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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 ne
by 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 agoI'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 agoEven Raspberry Pi has struggled with GPU/HW acceleration, but at least its distro is maintained & updated.
- sosodev 3y agoThe pi4's GPU at least supports OpenGL ES 3.1 and Vulkan 1.2 now. That's decent even if not powerful.
- snvzz 3y agorpi4 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 agoYup. 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 agoThe problem is that Broadcom won't sell you the chips they use so you can't.
- snvzz 3y agoVisionFive2[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
- jcul 3y agoIt's been gathering dust for a while now, but I had great success with my odroid C2. At one point I was running a matrix server with various bridges.
- ttymck 3y agoExcuse my ignorance, but what sort of applications benefit from hardware acceleration on limited SoC resources?
- sosodev 3y agoInferencing 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 agoWhy on earth would you run ML on a potato?
- bkirkby 3y agoinference, object detection for one.
- microtherion 3y agoTo 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 agoWhat 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 agoI’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 agoYou 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 agoYou are correct. I have many that do 5V 4A.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Rediscover 3y agoIf 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 agoWhat is a dumb brick?
- 3np 3y agoArmbian is a saving grace for boards that it supports.
- tonyarkles 3y agoThey’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 agoBang! Spot on! Love NXP. Everyone else here, read the above comment.