10 ms·

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. "

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)
    - akiselev 6y ago
      I've always been a fan of the iMX line - they're my goto reference designs for low volume embedded work along with STM32Fx for MCUs - but the BSPs are just not comparable for hobbyists. With RaspPi you can download an SD card image fully set up with a simple "wpa_supplicant.conf" for WiFi and a Bounjour discovery service to register a hostname like 'pi.local'. Takes like an hour with a crappy connection and then another hour at most for apt-get update. Need to hook a security camera? Download a prebuilkt MotionEyeOS image. Need to control a CNC with GCode and a .Net core API? Grab the Duet 3 and a raspberry pi.
      - jschwartzi 6y ago
        If you can use Multistrap then all you need is a linux kernel and you can build a full Debian system for your Linux chip.
    - turbinerneiter 6y ago
      iMX8 ist the most confusing product line ever, tough.
      - joezydeco 6y ago
        Yeah not gonna argue with you there. NXP has kind of muddied up all the product families with variants on core count and coprocessors. The iMX6 used to be single, dual, (solo/duallite), quad. Done. Now there's what - 5 other variants? 7?
    - justin66 6y ago
      Thanks for your reply. I've been working with Raspberry Pi and Nvidia Jetson hardware lately, and there is a pretty interesting (ahem) dichotomy in terms of friendliness of support and community. (maybe Nvidia's paying customers get more) I can see how one working at a very low level might regard both as being not sufficient. I have some good memories of using TI embedded hardware (MSP430) and the documentation being pretty good. That's a different paradigm than a whole Unix system, though, even if it's a system that's going to be used for embedded stuff. It's nice to hear the Beagle situation is good. I remember those boards getting a hearty endorsement from Andrew Tanenbaum but otherwise I don't know too much about them.
  - bitbckt 6y ago
    I suggest giving TI (Beagle) a serious look.
- mytailorisrich 6y ago
  It should also be said that Raspberry Pi was started by a Broadcom employee who is still on the payroll to this day, afaik.
blitmap 6y ago
Absolutely. The main reason I made a Raspberry Pi cluster was because the community support and pathways previously walked for me were there. It is _difficult_ to start on a less-common SBC. And then when I knew more I found aliexpress and the Orange Pi Zero LTS.
johnklos 6y ago
This is why I'm not a fan of GNU/Linux. There are 27 different distros which all support different hardware, so you can't just pick one and run it across whatever hardware you want. I run NetBSD, and the same exact software that runs on a Pi will also run on a RockPro64, just like the drivers for a zillion PCIe devices which work on other platforms will also work on a RockPro64. GNU/Linux really should share more between distros instead of always needing distros to be able to differentiate themselves from each other.
- xxpor 6y ago
  I'm not really sure what you're talking about. There's two cases: Drivers are open source and part of the kernel. In that case, if a distro hasn't enabled support in their kernel build, you can build your own. Or compile it in with dkms if it's out of tree. Or it's a proprietary driver, and then it might only work with certain distros, but in this case I seriously doubt the HW would work with NetBSD either.
- imtringued 6y ago
  You can pick one and run it across whatever hardware you want. The problem is that ARM SBCs require device specific builds and that is purely a problem with SBC and SoC vendors and has nothing to do with Linux distributions.
cestith 6y ago
The caveat to "fully supported" is that once you start replacing chips on the board it really isn't.
megous 6y ago
That's not true at all. There are boards that have mainline support quicker after release, there are SoCs really supported by the manufacturer, there are SoCs with much better documentation, etc. > 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. You're just trying to explain away ignorance, and prejudice really.
- 542458 6y ago
  I’ve worked with rPis, Beaglebones, that NTc Linux board, and nanoPis. As somebody who is not a Linux Guru, the RPi is extremely nice because I can google anything I want to do or any error I get + raspberry pi and get a decent jumping off point. The other boards just don’t have the sheer volume of “stupid Linux-ignorant questions” that the rPi does. The other nice thing is the massive community means that software gets tailored to the Pi’s capabilities - things like octoPi have been invaluable to me. Sure, I could assemble the same thing myself, but having somebody else do the heavy lifting is really nice. The final nice thing is that rPis are easy to buy. With other boards I have to pay for shipping from the states or wait for shipping from China. With the rPi, I have one distributor that’s local to me, and a second where shipping is pretty cheap.
  - megous 6y ago
    Seems a bit like self-inflicted wound though. If I look at the /boot dir on my Rpi2/Arch Linux ARM I don't recognize anything there. No u-boot, not boot.scr, nothing standard. If I wanted to configure display, read thermals, cpufreq I had to use some rpi specific tools in /opt, intstead of using standard kernel interfaces. Trying to add a TFT display to RPi involved googling and finding a bunch of outdated/contradictory advice and then still having to figure it out myself with experimentation. Locally bought Rpi2 at the time was also 3x the price of the better specced Orange Pi PC. And if I wanted to use video decoding I had to pay even more. I mean, it's great it works for you. My interest was in learning, and it felt like the things I would learn about Rpi would not help me that much with any other boards, due to quirkiness of Rpi's SoC design, and nonstandard OS interfaces. So I bailed early, and focused on something else. I also found the SoC to be rather closed.
Wheaties466 6y ago
I think the Odroid folks have some pretty decent software support.
- DarthGhandi 6y ago
  Certainly and performance/$ is usually better too.

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)
  - akiselev 6y ago
    I've always been a fan of the iMX line - they're my goto reference designs for low volume embedded work along with STM32Fx for MCUs - but the BSPs are just not comparable for hobbyists. With RaspPi you can download an SD card image fully set up with a simple "wpa_supplicant.conf" for WiFi and a Bounjour discovery service to register a hostname like 'pi.local'. Takes like an hour with a crappy connection and then another hour at most for apt-get update. Need to hook a security camera? Download a prebuilkt MotionEyeOS image. Need to control a CNC with GCode and a .Net core API? Grab the Duet 3 and a raspberry pi.
    - jschwartzi 6y ago
      If you can use Multistrap then all you need is a linux kernel and you can build a full Debian system for your Linux chip.
  - turbinerneiter 6y ago
    iMX8 ist the most confusing product line ever, tough.
    - joezydeco 6y ago
      Yeah not gonna argue with you there. NXP has kind of muddied up all the product families with variants on core count and coprocessors. The iMX6 used to be single, dual, (solo/duallite), quad. Done. Now there's what - 5 other variants? 7?
  - justin66 6y ago
    Thanks for your reply. I've been working with Raspberry Pi and Nvidia Jetson hardware lately, and there is a pretty interesting (ahem) dichotomy in terms of friendliness of support and community. (maybe Nvidia's paying customers get more) I can see how one working at a very low level might regard both as being not sufficient. I have some good memories of using TI embedded hardware (MSP430) and the documentation being pretty good. That's a different paradigm than a whole Unix system, though, even if it's a system that's going to be used for embedded stuff. It's nice to hear the Beagle situation is good. I remember those boards getting a hearty endorsement from Andrew Tanenbaum but otherwise I don't know too much about them.
- bitbckt 6y ago
  I suggest giving TI (Beagle) a serious look.
mytailorisrich 6y ago
It should also be said that Raspberry Pi was started by a Broadcom employee who is still on the payroll to this day, afaik.

blitmap 6y ago

Absolutely. The main reason I made a Raspberry Pi cluster was because the community support and pathways previously walked for me were there. It is _difficult_ to start on a less-common SBC. And then when I knew more I found aliexpress and the Orange Pi Zero LTS.

johnklos 6y ago

This is why I'm not a fan of GNU/Linux. There are 27 different distros which all support different hardware, so you can't just pick one and run it across whatever hardware you want. I run NetBSD, and the same exact software that runs on a Pi will also run on a RockPro64, just like the drivers for a zillion PCIe devices which work on other platforms will also work on a RockPro64. GNU/Linux really should share more between distros instead of always needing distros to be able to differentiate themselves from each other.

xxpor 6y ago
I'm not really sure what you're talking about. There's two cases: Drivers are open source and part of the kernel. In that case, if a distro hasn't enabled support in their kernel build, you can build your own. Or compile it in with dkms if it's out of tree. Or it's a proprietary driver, and then it might only work with certain distros, but in this case I seriously doubt the HW would work with NetBSD either.
imtringued 6y ago
You can pick one and run it across whatever hardware you want. The problem is that ARM SBCs require device specific builds and that is purely a problem with SBC and SoC vendors and has nothing to do with Linux distributions.

cestith 6y ago

The caveat to "fully supported" is that once you start replacing chips on the board it really isn't.

megous 6y ago

That's not true at all. There are boards that have mainline support quicker after release, there are SoCs really supported by the manufacturer, there are SoCs with much better documentation, etc. > 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. You're just trying to explain away ignorance, and prejudice really.

542458 6y ago
I’ve worked with rPis, Beaglebones, that NTc Linux board, and nanoPis. As somebody who is not a Linux Guru, the RPi is extremely nice because I can google anything I want to do or any error I get + raspberry pi and get a decent jumping off point. The other boards just don’t have the sheer volume of “stupid Linux-ignorant questions” that the rPi does. The other nice thing is the massive community means that software gets tailored to the Pi’s capabilities - things like octoPi have been invaluable to me. Sure, I could assemble the same thing myself, but having somebody else do the heavy lifting is really nice. The final nice thing is that rPis are easy to buy. With other boards I have to pay for shipping from the states or wait for shipping from China. With the rPi, I have one distributor that’s local to me, and a second where shipping is pretty cheap.
- megous 6y ago
  Seems a bit like self-inflicted wound though. If I look at the /boot dir on my Rpi2/Arch Linux ARM I don't recognize anything there. No u-boot, not boot.scr, nothing standard. If I wanted to configure display, read thermals, cpufreq I had to use some rpi specific tools in /opt, intstead of using standard kernel interfaces. Trying to add a TFT display to RPi involved googling and finding a bunch of outdated/contradictory advice and then still having to figure it out myself with experimentation. Locally bought Rpi2 at the time was also 3x the price of the better specced Orange Pi PC. And if I wanted to use video decoding I had to pay even more. I mean, it's great it works for you. My interest was in learning, and it felt like the things I would learn about Rpi would not help me that much with any other boards, due to quirkiness of Rpi's SoC design, and nonstandard OS interfaces. So I bailed early, and focused on something else. I also found the SoC to be rather closed.

Wheaties466 6y ago

I think the Odroid folks have some pretty decent software support.

DarthGhandi 6y ago
Certainly and performance/$ is usually better too.