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> The Pi, despite its warts, has two things going for it: a company that devotes a lot of time to testing, documentation, and bug fixes, and an active and broad
by squarefoot 5y ago
> The Pi, despite its warts, has two things going for it: a company that devotes a lot of time to testing, documentation, and bug fixes, and an active and broad community [...]
True, but lets not forget another non trivial one: advertising. I'm lucky if I can spot a new board discussed in a few sites, while every time a new PI is launched, the news resonates like someone set their feet on Mars. If manufacturers want to build a community and have more developers/ports/bugfixes etc. they should allocate some resources where it's appropriate. Not easy since the PI is pushed by Broadcom themselves, I know.
Also, I would avoid the term "clones", which gives a bad impression of the products. There's no such thing as a Raspberry PI clone, unless having similarly placed connectors in some models counts as cloning. The hardware is (thankfully) vastly different.
Also, Broadcom doesn't sell the PI processors to anyone else ensuring that cloning them is impossible, as is building any product using the same technology, short of hosting it in the form of a compute module, which may not be the ideal/cheaper solution in many contexts.
Not a big issue since there are much more powerful platforms out there, but few know about them for the above reason.
Personally, if I see an interesting board, my 1st and 2nd stops to see if and how well they are supported are the Armbian and DietPI boards and forums (other suggestions highly welcome!).
https://www.armbian.com/download/?device_support=Supported https://www.armbian.com/download/?device_support=Supported
https://dietpi.com/#download https://dietpi.com/#download
- djrogers 5y ago> advertising. I'm lucky if I can spot a new board discussed in a few sites, while every time a new PI is launched, the news resonates like someone set their feet on Mars. That's not advertising, that's marketing and name recognition.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- hammyhavoc 5y agoYep, but that doesn't change the point made.
- hutzlibu 5y agoDo you know of a board with a gpu, that is a bit better, than what the Pi offers?
- GhettoComputers 5y agoDoes it have to be ARM based? Most old laptop (you probably already own) can do everything a Pi can, but better at negligible energy cost. If you want to stream, you can remote control an old android for instance. If you want something similar with good graphics, Jetson Nano is good.
- hutzlibu 5y agoWell, size and battery life is important, when you want to use it as the heart of a robot for example. And yes, a android device (with broken and deactivated screen) is maybe the way to go for small size mobile computing power.
- GhettoComputers 5y agoWhat does "heart of a robot" mean? If it just needs to be remote controlled you can do that with simpler hardware like arduino. Do you need computer vision? Jetson has good support for that. Do you want it to be for edge computing? It just has to relay info to a server. What is your project? The Jetson is probably the best choice. Saying GPU is very vague, there are GPUs that are good at decoding video for instance that might not be useful.
- hutzlibu 5y agoNo concrete project as of now, but different ideas around semi-autonomous robots. And since they require heavy computation sometimes, I would like to offload that to the gpu if possible. Jetson sounds interesting. But mobile phones offer many sensors, computing power and a battery all packed together, so I might start with that. Or rather, have a smartphone for computation and remote connection and a arduino for directly controlling the servos. Or a lego mindstorm. Or both.