6 ms·

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

by zakki 6y ago

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.
    - jstanley 6y ago
      $200 isn't a big deal for something you really want, but at the margin, on projects that you don't even know you're going to bother finishing, it's the difference between being able to justify taking a punt on it and not. That's why the Raspberry Pi is so popular. I agree with everything you said about using cheap microcontrollers to experiment with basic electronics projects.
    - amelius 6y ago
      Not if you want to install such a computer in every single room of your house. Or if you want to build a cluster, like this guy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=78H-4KqVvrg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=78H-4KqVvrg
- fullstop 6y ago
  I've played around with a few other boards besides Pi, and I'm always let down by the kernel support. A lot of them are stuck on ancient kernels or you're at the mercy of their BSP drops. The Beagles at least have mainline kernel support, but things like pine64 and odroid still rely on a lot of patches or binary blobs. Thanks for pointing out the X-15, though.. I've not looked at Beagles since the Beaglebone Black. It looks like an impressive board with mainline kernel support.
  - posguy 6y ago
    The Allwinner A64 has nearly complete mainline kernel support at this point, hence the release of the PinePhone: https://linux-sunxi.org/Linux_mainlining_effort#Status_Matrix https://linux-sunxi.org/Linux_mainlining_effort#Status_Matri...
- speedgoose 6y ago
  Until you need to buy thousands of boards. And having a maintained software stack for a long time has a very high value in my humble opinion.
- gregmac 6y ago
  > There's no other board in this range because the other chipmakers aren't subsidizing their boards or ecosystems in this fashion. Can you elaborate on this? Who is subsidising the Pi, and why?
  - monocasa 6y ago
    Broadcom. They get a lot of kickbacks from the British government, AFAIK. Edit: Not sure why downvoted. Broadcom very much is able to write off a ton as donations to charity, since the rpi foundation is a British charity. They also get sweet heart deals from the UK based on that. The UK gets the ability to put a passable personal computer on every child's desk, like they've been attempting to do since the BBC micro days.
    - sosborn 6y ago
      > Broadcom very much is able to write off a ton as donations to charity If I donate $1000 dollars so that I can "write it off," do I come out ahead financially? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XEL65gywwHQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XEL65gywwHQ
      - monocasa 6y ago
        If you count your engineers' spare time as billable hours donated to charity, and then sell the chips to that charity at cost, but write off the profit as charitable donations to reduce your overall tax burden, you sure do. Particularly for chips that weren't going to be sold anyway (the original SoC was from a Roku like device that had been EoLed and Broadcom had been left with a surplus of the chips they didn't know what to do with). Which I'm not counting as a negative. This is successful example of charitable giving where everyone wins. Just because Kramer didn't know the process behind writing things off, doesn't mean that there isn't a real process and it isn't being used in this case. This is the whole reason why the rpi foundation is a charity, to allow these financial structures.
        sosborn 6y ago
- RealStickman_ 6y ago
  The RockPro64 has an x4 PCIe slot. The 2gb model is 60$ and the 4gb one is 80$. Add ~20$ for accessories and you have a nice little board that should be faster than the RPI and has more features.
  - jsight 6y ago
    If it is anything like the Rock64, it will also be unstable, negating much of the benefit.
    - rvense 6y ago
      I have one that's run well for a year. It's only been offline when I've powered it off myself.
      - jsight 6y ago
        Mine hard locks regularly requiring a power cycle. It is even worse with more recent kernels.
  - floatboth 6y ago
    Rockchip's PCIe is kind of a joke, you can't use a GPU there because there's not enough BAR space. But yeah, you could run an NVMe drive or a big NIC, I guess. Also, the heterogeneous 2xA72+4xA53 CPU setup is ehh.. :/ What's really cool about the RPi4 is that there's four A72 cores. And now 8GB RAM. And https://rpi4-uefi.dev https://rpi4-uefi.dev.
    - rvense 6y ago
      I've put a 4-port SATA controller in mine and use it as a NAS. Haven't benchmarked it but it works well.
- zymhan 6y ago
  $200 for an ARM Board? No thanks.
- HeyLaughingBoy 6y ago
  Yes, but for the cases where you don't need to do that, the Pi can blow it out of the water. I have an STM32-based controller board next to me (I'm a firmware developer) and I had originally suggested that instead of us spinning up a custom board, we use a BeagleBone or RPi Compute Module and build out the I/O and take advantage of all the OSS out there. I got a lot of pushback that I wasn't willing to fight (I said it a couple years ago with the same results), but if we had gone that route, the entire project would have been done months ago. Same would have been true the first time I brought it up on that other project. Sure the Pi's are cheap and attractive, but it's the ecosystem that provides the real value. And these days, with software usually being the main cost of the project, you can't beat OSS.
  - milesvp 6y ago
    I recently did an embedded job where we essentially used a mkrzero as our dev board. It saved us a ton of time on writing the firmware, since we didn’t need to wait for and debug prototypes. And the final schematic took way less time as well, since we could reference the mkrzero for things that might require guessing what the datasheets actually require. There’s a lot to be said for having a commercial product with multiple revisions to avoid painful guesswork.
    - HeyLaughingBoy 6y ago
      The Rev4 I referred to in this post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23680157 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23680157 used an OSHW board as a reference for a chip I had never used before and I was able to incorporate the Arduino library for it. Just brought the new hardware up yesterday. OSS/OSH saved me tons of time.
- icelancer 6y ago
  >> 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. So the answer is "No, there is no alternative in the same price range."
cestith 6y ago
The places I know of to get comparable SBCs for comparable prices are these.: https://shop.popcorncomputer.com/ https://shop.popcorncomputer.com/ https://store.pine64.org/ https://store.pine64.org/ That's assuming you don't want to buy a cheap phone and dismantle it (comes with battery, charging circuitry, touchscreen, audio, flash storage, etc).
bsder 6y ago
Beaglebone Black or Pocketbeagle. And, as a plus, everything is documented. And TI will talk to you.

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

by 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

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.
  - jstanley 6y ago
    $200 isn't a big deal for something you really want, but at the margin, on projects that you don't even know you're going to bother finishing, it's the difference between being able to justify taking a punt on it and not. That's why the Raspberry Pi is so popular. I agree with everything you said about using cheap microcontrollers to experiment with basic electronics projects.
  - amelius 6y ago
    Not if you want to install such a computer in every single room of your house. Or if you want to build a cluster, like this guy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=78H-4KqVvrg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=78H-4KqVvrg
fullstop 6y ago
I've played around with a few other boards besides Pi, and I'm always let down by the kernel support. A lot of them are stuck on ancient kernels or you're at the mercy of their BSP drops. The Beagles at least have mainline kernel support, but things like pine64 and odroid still rely on a lot of patches or binary blobs. Thanks for pointing out the X-15, though.. I've not looked at Beagles since the Beaglebone Black. It looks like an impressive board with mainline kernel support.
- posguy 6y ago
  The Allwinner A64 has nearly complete mainline kernel support at this point, hence the release of the PinePhone: https://linux-sunxi.org/Linux_mainlining_effort#Status_Matrix https://linux-sunxi.org/Linux_mainlining_effort#Status_Matri...
speedgoose 6y ago
Until you need to buy thousands of boards. And having a maintained software stack for a long time has a very high value in my humble opinion.
gregmac 6y ago
> There's no other board in this range because the other chipmakers aren't subsidizing their boards or ecosystems in this fashion. Can you elaborate on this? Who is subsidising the Pi, and why?
- monocasa 6y ago
  Broadcom. They get a lot of kickbacks from the British government, AFAIK. Edit: Not sure why downvoted. Broadcom very much is able to write off a ton as donations to charity, since the rpi foundation is a British charity. They also get sweet heart deals from the UK based on that. The UK gets the ability to put a passable personal computer on every child's desk, like they've been attempting to do since the BBC micro days.
  - sosborn 6y ago
    > Broadcom very much is able to write off a ton as donations to charity If I donate $1000 dollars so that I can "write it off," do I come out ahead financially? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XEL65gywwHQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XEL65gywwHQ
    - monocasa 6y ago
      If you count your engineers' spare time as billable hours donated to charity, and then sell the chips to that charity at cost, but write off the profit as charitable donations to reduce your overall tax burden, you sure do. Particularly for chips that weren't going to be sold anyway (the original SoC was from a Roku like device that had been EoLed and Broadcom had been left with a surplus of the chips they didn't know what to do with). Which I'm not counting as a negative. This is successful example of charitable giving where everyone wins. Just because Kramer didn't know the process behind writing things off, doesn't mean that there isn't a real process and it isn't being used in this case. This is the whole reason why the rpi foundation is a charity, to allow these financial structures.
      - sosborn 6y ago
RealStickman_ 6y ago
The RockPro64 has an x4 PCIe slot. The 2gb model is 60$ and the 4gb one is 80$. Add ~20$ for accessories and you have a nice little board that should be faster than the RPI and has more features.
- jsight 6y ago
  If it is anything like the Rock64, it will also be unstable, negating much of the benefit.
  - rvense 6y ago
    I have one that's run well for a year. It's only been offline when I've powered it off myself.
    - jsight 6y ago
      Mine hard locks regularly requiring a power cycle. It is even worse with more recent kernels.
- floatboth 6y ago
  Rockchip's PCIe is kind of a joke, you can't use a GPU there because there's not enough BAR space. But yeah, you could run an NVMe drive or a big NIC, I guess. Also, the heterogeneous 2xA72+4xA53 CPU setup is ehh.. :/ What's really cool about the RPi4 is that there's four A72 cores. And now 8GB RAM. And https://rpi4-uefi.dev https://rpi4-uefi.dev.
  - rvense 6y ago
    I've put a 4-port SATA controller in mine and use it as a NAS. Haven't benchmarked it but it works well.
zymhan 6y ago
$200 for an ARM Board? No thanks.
HeyLaughingBoy 6y ago
Yes, but for the cases where you don't need to do that, the Pi can blow it out of the water. I have an STM32-based controller board next to me (I'm a firmware developer) and I had originally suggested that instead of us spinning up a custom board, we use a BeagleBone or RPi Compute Module and build out the I/O and take advantage of all the OSS out there. I got a lot of pushback that I wasn't willing to fight (I said it a couple years ago with the same results), but if we had gone that route, the entire project would have been done months ago. Same would have been true the first time I brought it up on that other project. Sure the Pi's are cheap and attractive, but it's the ecosystem that provides the real value. And these days, with software usually being the main cost of the project, you can't beat OSS.
- milesvp 6y ago
  I recently did an embedded job where we essentially used a mkrzero as our dev board. It saved us a ton of time on writing the firmware, since we didn’t need to wait for and debug prototypes. And the final schematic took way less time as well, since we could reference the mkrzero for things that might require guessing what the datasheets actually require. There’s a lot to be said for having a commercial product with multiple revisions to avoid painful guesswork.
  - HeyLaughingBoy 6y ago
    The Rev4 I referred to in this post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23680157 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23680157 used an OSHW board as a reference for a chip I had never used before and I was able to incorporate the Arduino library for it. Just brought the new hardware up yesterday. OSS/OSH saved me tons of time.
icelancer 6y ago
>> 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. So the answer is "No, there is no alternative in the same price range."

cestith 6y ago

The places I know of to get comparable SBCs for comparable prices are these.: https://shop.popcorncomputer.com/ https://shop.popcorncomputer.com/ https://store.pine64.org/ https://store.pine64.org/ That's assuming you don't want to buy a cheap phone and dismantle it (comes with battery, charging circuitry, touchscreen, audio, flash storage, etc).

bsder 6y ago

Beaglebone Black or Pocketbeagle. And, as a plus, everything is documented. And TI will talk to you.