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Orange Pi 800 Keyboard PC – A Raspberry Pi 400 alternative powered by RK3399
- SaulJLH 4y agoDupe. Posted 4hrs before this post (1hr): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31639724 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31639724
- pvg 4y agoThey're only HN dupes if there's been discussion on the submission.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- adolph 4y agoSeems to have more availability than RPi.
- rbanffy 4y agoThe store links aren't working here, so I guess it's a tie. They could, at least, use different colors not to look like such a RPi rip-off.
- kjs3 4y agoThe RPi 400 seems pretty easy to get. I ordered 2 a couple of weeks ago and got them with no problem. It's any sort of regular RPi 4 board that's unobtainium, except occasionally as a bundle with a ton of stuff you may or may not want/need.
- earthscienceman 4y agoAs somebody who just wasted too much of his life trying to figure out a software issue on another RK3399 powered SBC, let me tell you that software documentation/support is worth so much more than features or power. If the software that can run on these are cobbled together semi-proprietary chains of mishmashed crap, these boards will continue to be mediocre at best. Which! For the record... makes me very sad. There's a reason I bought the board I bought. On paper it seemed great. But the boot process was entirely undocumented and I ran into so many issues with kernel compatibility and featureset for their custom images.
- garaetjjte 4y ago>If the software that can run on these are cobbled together semi-proprietary chains of mishmashed crap Like these weirdo Broadcom chips in Raspberry Pis?
- simondotau 4y agoThis would be a fair point if you were stuck with proprietary software. But this, this is a perfect example of how an open source ecosystem changes the physics. In an open source ecosystem, it doesn't matter how "weirdo" any chain of mishmashed crap might be if it's exactly the same weird crap as a billion other people. Scale means the fundamentals will have already been solved (or, if you're an early adopter, will soon be solved).
- rjsw 4y agoWhat doesn't work? Getting NetBSD to work well on this class of SBC hasn't been too hard. I probably need to try to get a RPi of some kind though.
- marcodiego 4y agoThat is why I refuse to buy anything that is not supported by armbian.
- megous 4y ago> If the software that can run on these are cobbled together semi-proprietary chains of mishmashed crap, these boards will continue to be mediocre at best. What part of SW needed for RK3399 is that? To me pretty much all from bootloader to kernel is mainline in various projects and FOSS. So far it was fairly straightforward use mainline APIs trying to make cameras work via ISPs, RGA for image rotation, Hnatro for JPEG encoding in HW, etc. etc. Very few small bugs here and there that can be easily fixed. I've seen much worse. TRMs are available. Various other PDFs from Rockchip can be found, too (even some obscure ones about camera calibration, and stuff like that).
- Limb 4y ago
- mrweasel 4y agoIn my mind this share one of the great drawbacks of the Raspberry Pi 400: The storage solution is terrible and makes the whole thing pointless. It doesn't matter that much that the regular boards don't have storage beyond the SD card. It's fine for fun little project. If you attach a keyboard, then I honestly expect this thing to be able to function as an entry-level desktop. It might just be me, but both the Raspberry Pi 400 and this Orange Pi 800 needs an M.2 slot. It doesn't need to support NVME, but at least add support for an M.2 SSD.
- rjsw 4y agoOther RK3399 systems support NVME devices. Using an eMMC card in the Raspberry Pi 400 should have been easy to do.
- CameronNemo 4y agoThey do support NVMe, but only 4 lanes at PCIe 1.0 speeds. Seems like a waste to spend $$$ on storage that will only be partially used by a $$ board.
- meatmanek 4y agoNVMe drives are surprisingly cheap these days - you can get a 128GB 2230 drive for $15 from several manufacturers. 256GB 2242 drives are around $30. If you have the space for a 2280 drive, you can get larger drives for under $100/TB. 128GB microSD cards are also around $15, but will likely have worse performance and durability than the SSD.
- HideousKojima 4y agoWith the latest firmware, the RPi 4 can boot from an SSD over USB. Still not as nice and convenient as an M.2 drive would be, but it's much nicer than using an SD card.
- vincent-manis 4y agoI have a 400 booting off a USB SSD (a SanDISK 1TB external drive). It works fine, and performance is quite decent (good enough performance of Emacs, TeX, and software builds to suit me).
- hkgjjgjfjfjfjf 4y ago
- worik 4y agoA VGA port? Really?
- CameronNemo 4y agoI mean I wouldn't want to splurge for an expensive display with such an underpowered device, so people with unused VGA monitors seems like a good target market for this device.
- SoftTalker 4y agoJust looking at it reminds me of the original "keyboard computers" like the TRS-80, the C64/VIC-20. Just kind of gave me a sense of nostalgia for a second.
- undersuit 4y agoReaching out to the retro emulation crowd?
- fulafel 4y agoVGA can be a good set of DAC pins. Fabrice Bellard even made a DVB-T transmitter from a VGA output.
- andrewstuart 4y agoNo ARM system is viable except Raspberry Pi and Apple as a general purpose computer. The software is too bad. It's not worth the problems and incompatibilities. Once you've spent days trying to get non Raspberry Pi devices to "just work" you'll see things in an entirely new light.
- epx 4y agoAnd currently a NUC is cheaper than a Raspberry Pi.
- freewizard 4y agoYes, SFF is even cheaper :D
- squarefoot 4y agoTo those complaining about software instability, lack of support, etc. on anything that is not a Raspberry Pi, here are a few hints: 1. Before purchasing anything, make a list of your hardware needs then find a number of boards that could fulfill them. The (yearly updated) list at Linuxgizmos can help. https://linuxgizmos.com/catalog-of-136-open-spec-community-backed-linux-sbcs-under-200/ https://linuxgizmos.com/catalog-of-136-open-spec-community-b... 2. It is advisable to ignore any software published by the board manufacturer. Unless you spend a lot on LTS hardware (guaranteed, not just labeled as such), many manufacturers will stop releasing/updating their own distro after some time. Just concentrate on the hardware. 3. Now that you have a list, head to armbian.com or dietpi.com and find if your board brand/model is supported. Chances are that it is since those two distributions support a really high number of devices. It might seem odd but it's not; we don't ask Asus or Supermicro to release an operating system for their mainboards, do we? So why we should expect that from SBC manufacturers when there is perfectly good 3rd party support around? https://www.armbian.com/download/?device_support=Supported https://www.armbian.com/download/?device_support=Supported https://dietpi.com/#download https://dietpi.com/#download 4. Find the board that is better supported and you're done. Read also the forums, lots of knowledgeable people over there! Also consider making a well deserved donation to the projects for the hard work involved. For documentation about Allwinner and Rockchip SoCs, some among the most used in low cost boards, refer also to the following pages. https://linux-sunxi.org/Main_Page https://linux-sunxi.org/Main_Page https://www.rockchip.fr/ https://www.rockchip.fr/
- geerlingguy 4y agoThat's still a lot more work than buying a board that has a supported OS... But really, the onus should be on chip makers to work on standardizing chips more (eg targeting SystemReady on ARM), getting their chips supported in Linux, etc. It's a lot of work to support each slightly-different SoC and relying on the community means it's a slow process and usually results in some headline features (like built-in neural engines or GPUs) never gaining support in general Linux distros. Or gaining that support like 3 years after a chip is released, meaning it's practically irrelevant at that point unless you just want to futz around with an older board for hobby purposes. It's not meaningless, but it just rubs me the wrong way seeing how much blood sweat and tears the community puts into these things without much in the way of official help.
- Havoc 4y agoDoes this form factor appeal to anyone here? Presumably someone is buying these but I just don’t see the appeal
- II2II 4y agoThe form factor was hugely appealing to computer users in the 1980's, presumably because you could just plug in into the wall socket and television and everything was ready to go. I would imagine that some parents would pick them up for their kids, particularly if they wanted them to use computers for learning rather than media consumption. Some people may pick one up to emulate those vintage home computers. Some may pick them up to develop software for a Pi 4, simply because it's easier to swap a uSD card between a Pi 4 and 400 than it is to connect a keyboard and monitor to an otherwise headless Pi 4.
- madmod 4y agoYou lost me at VGA… seriously what decade is it? Doesnt come close to competing with the dual HDMI of the pi 400.
- k_sze 4y agoI was hoping for more RAM, like 8 GiB.
- GekkePrutser 4y agoIt's too much of a knockoff for me. What I do like though is that this has an audio port. I still don't understand why they left that out on the pi 400, the excuse was that there wasn't enough space but there is.