively certain I can get a replacement, and if I need to upgrade, it will be painless. That said, there is nothing wrong with trying to shoehorn features into something you've got already, vs buying something unknown.
    - joezydeco 6y ago
      See, to me that sounds like RPi is the only board with a working software ecosystem, active contributors, and available source code to help get your project done. But that's not really the case.
      - 6y ago
paulgerhardt 6y ago
A few years ago I tried switching off Raspberry Pi's after getting fed up with all the proprietary Broadcom nonsense and SD card (un)reliability. Specifically to the OrangePi. Wow the experience was terrible and back to Raspberry it was. Recently doing another project and ran into the same limitations on the pi4. This time tried the NanoPi m4v2. Wow is it amazing. Native PCIe slot with a NVMe/SATA/USB3 riser hats are fantastic: https://www.friendlyarm.com/image/catalog/description/M4v2_en_04.jpg https://www.friendlyarm.com/image/catalog/description/M4v2_e... - with the SATA hat you can build the equivalent of Synology DS918+ NAS for 1/10th the price. Won’t be going back to Raspberry. Specifically this is for the use case of a few hundred SBC's deployed in the field for commercial/light industrial - but if you’re a casual Raspberry user do reevaluate the NanoPi. (edit: or the OrangePi apparently, see below!) I’ve found the Raspberry Pi software support to be an ocean wide and a frisbee deep. For anything more involved than a casual weekend project you’re going to have to bushwhack either way.
- posguy 6y ago
  Most of the OrangePi lineup has full mainline kernel support now, thanks to projects like Linux-SUNXI and Armbian. Here is the status matrix: https://linux-sunxi.org/Linux_mainlining_effort#Status_Matrix https://linux-sunxi.org/Linux_mainlining_effort#Status_Matri...
  - CountSessine 6y ago
    Rockchip generally cooperates with Linux driver developers. The last time I checked, Linux-SUNXI was still stuck reverse engineering everything because Allwinner is actively hostile to driver developers. Has that changed?
  - kelnos 6y ago
    I wouldn't call that full at all. That matrix doesn't show full support for any of the listed SoCs, and some of them are missing some pretty critical things IMO. And other things raise big red flags for me, like: > sunxi-musb driver lacks DMA support (with current driver, USB gadgets are limited to PIO, limiting speed to 10MiB/s and causing large CPU) That... seems like a pretty big deal for anyone who wants to do anything with USB. It's also telling that it appears that all the upstreaming efforts seem to be community-driven, which is an even bigger red flag to me; the main page of the wiki you linked calls out Allwinner for their hostile attitude toward open source and the GPL[0]. It's fantastic that such a community has formed and works hard to fill in the gaps, but I'm not sure I want to (for example) build a NAS out of an OrangePi when I'm not confident that in 5-10 years I'll be able to run a future-current OS and kernel on it. The RPi's support isn't perfect, and not everything has been upstreamed, but most of the critical components are, and everything else is either in progress or at least has an out-of-tree open source driver. [0] Not that Broadcom wins any points here...
mrweasel 6y ago
Is there an ARM based board in a ITX/ATX form factor with a few PCIe slots? Because that's what I'm looking for. This PCIe on the Raspberry Pi is a neat hack, but still a way of from being a real desktop.
- imtringued 6y ago
  Only if you have deep pockets.
- floatboth 6y ago
  SolidRun MACCHIATObin has one PCIe slot. Enough for a GPU! I have this, it's pretty good. Though I have to resort to USB-Ethernet since FreeBSD doesn't support the onboard NIC (and the driver isn't the easiest to port) :D SolidRun HoneyComb LX2K has a bigger full size slot and an M.2 slot. I don't think bifurcation works but you do have two slots, you could run a GPU and a NIC or HBA at the same time, using an M.2 to PCIe-slot adapter. And/or use extension boards with PLX switches if you need more cards?
  - mrweasel 6y ago
    $750 is perhaps a bit more than I was willing to pay, but that is pretty interesting.
- cestith 6y ago
  Not ITX or ATX, but the RockPro64 has a single PCIex4 slot. $60 for 2GB model or $80 for the 4 GB model right now. https://store.pine64.org/product/rockpro64-2gb-single-board-computer/ https://store.pine64.org/product/rockpro64-2gb-single-board-...
- ericye16 6y ago
  This is at a completely different budget, but I used an Nvidia jetson TX2 dev kit for a while and it's reasonably responsive and has a PCIe slot. I think the dev kit carrier board is also ITX-shaped, but am not too sure.
mtgp1000 6y ago
I want a plug and play hardware interface that can handle digital and analog io in a hackable package, capable of running cpp (easy to compile for) and if possible python. If there are convenient alternatives to rpi, especially if they're cheaper for comparable performance, I'm all ears!
- MayeulC 6y ago
  Pine64 has a bunch of well-supported SBCs, some of which (Rockpro64) include a PCIe port, for instance. I think beagleboard was in the business even before the pi foundation, but I don't think they care about mainlining as much as the pine64 community.
jsight 6y ago
I tend to agree, but I think part of the problem is that there are so many other options out there. Each individual alternative option gets little attention by the market and it is really difficult to tell which ones are stable enough to be usable.
Liveanimalcams 6y ago
My problem is I've had a huge problem with getting tensorflow running on anything but a raspberry pi :( The eco system around the pi is really amazing and I feel like its more alive. Which makes sense since its a learning platform.
ulzeraj 6y ago
From my experience competitors often implement hardware features but their support matrix for software is not quite the same as the RPis. Most of the time you are stuck on the maintainer modified distribution and their own patched kernels and if you want to go beyond that you are on your own. The ARM world is not as standardized as x86 and AMD64.
coronadisaster 6y ago
Last I checked, a problem with the other boards is that they aren't as open.
kelnos 6y ago
I've looked at a few of the other Pi-like SBCs out there that have beefier hardware features, and the one question I can't find an answer to is: how well is it supported, and what happens if the company that makes it disappears? With the RPi, I know that enough stuff is upstreamed that even if the RPi Foundation were to dissolve, I could still run a stock Debian with a stock kernel on it and get most of the functionality working (where in my case, "most" is everything that I personally have a need for). While the RPi isn't 100% open hardware-wise (stupid Broadcom), the stuff that is open is good enough for me. But I don't know how to get similar confidence about NanoPi, RockPi, OrangePi, CubieBoard, etc. How open is the hardware? Is support for everything I need upstreamed? What's the community like? A cursory look at their various websites didn't give me enough information to feel comfortable trying one out. I have a limited amount of time for this stuff, and I'd like to have a pretty high level of confidence before buying one. I'll admit that my hesitance is maybe a little unfair and colored by a single bad experience: a few years ago I bought a ReSpeaker (the original v1 hardware). It was, frankly, garbage. The hardware itself was designed poorly and was buggy (attempting to run anything off the SD card would result in random no-reason SIGILL/SIGBUS/SIGSEGV, for one thing; that's a sign of broken hardware design). Support was minimal[0], and after they started working on the v2 hardware, they more or less stopped caring about v1. I actually threw the board away because it was useless. I wasted a good 20+ hours trying to get the ReSpeaker to do something useful, and I'm never getting that time back. I don't want a repeat. In contrast, the RPi has always been a reliable platform to build on, with a great, responsive community. [0] And the only suggestion was "only run things off the built-in flash"... which, IIRC, was double-digit-megabyte tiny.

ericcholis 6y ago

I think the "spirit" of the RPi is what encourages this hacker/maker mentality....which is perfectly fine by me.

joezydeco 6y ago
Funny. I thought the original spirit of RPi was to be a BBC Micro to a new generation of schoolkids and let them explore a modern desktop programming system for cheap. The "let's hack this into a Beowulf cluster!" stuff was secondary. Now it seems to be primary and the education stuff is, um, not even mentioned anymore?
- pjmlp 6y ago
  It is still mentioned, in the context of UK education.
- mikepurvis 6y ago
  The education market may have been seen as larger and more "addressable" when this was all in the planning stages.
- iNate2000 6y ago
  This is what happens when you let people explore something for cheap: they do all kinds of things you didn’t expect. The outcome couldn’t have been better.
  - HeyLaughingBoy 6y ago
    This is exactly it. There's a group of guys I build hardware/firmware for. They are experienced engineers, but their expertise is in machine tools. We met because they made a post on an Arduino forum a few years ago basically saying "we need to do X. We know it has to be possible in a cost-effective way because of all the cheap Arduino, Raspberry Pi, etc. hardware we keep seeing for sale but we don't have any experience on those platforms. Can anyone help us?" This illustrates a point that a lot of people don't see: while Arduino or RPi were released for a specific purpose, the absolutely massive ecosystem that grew up around them enabled a slew of entirely new classes of applications that weren't feasible before due to cost. Back to "my" guys. If I quoted them an upfront design for what they needed, starting from scratch, it would have reached into the five figures easily. Instead I was able to say "hey, I'm working on something that has a lot in common with that. I'll build you a prototype of what you need for the cost of the hardware" and we went from there. Now that project makes me a few $k per year.
- bityard 6y ago
  > Now it seems to be primary and the education stuff is, um, not even mentioned anymore? Except at the very top of the website?
- ashika 6y ago
  i think it still is that, but achieves it so easily as to be unremarkable. rpi has probably introduced many people to linux and debian. it might seem trivial, but anything that gives ordinary people a good experience with open computing should be considered a massive victory.

zakki 6y ago

Do you mind to name the brand/series of the products in the same price range? *really wants to know, not trolling

joezydeco 6y ago
Yeah, I know you're not trolling but that comes up every.single.time. alternatives to RPi are mentioned. We get it: it's cheap. I can get a running Linux board for $30 so kiss off. There's no other board in this range because the other chipmakers aren't subsidizing their boards or ecosystems in this fashion. So there's no answer to that. But I know what my time is worth and I'd rather spend $150-$200 more on a Beagle X-15 or Boundary Nitrogen or Toradex Colibri and get the documentation and schematics and all the source I need to make it do things like eMMC and PCIe. If I spent more than 2-3 hours on hacking chips into the board I've already lost.
- jstanley 6y ago
  Well, for hobbyists just messing around on their own time, "just pay $200, your time should be worth more than that" isn't really a sensible answer.
  - simias 6y ago
    If you're a software engineer with the skills to mess with low level interfaces like that, $200 doesn't seem that insane, especially since those are general purpose boards that can easily be repurposed. I mean of course I realize that for many people $200 is a lot of money but I'm willing to bet that for the average HNer it's really not that big of a deal. Besides TFA's chip requires desoldering and resoldering an SMT chip from the RPi's tiny and densely populated motherboard, not exactly Soldering 101. Moreover if you're really just starting with low level programming, want to mess with basic electronics and things like that then don't get into PCIe, actually don't even get into Linux. Just get a cheap-o ARM microcontroller board, a multimeter and a $10 saleae digital analyzer clone from ebay and play with that, you'll learn a lot more that way.
    - 6y ago

justin66 6y ago

The software support and community of the Raspberry Pi is several orders of magnitude better than anything that exists for the other boards you're mentioning. "Embedded linux capable" is different than having many linux distributions, and other operating systems, treat the boards as a fully supported target. It's true that RPi owners don't know about a lot of that other stuff, but there are reasons they don't know about them.

joezydeco 6y ago
And it kind of has to be when Broadcom won't answer their pleas for help, right? I've worked with Broadcom and they won't even pick up the phone unless you're moving 100K EAU. (and, protip: when you do get technical help or source it's complete crap)
- justin66 6y ago
  Your case is maybe kind of illustrative of what I was talking about. The number of RPi users who work at the level where they might have questions for Broadcom is vanishingly small, and that's okay. Almost all people want to write software in userspace, even if it's software that does cool embedded, IoT type stuff. What's the best right now in terms of openness and support for someone working at the driver level?
  - joezydeco 6y ago
    I've been a Freescale/NXP customer for decades and I like their stuff. Their documentation is comprehensive, their technical notes and errata are free to read. They're not perfect but they work at it. Their Github presence is decent. iMX is a good line for Linux, LPC for microcontrollers but the new iMXRT parts are looking great for FreeRTOS. I don't work as much with TI but I've used Panda in the past for OMAP4 and some personal work with Beagle/AM335x and it's solid stuff. I'd like to think Beagle's community is as good as RPi's, just a little more low-key (and the chipmaker participates as well)
    - 6y ago

mysterydip 6y ago

I haven't found anything that's been able to match the price point of the pi for the amount of things you can do with it. I'd love an x86 system of similar footprint and cost. Are there some I don't know about?

thinkmassive 6y ago
Here's a great place to start your search https://www.hackerboards.com/ https://www.hackerboards.com/
- gregmac 6y ago
  I think this actually highlights part of the problem. There's certainly a ton of capable products there, lots of stuff that looks very fun to play with. You can probably find something with whatever specific combo of features you need for your project. However, there's two big issues: price and availability. Price is obvious. If you want to spend $200 or more you have a massive number of options. However, this is a far cry from the $35-75 for a Pi, plus for both you still need a power supply, case, etc. I can also order a Pi from a couple different sites, and probably pick one up locally in a pinch, too. It seems like there's lot of other boards where you can't actually buy one. Some are in the category of "how many thousand would you like?" It's just a totally different world than the Pi's distribution and ecosystem, to the point it's not really fair to consider for the average hobbyist. There's dozens of readily available case options and other add-ons for the Pi. I also know if I build software for the Pi I'll still be able to buy another one anytime I want for the next few years, and due to its popularity chances are for the next decade (if not a real Pi, someone will make a clone). It's great there's options, but the fact a product merely exists doesn't instantly make it a viable alternative.
  - GordonS 6y ago
    The sheet quantity of boards here is another problem - I'd personally much prefer a curated list, with recommendations for different use cases.

nacs 6y ago

I'm sure a person who does this amount of work on the project did a 2 minute Google search for similar products even if they somehow weren't aware of other boards. Also, did you forget you're on HackerNews? Sometimes people do things just because it's interesting or they're curious.

simias 6y ago

I think it's like Arduino. If you're not well versed into the world of embedded boards it can be tricky to navigate all the offerings. RPi is popular, massively well supported, you can find tons of projects online using it for almost anything, it seems like the safe choice. I mean, I have the strong suspicion that the vast majority of RPi owners wouldn't be able to cite the name of a single alternative. Not a one. RPi's popularity eclipsed everything else (like Arduino in its heyday). And even in your comment you haven't mentioned any alternative yourself, only that they exist. If you care about people using alternatives you should start with that. Actually, I should too, but the only Embedded Linux boards with a PCIe interface I've used are super expensive FPGA-based ones, so not really in the same category.

monocasa 6y ago
Even as someone well versed in the embedded world (my previous job had me as a lead for a proprietary high availability RTOS, which I personally ported to several ISAs), I still prefer RPi to the other boards. I normally get these boards with an endgoal in mind that isn't just "play with the board". While none of these boards have anything approaching the real support you'd get as a first rate developer, at least the RPis have an ecosystem of exactly the kind of stuff in the article so you have an equivalent to support. The Pine64 peeps seem close, but I haven't dug too deep there. Everything else seems to be "oh look, you can technically run Linux, but don't touch anything that the vendor provided for you".
- elcritch 6y ago
  Exactly, I tried using Omega Onion’s but it turns out you can really only use their version of Linux. They claim support for booting from an SD card, but not really. The Chinese based Orange/Nano’s use Allwinner soc’s and the mainstream Linux support for those have gotten better, but nowhere near the pi’s. Though must say TI AM3* boards (beagle’s) have good mainline Linux support and they appear to do all their work on public got repos. Now the iMX* boards seem nice but I haven’t really found a maker board variant.
- koffiezet 6y ago
  Have you ever looked at beaglebones? TI's support is pretty nice in my experience, and the hardware is a LOT more solid and reliable. Certainly the USB stack has been a weak point on the RPi, which is problematic since the ethernet adapter is USB. For most embedded work which needs to be reliable, the RPi is to much designed to a price, with enough tradeoffs making it an unattractive and ultimately more expensive option. In a PoC we did, we had to replace RPi's weekly in the field, racking up intervention costs. This completely disappeared the moment we switched to beaglebones. I quite like the RPi for what it is, a cheap & fun platform offering a lot of possibilities to the masses, but I wouldn't consider it to be a serious embedded platform to target you can depend on. But I've used it as a video/slideshow player in real-world situations, where if they'd drop out, there aren't any real consequences (which most of the time were cards failing, and yes, the root-fs was read-only...)

m0xte 6y ago

Worth looking at NUC and second hand Lenovo M600 fanless units as well. 900% less crap and I reckon 90% of users don’t plug anything directly into IO ports on their Pi.

blacksmith_tb 6y ago
But then you're looking at double or quadruple the price of even a fancy RPi. Even something like the Odroid H2plus[1] is going to be pretty spendy once you add ram and a ssd (though it's x86, so I would expect it would need a lot less fiddling with) 1: https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/odroid-h2plus/ https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/odroid-h2plus/
- m0xte 6y ago
  Yes but the amount of time you’re not wasting is worth it.
  - Thrymr 6y ago
    Perhaps for you, but 2-3x the cost is an entirely different product.
    - m0xte 6y ago
      You tend to have to buy 2-3 times as many SoC boards in the same lifetime as the other item from experience. Thus the savings up front are artificial. I’ve got two dead pi’s here ceased to function while in unattended operation.

craftinator 6y ago

I don't think you'll see much positivity with your comment. This is old school hacking in the new age of computing; I have this one thing, and I want to hook it to another thing, let's figure out how to do that. I think it's amazing, and shows just how flexible and hackable the Pi can be. Of course we can throw bookoo bucks at a problem to make it disappear, or buy a specific built machine to do what we want. But there's no challenge in that, no engineering, and it's a bit of a cop out to lament that people are hacking hardware this way...

joezydeco 6y ago
Yeah, I know. I always regret commenting on RPi projects because when you do this kind of stuff day-in-day-out for a living you want to suggest alternatives that could save people a lot of busywork and lost psychic energy. Because that's what I would do for my coworkers. But I'm pissing into the wind at this point. Got my cheap ARM board, fuck you. And that's fine. Enjoy the adventure. I'm all for hacking, but reinventing the wheel isn't my thing.
- turtlebits 6y ago
  The Raspberry Pi just works and there's tons of documentation. It's not about cost. I don't want to spend my time digging into the ins and outs of a specific board, which is exactly saving me a bunch of busywork and time. If there is a new version or my existing one breaks, I'm relatively certain I can get a replacement, and if I need to upgrade, it will be painless. That said, there is nothing wrong with trying to shoehorn features into something you've got already, vs buying something unknown.
  - joezydeco 6y ago
    See, to me that sounds like RPi is the only board with a working software ecosystem, active contributors, and available source code to help get your project done. But that's not really the case.
    - 6y ago

paulgerhardt 6y ago

A few years ago I tried switching off Raspberry Pi's after getting fed up with all the proprietary Broadcom nonsense and SD card (un)reliability. Specifically to the OrangePi. Wow the experience was terrible and back to Raspberry it was. Recently doing another project and ran into the same limitations on the pi4. This time tried the NanoPi m4v2. Wow is it amazing. Native PCIe slot with a NVMe/SATA/USB3 riser hats are fantastic: https://www.friendlyarm.com/image/catalog/description/M4v2_en_04.jpg https://www.friendlyarm.com/image/catalog/description/M4v2_e... - with the SATA hat you can build the equivalent of Synology DS918+ NAS for 1/10th the price. Won’t be going back to Raspberry. Specifically this is for the use case of a few hundred SBC's deployed in the field for commercial/light industrial - but if you’re a casual Raspberry user do reevaluate the NanoPi. (edit: or the OrangePi apparently, see below!) I’ve found the Raspberry Pi software support to be an ocean wide and a frisbee deep. For anything more involved than a casual weekend project you’re going to have to bushwhack either way.

posguy 6y ago
Most of the OrangePi lineup has full mainline kernel support now, thanks to projects like Linux-SUNXI and Armbian. Here is the status matrix: https://linux-sunxi.org/Linux_mainlining_effort#Status_Matrix https://linux-sunxi.org/Linux_mainlining_effort#Status_Matri...
- CountSessine 6y ago
  Rockchip generally cooperates with Linux driver developers. The last time I checked, Linux-SUNXI was still stuck reverse engineering everything because Allwinner is actively hostile to driver developers. Has that changed?
- kelnos 6y ago
  I wouldn't call that full at all. That matrix doesn't show full support for any of the listed SoCs, and some of them are missing some pretty critical things IMO. And other things raise big red flags for me, like: > sunxi-musb driver lacks DMA support (with current driver, USB gadgets are limited to PIO, limiting speed to 10MiB/s and causing large CPU) That... seems like a pretty big deal for anyone who wants to do anything with USB. It's also telling that it appears that all the upstreaming efforts seem to be community-driven, which is an even bigger red flag to me; the main page of the wiki you linked calls out Allwinner for their hostile attitude toward open source and the GPL[0]. It's fantastic that such a community has formed and works hard to fill in the gaps, but I'm not sure I want to (for example) build a NAS out of an OrangePi when I'm not confident that in 5-10 years I'll be able to run a future-current OS and kernel on it. The RPi's support isn't perfect, and not everything has been upstreamed, but most of the critical components are, and everything else is either in progress or at least has an out-of-tree open source driver. [0] Not that Broadcom wins any points here...

mrweasel 6y ago

Is there an ARM based board in a ITX/ATX form factor with a few PCIe slots? Because that's what I'm looking for. This PCIe on the Raspberry Pi is a neat hack, but still a way of from being a real desktop.

imtringued 6y ago
Only if you have deep pockets.
floatboth 6y ago
SolidRun MACCHIATObin has one PCIe slot. Enough for a GPU! I have this, it's pretty good. Though I have to resort to USB-Ethernet since FreeBSD doesn't support the onboard NIC (and the driver isn't the easiest to port) :D SolidRun HoneyComb LX2K has a bigger full size slot and an M.2 slot. I don't think bifurcation works but you do have two slots, you could run a GPU and a NIC or HBA at the same time, using an M.2 to PCIe-slot adapter. And/or use extension boards with PLX switches if you need more cards?
- mrweasel 6y ago
  $750 is perhaps a bit more than I was willing to pay, but that is pretty interesting.
cestith 6y ago
Not ITX or ATX, but the RockPro64 has a single PCIex4 slot. $60 for 2GB model or $80 for the 4 GB model right now. https://store.pine64.org/product/rockpro64-2gb-single-board-computer/ https://store.pine64.org/product/rockpro64-2gb-single-board-...
ericye16 6y ago
This is at a completely different budget, but I used an Nvidia jetson TX2 dev kit for a while and it's reasonably responsive and has a PCIe slot. I think the dev kit carrier board is also ITX-shaped, but am not too sure.

mtgp1000 6y ago

I want a plug and play hardware interface that can handle digital and analog io in a hackable package, capable of running cpp (easy to compile for) and if possible python. If there are convenient alternatives to rpi, especially if they're cheaper for comparable performance, I'm all ears!

MayeulC 6y ago
Pine64 has a bunch of well-supported SBCs, some of which (Rockpro64) include a PCIe port, for instance. I think beagleboard was in the business even before the pi foundation, but I don't think they care about mainlining as much as the pine64 community.

jsight 6y ago

I tend to agree, but I think part of the problem is that there are so many other options out there. Each individual alternative option gets little attention by the market and it is really difficult to tell which ones are stable enough to be usable.

Liveanimalcams 6y ago

My problem is I've had a huge problem with getting tensorflow running on anything but a raspberry pi :( The eco system around the pi is really amazing and I feel like its more alive. Which makes sense since its a learning platform.

ulzeraj 6y ago

From my experience competitors often implement hardware features but their support matrix for software is not quite the same as the RPis. Most of the time you are stuck on the maintainer modified distribution and their own patched kernels and if you want to go beyond that you are on your own. The ARM world is not as standardized as x86 and AMD64.

coronadisaster 6y ago

Last I checked, a problem with the other boards is that they aren't as open.

kelnos 6y ago

I've looked at a few of the other Pi-like SBCs out there that have beefier hardware features, and the one question I can't find an answer to is: how well is it supported, and what happens if the company that makes it disappears? With the RPi, I know that enough stuff is upstreamed that even if the RPi Foundation were to dissolve, I could still run a stock Debian with a stock kernel on it and get most of the functionality working (where in my case, "most" is everything that I personally have a need for). While the RPi isn't 100% open hardware-wise (stupid Broadcom), the stuff that is open is good enough for me. But I don't know how to get similar confidence about NanoPi, RockPi, OrangePi, CubieBoard, etc. How open is the hardware? Is support for everything I need upstreamed? What's the community like? A cursory look at their various websites didn't give me enough information to feel comfortable trying one out. I have a limited amount of time for this stuff, and I'd like to have a pretty high level of confidence before buying one. I'll admit that my hesitance is maybe a little unfair and colored by a single bad experience: a few years ago I bought a ReSpeaker (the original v1 hardware). It was, frankly, garbage. The hardware itself was designed poorly and was buggy (attempting to run anything off the SD card would result in random no-reason SIGILL/SIGBUS/SIGSEGV, for one thing; that's a sign of broken hardware design). Support was minimal[0], and after they started working on the v2 hardware, they more or less stopped caring about v1. I actually threw the board away because it was useless. I wasted a good 20+ hours trying to get the ReSpeaker to do something useful, and I'm never getting that time back. I don't want a repeat. In contrast, the RPi has always been a reliable platform to build on, with a great, responsive community. [0] And the only suggestion was "only run things off the built-in flash"... which, IIRC, was double-digit-megabyte tiny.