6 ms·

As usual, looks good on papier but no ecosystem and the current stack that it comes with is dead on arrival. Boards need to come with mainstream distro support

As usual, looks good on papier but no ecosystem and the current stack that it comes with is dead on arrival. Boards need to come with mainstream distro support or with an ecosystem (or both), otherwise it will just die. And with internet connected devices, you can't set-and-forget, so it needs to have live support. Edit: a RockPi S (same SoC) can be had for $35 and a touch LCD for $11... Granted, it doesn't come with the same integration and headers, and doesn't have a microphone by default, and no RISC-V MCU. But the point of integration is a useful product that stays useful, and it doesn't if there is no ecosystem. As for 'adding' mainstream support, it takes quite some effort and active ownership. Out of the many rockchip boards and add-ons this is the set that made it to some level of standard inclusion: http://ftp.debian.org/debian/dists/stable/main/installer-arm64/current/images/device-tree/rockchip/ http://ftp.debian.org/debian/dists/stable/main/installer-arm...

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
CommanderData 3y ago
I purchased a few ARM boards in the past and won't do it again. All became e-waste. Rockchip notably, great hardware on paper. Try developing something that needs hardware acceleration and it's a paper weight. It's a common cycle of broken promises to provide drivers by manufactures, rinse and repeat. The exception being raspberry pi or expressif. Depending on the application.
- sosodev 3y ago
  I've had the same experience with non Raspberry Pi boards. They've become useless thanks to endlessly broken software and zero support. My rpi's have been useful for years and are still getting regular updates. I think I too was drawn in by the performance claims made by those other manufacturers. I realized though that raspberry pi are very powerful computers. We just take the scale of modern computing for granted and our software is the real problem.
  - Klinky 3y ago
    Even Raspberry Pi has struggled with GPU/HW acceleration, but at least its distro is maintained & updated.
    - sosodev 3y ago
      The pi4's GPU at least supports OpenGL ES 3.1 and Vulkan 1.2 now. That's decent even if not powerful.
      - snvzz 3y ago
        rpi4 is massively memory bandwidth starved. It can't even keep up with drawing the screen in general, much less run games. VisionFive2's GPU (from Imatech) is supposedly at least 4x as fast.
  - ignoramous 3y ago
    > ...just take the scale of modern computing for granted and our software is the real problem. I was thinking how I constantly find myself using GPT and Bard to prettify source code. Surely, not the most efficient use of compute. Like some crude Parkinson's Law joke on more proficient algorithms.
  - joshmarinacci 3y ago
    Yup. It's RPi or nothing. It's the software that makes these valuable, not hardware specs. If I wanted to sell an ARM board I'd make it as Pi compatible as possible.
    - Eisenstein 3y ago
      The problem is that Broadcom won't sell you the chips they use so you can't.
    - snvzz 3y ago
      VisionFive2[0] is the way to go. They're much further in upstreaming in just half a year than Raspberry Pi in its long history. RISC-V is inevitable. 0. https://rvspace.org/en/project/JH7110_Upstream_Plan https://rvspace.org/en/project/JH7110_Upstream_Plan
- ttymck 3y ago
  Excuse my ignorance, but what sort of applications benefit from hardware acceleration on limited SoC resources?
  - sosodev 3y ago
    Inferencing neural networks is a big one. It's hard to get near real-time performance without it. Depending on the use case of course.
    - chaxor 3y ago
      Why on earth would you run ML on a potato?
      - bkirkby 3y ago
        inference, object detection for one.
      - microtherion 3y ago
        To give one example, Raspberry Pi are often used to control 3D printers and attached webcams, and there are ML systems that supervise the webcam feed for evidence of a print failure. Being able to run these systems on the SBC would be an advantage, but that's typically not realistic today.
      - schreiaj 3y ago
        What should we run it on if we want to deploy it on mobile systems with limited access to network and extremely restricted power budgets? For a hobby project I'm trying to find a solution - Power budget for multiple is sub 200w. Need to run inference on a lower resolution video stream (or multiple, that be nice) to do object detection. Cost is a factor because I need to have multiple angles to determine where in relation to a mobile platform the target object is. I'm looking at the Coral.ai board because RPi like boards lack the ability to do ML tasks at reasonable FPS and NVidia seems to have abandoned the lower cost side of the market since the Jetson Nanos seem to be less and less available. (Not that Coral.ai boards are available at all...)
- gadgetoid 3y ago
  I’m still trying to get a Rock 5B to boot from NVMe. By all appearances they included a USB Type-C port that doesn’t work, so the system never pulls sufficient power not to boot loop. Apparently even after a firmware update. To be totally fair to the up-and-coming boards, the Pi was pretty poorly supported on day 1 and the community did (and still does) a lot of heavy lifting. I’m still waiting for a contender, but I don’t have the time or energy to devote to another SBC. Despite being a super prolific maintainer of Pi-stuff and related projects I haven’t had a single SBC manufacturer reach out to me and say “hey what do you need to support this?” They just don’t seem to care beyond shoving product out the door and hoping for the best.
  - death_syn 3y ago
    You need to get a dumb brick for that Rock 5B. Looks like you got one of the ones with a bad firmware. When it negotiates the power drops out. There're tons of forum posts.
    - Rediscover 3y ago
      You are correct. I have many that do 5V 4A.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
  - Rediscover 3y ago
    If You have not tried what the other reply-post suggests (dumb brick), I have a 5V 4A dumb brick I can loan for a quick test. Seattle area. It has worked on quite a few boards here. Or purchase one from where-ever, they are really useful outside of SBCs (though they are usually 5.3V and 4.xA, so watch out with sensitive parts).
    - bombcar 3y ago
      What is a dumb brick?
- 3np 3y ago
  Armbian is a saving grace for boards that it supports.
- tonyarkles 3y ago
  They’re less popular in the hobby world, but the Freescale/NXP i.MX6 family has absolutely fabulous mainline Linux support. There’s still a Freescale tree, but for most functionality you don’t need it. A few years back a client of mine needed some other functionality that wasn’t available in the version that Freescale forked for their tree and they wanted me to come in and assess what it would take to backport the driver they needed or basically make our own fork that forward-ported whatever Freescale mojo was needed. As it turned out, I spent a couple of hours messing around a bit with some device tree configuration to make it work with the peripherals on their custom carrier and a bit of `make menuconfig`… and it booted right up on Linus’ tree.
  - Rediscover 3y ago
    Bang! Spot on! Love NXP. Everyone else here, read the above comment.
MisterTea 3y ago
> As usual, looks good on papier but no ecosystem and the current stack that it comes with is dead on arrival. There is no standard Arm ecosystem to boot on which is the real issue - every board needs a custom kernel and booting. I blame Arm for never cooking up a PC like spec that defines hardware configuration, firmware and booting. This is why x86 is going to stick around for a while - its dead simple to bootstrap a random x86 machine (well, almost).
- Retr0id 3y ago
  I naively assumed that device trees had solved this problem, but clearly they haven't in practice. How come?
  - Teknoman117 3y ago
    For one, you have to provide one specifically for your board to boot at all. There is no "common" one that'll get you to a shell on any board. The main issue is that most SoC vendors just dump a heavily hacked up Linux kernel source intended for Android on you, along with binary blobs (firmware, android hal services, etc.). The drivers aren't in the kernel per se, just enough of a stub for the proprietary blobs to talk to the hardware. So if the goal is to run a standard Linux distro on the board, you're pretty screwed unless you have the time and resources (or a community) to reverse engineer the android bsp into drivers for the mainline kernel. The thing that makes the RPi great is that there's actually an entity paying for this development to happen, along with the community. It's certainly far from the fastest ARM board, but even the decade old RPi 1 still gets kernel updates.
- userbinator 3y ago
  I blame Arm for never cooking up a PC like spec that defines hardware configuration, firmware and booting. ARM isn't to blame; it's that no one company was big enough to set the standard (and let others clone it) for ARM systems unlike what IBM did with the x86/PC, which is not surprising given how diverse ARM's cores are.
- hakfoo 3y ago
  I always wondered how we got there. The original ARM chips, as in the Archimedes era, obviously ran in things that broadly resembled the other desktop computing platforms of the era. They had to solve the same problems: deciding which device to boot from, how to initialize the attached grab-bag of peripherals. They also had a long series of models with varying capabilities and integration. So they must have something comparable to a BIOS/EFI/Open Firmware-- a standardized hardware enumeration and bringup process. Somehow that disappeared when ARM moved away from RISC OS "desktop computers" and went into the microcontroller world. Why? I figured it probably either had to do with licensing, or an assumption that an embedded ARM core in some random device would only ever be used with a particular bag of peripherals, so there was no need to rely on conventions.
ano-ther 3y ago
The bottom connector looks like a BBC micro:bit so there is an ecosystem at least on the hardware side
cosmojg 3y ago
Assuming it's small enough for your needs, a used Intel NUC can get you loads more mileage than pretty much any ARM SoC at an equivalent price. Currently available on eBay: * $49.95 for an i5-5300U at 2.3GHz, 4GB of RAM, and 128GB of SSD storage * $89.00 for an i3-7100U at 2.4GHz, 8GB of RAM, and 256GB of SSD storage * $135.00 for an i7-5557U at 3.1GHz, 16GB of RAM, and 256GB of SSD storage ...all loaded with ample driver support, extensive connectivity options, and bog-standard x86-64 instructions. Obviously, there will always be use cases that call for a tiny ARM SoC and nothing else, but plenty of the applications for which people will buy an ARM SoC (e.g., Kodi/Jellyfin/Plex/Emby media centers, RetroArch gaming machines, Minecraft servers, streaming servers, web servers, network filtering, seedboxes, etc.) are better served by a used Intel NUC.
- nalzok 3y ago
  Wait, NUCs are that cheap? I would appreciate a link so that I can get my hands on one. I don't use eBay often and filtering feels terrible on their site.
  - NortySpock 3y ago
    Not a NUC, or your parent poster, but I picked up a Dell Wyse 7020 thin client for ~$35 + shipping from a recycled electronics vendor in Pennsylvania. EPC here in the USA is an electronics liquidator / off-business-lease seller. https://www.ebay.com/itm/275777770141?epid=519034385&hash=item4035a2d29d:g:VigAAOSw-N5kLXKk https://www.ebay.com/itm/275777770141?epid=519034385&hash=it... A homegrown website on re-using thin clients: https://www.parkytowers.me.uk/thin/wyse/z/zx0q/ https://www.parkytowers.me.uk/thin/wyse/z/zx0q/ Of course, I'm still trying to figure out exactly how to upgrade it and if it will replace my trusty RPi4, but I prefer fanless designs where possible, especially for 24/7 usage. Search tips: look for "USFF" (ultra small form factor), or find a refurbishment vendor like EPC ( https://epcglobal.shop/collections/dell-desktops/price_-100-200?sort_by=best-selling https://epcglobal.shop/collections/dell-desktops/price_-100-... ) and then track down their eBay page. Specifically, EPC Pennsylvania seemed to have some very inexpensive deals: https://www.ebay.com/str/epcpennsylvania https://www.ebay.com/str/epcpennsylvania It can also help to search for specific business computer models on eBay, as small vendors doing electronics liquidation may just read the model number on the unit, take a picture, and fling it up on the store page in the "priced to sell" price bracket. https://www.servethehome.com/tag/tinyminimicro/ https://www.servethehome.com/tag/tinyminimicro/ has a list of small servers they have reviewed, so that can help with getting an idea of a computer's capabilities, upgrade paths, or gotchas (e.g. not supporting more than 8 GB of RAM or something).
pipeline_peak 3y ago
This, I bought a Cubieboard back in 2013 because everything looked good on paper. It didn’t take long to realize how useless the thing was with ARM Debian and absolutely no driver support…

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

CommanderData 3y ago

I purchased a few ARM boards in the past and won't do it again. All became e-waste. Rockchip notably, great hardware on paper. Try developing something that needs hardware acceleration and it's a paper weight. It's a common cycle of broken promises to provide drivers by manufactures, rinse and repeat. The exception being raspberry pi or expressif. Depending on the application.

sosodev 3y ago
I've had the same experience with non Raspberry Pi boards. They've become useless thanks to endlessly broken software and zero support. My rpi's have been useful for years and are still getting regular updates. I think I too was drawn in by the performance claims made by those other manufacturers. I realized though that raspberry pi are very powerful computers. We just take the scale of modern computing for granted and our software is the real problem.
- Klinky 3y ago
  Even Raspberry Pi has struggled with GPU/HW acceleration, but at least its distro is maintained & updated.
  - sosodev 3y ago
    The pi4's GPU at least supports OpenGL ES 3.1 and Vulkan 1.2 now. That's decent even if not powerful.
    - snvzz 3y ago
      rpi4 is massively memory bandwidth starved. It can't even keep up with drawing the screen in general, much less run games. VisionFive2's GPU (from Imatech) is supposedly at least 4x as fast.
- ignoramous 3y ago
  > ...just take the scale of modern computing for granted and our software is the real problem. I was thinking how I constantly find myself using GPT and Bard to prettify source code. Surely, not the most efficient use of compute. Like some crude Parkinson's Law joke on more proficient algorithms.
- joshmarinacci 3y ago
  Yup. It's RPi or nothing. It's the software that makes these valuable, not hardware specs. If I wanted to sell an ARM board I'd make it as Pi compatible as possible.
  - Eisenstein 3y ago
    The problem is that Broadcom won't sell you the chips they use so you can't.
  - snvzz 3y ago
    VisionFive2[0] is the way to go. They're much further in upstreaming in just half a year than Raspberry Pi in its long history. RISC-V is inevitable. 0. https://rvspace.org/en/project/JH7110_Upstream_Plan https://rvspace.org/en/project/JH7110_Upstream_Plan
ttymck 3y ago
Excuse my ignorance, but what sort of applications benefit from hardware acceleration on limited SoC resources?
- sosodev 3y ago
  Inferencing neural networks is a big one. It's hard to get near real-time performance without it. Depending on the use case of course.
  - chaxor 3y ago
    Why on earth would you run ML on a potato?
    - bkirkby 3y ago
      inference, object detection for one.
    - microtherion 3y ago
      To give one example, Raspberry Pi are often used to control 3D printers and attached webcams, and there are ML systems that supervise the webcam feed for evidence of a print failure. Being able to run these systems on the SBC would be an advantage, but that's typically not realistic today.
    - schreiaj 3y ago
      What should we run it on if we want to deploy it on mobile systems with limited access to network and extremely restricted power budgets? For a hobby project I'm trying to find a solution - Power budget for multiple is sub 200w. Need to run inference on a lower resolution video stream (or multiple, that be nice) to do object detection. Cost is a factor because I need to have multiple angles to determine where in relation to a mobile platform the target object is. I'm looking at the Coral.ai board because RPi like boards lack the ability to do ML tasks at reasonable FPS and NVidia seems to have abandoned the lower cost side of the market since the Jetson Nanos seem to be less and less available. (Not that Coral.ai boards are available at all...)
gadgetoid 3y ago
I’m still trying to get a Rock 5B to boot from NVMe. By all appearances they included a USB Type-C port that doesn’t work, so the system never pulls sufficient power not to boot loop. Apparently even after a firmware update. To be totally fair to the up-and-coming boards, the Pi was pretty poorly supported on day 1 and the community did (and still does) a lot of heavy lifting. I’m still waiting for a contender, but I don’t have the time or energy to devote to another SBC. Despite being a super prolific maintainer of Pi-stuff and related projects I haven’t had a single SBC manufacturer reach out to me and say “hey what do you need to support this?” They just don’t seem to care beyond shoving product out the door and hoping for the best.
- death_syn 3y ago
  You need to get a dumb brick for that Rock 5B. Looks like you got one of the ones with a bad firmware. When it negotiates the power drops out. There're tons of forum posts.
  - Rediscover 3y ago
    You are correct. I have many that do 5V 4A.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- Rediscover 3y ago
  If You have not tried what the other reply-post suggests (dumb brick), I have a 5V 4A dumb brick I can loan for a quick test. Seattle area. It has worked on quite a few boards here. Or purchase one from where-ever, they are really useful outside of SBCs (though they are usually 5.3V and 4.xA, so watch out with sensitive parts).
  - bombcar 3y ago
    What is a dumb brick?
3np 3y ago
Armbian is a saving grace for boards that it supports.
tonyarkles 3y ago
They’re less popular in the hobby world, but the Freescale/NXP i.MX6 family has absolutely fabulous mainline Linux support. There’s still a Freescale tree, but for most functionality you don’t need it. A few years back a client of mine needed some other functionality that wasn’t available in the version that Freescale forked for their tree and they wanted me to come in and assess what it would take to backport the driver they needed or basically make our own fork that forward-ported whatever Freescale mojo was needed. As it turned out, I spent a couple of hours messing around a bit with some device tree configuration to make it work with the peripherals on their custom carrier and a bit of `make menuconfig`… and it booted right up on Linus’ tree.
- Rediscover 3y ago
  Bang! Spot on! Love NXP. Everyone else here, read the above comment.

MisterTea 3y ago

> As usual, looks good on papier but no ecosystem and the current stack that it comes with is dead on arrival. There is no standard Arm ecosystem to boot on which is the real issue - every board needs a custom kernel and booting. I blame Arm for never cooking up a PC like spec that defines hardware configuration, firmware and booting. This is why x86 is going to stick around for a while - its dead simple to bootstrap a random x86 machine (well, almost).

Retr0id 3y ago
I naively assumed that device trees had solved this problem, but clearly they haven't in practice. How come?
- Teknoman117 3y ago
  For one, you have to provide one specifically for your board to boot at all. There is no "common" one that'll get you to a shell on any board. The main issue is that most SoC vendors just dump a heavily hacked up Linux kernel source intended for Android on you, along with binary blobs (firmware, android hal services, etc.). The drivers aren't in the kernel per se, just enough of a stub for the proprietary blobs to talk to the hardware. So if the goal is to run a standard Linux distro on the board, you're pretty screwed unless you have the time and resources (or a community) to reverse engineer the android bsp into drivers for the mainline kernel. The thing that makes the RPi great is that there's actually an entity paying for this development to happen, along with the community. It's certainly far from the fastest ARM board, but even the decade old RPi 1 still gets kernel updates.
userbinator 3y ago
I blame Arm for never cooking up a PC like spec that defines hardware configuration, firmware and booting. ARM isn't to blame; it's that no one company was big enough to set the standard (and let others clone it) for ARM systems unlike what IBM did with the x86/PC, which is not surprising given how diverse ARM's cores are.
hakfoo 3y ago
I always wondered how we got there. The original ARM chips, as in the Archimedes era, obviously ran in things that broadly resembled the other desktop computing platforms of the era. They had to solve the same problems: deciding which device to boot from, how to initialize the attached grab-bag of peripherals. They also had a long series of models with varying capabilities and integration. So they must have something comparable to a BIOS/EFI/Open Firmware-- a standardized hardware enumeration and bringup process. Somehow that disappeared when ARM moved away from RISC OS "desktop computers" and went into the microcontroller world. Why? I figured it probably either had to do with licensing, or an assumption that an embedded ARM core in some random device would only ever be used with a particular bag of peripherals, so there was no need to rely on conventions.

ano-ther 3y ago

The bottom connector looks like a BBC micro:bit so there is an ecosystem at least on the hardware side

cosmojg 3y ago

Assuming it's small enough for your needs, a used Intel NUC can get you loads more mileage than pretty much any ARM SoC at an equivalent price. Currently available on eBay: * $49.95 for an i5-5300U at 2.3GHz, 4GB of RAM, and 128GB of SSD storage * $89.00 for an i3-7100U at 2.4GHz, 8GB of RAM, and 256GB of SSD storage * $135.00 for an i7-5557U at 3.1GHz, 16GB of RAM, and 256GB of SSD storage ...all loaded with ample driver support, extensive connectivity options, and bog-standard x86-64 instructions. Obviously, there will always be use cases that call for a tiny ARM SoC and nothing else, but plenty of the applications for which people will buy an ARM SoC (e.g., Kodi/Jellyfin/Plex/Emby media centers, RetroArch gaming machines, Minecraft servers, streaming servers, web servers, network filtering, seedboxes, etc.) are better served by a used Intel NUC.

nalzok 3y ago
Wait, NUCs are that cheap? I would appreciate a link so that I can get my hands on one. I don't use eBay often and filtering feels terrible on their site.
- NortySpock 3y ago
  Not a NUC, or your parent poster, but I picked up a Dell Wyse 7020 thin client for ~$35 + shipping from a recycled electronics vendor in Pennsylvania. EPC here in the USA is an electronics liquidator / off-business-lease seller. https://www.ebay.com/itm/275777770141?epid=519034385&hash=item4035a2d29d:g:VigAAOSw-N5kLXKk https://www.ebay.com/itm/275777770141?epid=519034385&hash=it... A homegrown website on re-using thin clients: https://www.parkytowers.me.uk/thin/wyse/z/zx0q/ https://www.parkytowers.me.uk/thin/wyse/z/zx0q/ Of course, I'm still trying to figure out exactly how to upgrade it and if it will replace my trusty RPi4, but I prefer fanless designs where possible, especially for 24/7 usage. Search tips: look for "USFF" (ultra small form factor), or find a refurbishment vendor like EPC ( https://epcglobal.shop/collections/dell-desktops/price_-100-200?sort_by=best-selling https://epcglobal.shop/collections/dell-desktops/price_-100-... ) and then track down their eBay page. Specifically, EPC Pennsylvania seemed to have some very inexpensive deals: https://www.ebay.com/str/epcpennsylvania https://www.ebay.com/str/epcpennsylvania It can also help to search for specific business computer models on eBay, as small vendors doing electronics liquidation may just read the model number on the unit, take a picture, and fling it up on the store page in the "priced to sell" price bracket. https://www.servethehome.com/tag/tinyminimicro/ https://www.servethehome.com/tag/tinyminimicro/ has a list of small servers they have reviewed, so that can help with getting an idea of a computer's capabilities, upgrade paths, or gotchas (e.g. not supporting more than 8 GB of RAM or something).

pipeline_peak 3y ago

This, I bought a Cubieboard back in 2013 because everything looked good on paper. It didn’t take long to realize how useless the thing was with ARM Debian and absolutely no driver support…