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Raspberry Pi 5 vs. Orange Pi 5 Plus vs. Rock 5 Model B
- calrain 3y agoGetting second hand SFF desktops is a much smarter option for many use cases that Pi's use to fill.
- jamesy0ung 3y agoThey might be good performance wise, but if you watch the Jeff Geerling video he mentions in the post, it will show you how much trouble he has with it. Custom distros with broken repos, non mainlined outdated kernels.
- filoleg 3y agoYup, can confirm. Was trying to setup an Octoprint machine for my 3d printer, none of Raspberry Pi’s were in stock. After trying to catch one for weeks, I ended up buying the second-newest revision of OrangePi that was pretty powerful (not the barebones version). To say it was trouble would be an understatement. Even after I successfully completed the setup (which took forever, as the documentation was contradicting, confusing, and felt like it was worse than machine-translated to english). Stability wasn’t there either at all. Occasionally it would just lock up and freeze, requiring a hard reboot. It would heat up pretty bad sometimes, despite an extra heat dissipator/cooler (that i triply made sure was installed properly). Webcam would randomly just refuse working (and I had to manually edit linux configs to get it to work in the first place). Sometimes SSH connection would just die and I become unable to connect to it again without either a reboot or restarting networking services on it (which would require me physically being next to it, thus defeating the point of Octoprint being remote). And mind you, I didn’t run it as some heavy production-tier 3d printing controller, I would print something a couple times a week tops, and nothing too complex or too high res (in terms of the model being printed). All while Raspberry Pi has great documentation, and Octoprint setup on it is pretty much plug and play with just a few clicks of installing dependencies (or even simpler than that, if you install a dedicated Octoprint distro made specifically for Raspberry Pi).
- phamilton4 3y agoHaving owned many raspberry pis, a handful of rock pis (4A, 4B, Zero and S), Mango Pis, Khadas VIM4 and other SBCs (I have a problem haha)... I can say without a doubt the two shining stars the Raspberry Pi has are their distro/software and general ecosystem. Just upgrading and dealing with downloading/upgrading the Raspberry Pi is a dream compared to the Rock Pis. The Khadas is a little better, but still I have a hard time upgrading it and sometimes certain images just won't even work from the company. Sometimes when trying to upgrade Rock Pis with eMMC you will find 2 or three different ways to install the freaking image on their own wikis. There's also the "security" aspect for me, I really don't trust some of these distros (maybe I shouldn't worry??). A random image someone put on their website with broken instructions and messed up repos/kernels doesn't exactly instill confidence to me. I will say the one GREAT thing from Rock Pi is their rock pi x. But it has an x86 processor and I can just install any distro. I wish they were easier to purchase and had more memory!!!
- ThatPlayer 3y agoYeah, I wouldn't recommend one that doesn't have mainline kernels. But Pine64 does good work on getting stuff upstreamed. The RK3399 used in the PinePhone Pro, the Orange Pi 4, Rock 4, and other boards has proper mainline support. I'm also a fan of the open sourced GPU drivers for that SoC done by the panfrost team that has desktop OpenGL support (not just the ES stuff). Pine64's QuartzPro64 board uses the same RK3588 in the Orange Pi 5 Plus and Rock 5B, and they're working on upstreaming support for that: https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/QuartzPro64_Development#Upstreaming_Status https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/QuartzPro64_Development#Upstrea...
- rodlette 3y agoAFAIK, Pine64 the company don't do any (?) upstreaming. Upstreaming for Pine64 devices is done by the community: https://lore.kernel.org/all/?q=pine64+rk3399+add https://lore.kernel.org/all/?q=pine64+rk3399+add QuartzPro64 was recently mainlined by megous. I don't think he's employed or compensated by Pine64, but I'm not sure. The SoCs are added by Rockchip, Collabora, and others.
- ilyt 3y agoThat's my experience with many alternatives, basically nothing (INCLUDING rPi) is just supported in mainline, but rPi's patched version of Debian is well supported unlike the alternatives. If just for playing around paying extra for pi just to have something that works makes a lot of sense.
- PlutoIsAPlanet 3y agoYou can install the mainline ARM UEFI builds of Debian onto the RPi and install it like a regular PC. I've not been able to find any other SBC that is able to do that.
- em3rgent0rdr 3y agoEspecially when dealing with low-level hardware stuff, like SPI and PWM and other pin I/O, design can be much easier when sticking to Raspberries only, because there are inevitably a lot of quirks that are different between companies.
- robotnikman 3y agoCustom and outdated distros is a big problem with ARM boards unfortunately, unless you are a big and popular player like the Raspberry Pi. But even then a lot is not supported in mainline
- baz00 3y agoThey're all shit. Get a Lenovo mini PC off eBay and stick Debian on it. I replaced my shitty Pi with a Lenovo M600. If you want a dependable computer, stay away from pseudo-embedded hardware.
- LispSporks22 3y agoI like this idea, but what do you do for GPIO (and SPI, I2C etc.)?
- synack 3y agoArduino or similar over USB.
- petsfed 3y agoThis is, in almost every respect, the better way. Any non-real-time operating system will eventually get a little bit buggy around timing intensive operations like I2C or (especially) SPI. Better to have your GPIO operations performed by a dedicated micro that only handles your serial traffic and whatever pin-twiddling operations you need to do. Ideally, your serial traffic is in a binary protocol like MODBUS-RTU, so your traffic parser is as fast as possible. Bitbanging I2C or SPI is tedious but generally pretty achievable in a bare-metal application. But unless you're hacking your kernel to force that kind of timing fidelity, bit banging on an RPi running Debian is just impossible.
- megous 3y agoSounds like this would be very annoying compared to a SBC. You have typically several SPI, UART, I2C, gpio interfaces on the pin header on usual ARM SBCs. Ready to use from Linux via standard API, using DMA, etc.
- petsfed 3y agoI once had a very simple I2C operation performed on an Orange Pi running project nerves. I had to add a try-again loop to the I2C operation, because the underlying OS kept disrupting the I2C timing. I2C is generally run between 100-400 KHz, so you'd think it wouldn't be an issue, but it definitely was. You can get around this by patching the kernel to carve out timing protection for those operations, but speaking as a firmware programmer, if I'm patching the kernel to avoid writing a simple arduino sketch, I've made some pretty deep mistakes.
- noman-land 3y agoI must use this thread to plug these handheld devices that I have not used but that look pretty cool. https://www.clockworkpi.com/ https://www.clockworkpi.com/
- ghusto 3y agoAm I crazy, or are we jumping from 4 to 5 whilst ignoring the fact that most of us still can't get hold of 4 due to the supply chain issues?
- fanf2 3y agoThe Raspberry Pi 4 is available in stock in many places now https://rpilocator.com/?cat=PI4 https://rpilocator.com/?cat=PI4
- declan_roberts 3y agoIt's a lot better in the last few months. If you're still looking for an RPI 4 then sign up on a waitlist at place like adafruit and you'll get one soon.
- ixwt 3y agoI picked one up a few weeks ago from Digikey. They had over 2000 in stock at the time.
- ilyt 3y agoI was surprised too, I expected 5 to come next year
- tomcam 3y agoMan that’s just bad planning. I would expect them to produce a lot more than that
- babypuncher 3y agothere hasn't been a shortage for a while now, but you probably didn't hear about it because shortages ending isn't considered newsworthy. it's the same with sriracha, you can pretty easily find it for msrp now, but lots of people still think it is hard to find because the last thing they heard on the topic was a news article about bottles selling on the gray market for $40-$80 back in may.
- ghusto 3y ago
- auspiv 3y agoGeez for the prices listed in the article (153 EUR and 301 EUR), get a TMM (tiny mini micro - https://www.servethehome.com/introducing-project-tinyminimicro-home-lab-revolution/ https://www.servethehome.com/introducing-project-tinyminimic...) computer. These are the SFF/USFF off-lease older enterprise computers like Dell Optiplex. Note that ServeTheHome.com does power consumption for every model it reviews. These ~1L sized computers idle in the 7-13W range. Even with EU electricity prices, it would take you a very, very long time to make up the difference from a 5W SBC. You also get standard x86 support, normal expand-ability, M.2 slots, PCIe ports, etc. You lose GPIO support. For $100-$120 on eBay, a search for 'dell optiplex 3070' typically results in getting either a i3-9100 or i5-9500, 8-16GB memory, and 120-256GB NVMe. I bought one a couple months ago for Blue Iris and it uses 8W at idle. Here's an example of a USFF (ultra small form factor) for $110 - https://www.ebay.com/itm/325826958401 https://www.ebay.com/itm/325826958401 Lenovo variant (M720q tiny) for $121 w/ i5-8400T, 16GB, and 256GB SSD (probably NVMe) - https://www.ebay.com/itm/266450621632 https://www.ebay.com/itm/266450621632
- doubleg72 3y agoExactly, we scrap them after like 5 years at the hospital system I work in.
- auspiv 3y agoYep, very standard to upgrade at end of the 5 year warranty period.
- coffeeri 3y agoI've also compared many 1L PCs from a performance/price/power consumption perspective. I decided on the HP prodesk/ elitedesk 400/800 G5 with the i5-9500T. It idles at ~2-3W and has considerably more computing and storage than these embedded solutions. I only see something like a raspberry pi be handy when relying on GPIO ports.
- jauntywundrkind 3y agoI don't know what you did to get yours idling that low. My 800 i5-9500t idles at 9w. I took out the flex io module & wifi card, and make sure nvme has "spin down" but still nowhere near that low. I had some Acer chromeboxes that would do 4.5w easy without any tuning or setup, and they used pretty low end dyal-core i3's from just barely before the i5-9500t. Generally I don't think servethehome finds many tiny mini-pcs below 7w.
- declan_roberts 3y agoI've been waiting patiently to shut off my old power-hungry NAS server and move the management of the 8 disk zfs array on to something like a raspberry pi. It looks like I might be a step closer with the RPI5's pcie expansion options.
- suprjami 3y agoIf you really care about power consumption here, buy a proper NAS like a Synology.
- magixx 3y agoI'm really not sure that you'll get that much power savings. Given the idle consumption of a drive is ~6W I'm actually surprised my 10 year old server/NAS only consumes about 110W for a system with 10 drives, 10GBase-T, 8 DIMMs, Intel 3930k and fans/some USB peripherals. I should try testing under some load however.
- mardifoufs 3y agoNow that the rockchip cpu is very close to full upstream kernel support, how does the raspberry pi compare? Do they maintain their own kernel branch (considering they use a pretty uncommon/restricted Broadcom chip) or is it mostly upstreamed?
- chatmasta 3y agoWhere do you buy an Orange Pi? When I was researching these devices I found it to be extremely weird/sketchy. These are three different websites all apparently from different companies: - https://orangepi.com/ https://orangepi.com/ - https://orangepi.net/ https://orangepi.net/ - http://www.orangepi.org http://www.orangepi.org (note: https does not work)
- notRobot 3y agoFirst two links are resellers, as mentioned in the footers. But yes, Orange Pis have always been a bit shady.
- chatmasta 3y agoSo the third link is the official one? Its footer has some very sketchy looking links, including to two different telegram channels, three aliexpress stores, and some guy's skype username... Then again, we might not even be seeing the same site, since it forces http:// http:// and could be modified in transit by anyone on the path of either of our ISPs and the web host.
- ThatPlayer 3y agoIn my experience on Aliexpress, 3 stores aren't unusual. Most of the stores I buy from on Aliexpress (mostly 3d printer parts) have at least 2 stores. Even the reputable ones like BigTreeTech which is a pretty popular for 3d printer control boards have at least five stores by my last count. According to them, Aliexpress don't allow multiple accounts to manage a store, so they make a new one for each salesperson.
- megous 3y agoOrange Pi / Xunlong is a stable brand that's been primarily on Aliexpress for 7-8 years IIRC, producing various boards, all of which work fine for me. Very reliable seller, and the product + it's cheap. In the past they had Orange Pi PC, which was half the price of Raspberry Pi 2 or whatnot and much better in connectivity (4x real USB host interfaces, ...). Their software I would not touch, but I never had to. Most Allwinner and Rockchip boards are well supported upstream. I just upstreamed support for Orange Pi 5 Plus a week ago or so. https://xnux.eu/log/088.html https://xnux.eu/log/088.html All you ever need with these random boards is to build your own Linux kernel and bootloader for them, which is a few fairly standard steps, and then you can use any normal aarch64 distro on them, even if the board is not "supported" by the distro. I just have a script to cross-build the recent kernel for the boards I own, and update it remotely. Not a huge issue.
- Pxtl 3y agoThe Pi 5 looks neat and I hear it's finally got a power button built-in, which was always the sorest point of the rpi series for me - the fact that it had no good story for safely idling was always absurd. The default configuration was "if you lose power there's a good chance the filesystem will be corrupt". Still, does the new one do better beyond having an off-button? Like does it wake via USB properly? Does it have some way to safely recover the filesystem after power-loss? Because that has always been the gigantic asterisk on the otherwise-cool RPI. "It's a ticking time-bomb until its memory gets corrupted, and if it crashes you have to roll the dice by power-cycling it" was never a good story. That and its unbearable prima-donna pickyness about voltage.
- Scramblejams 3y agoFWIW once I started deploying my Pis with automotive-grade SD cards bought from Arrow and Canakit 5.1v PSUs, all the stability & integrity issues completely disappeared. Costs a bit more, bringing the price of a setup closer to a used SFF HP or whatever, but it’s super stable. Whether we should feel bound to go to such lengths is another topic…
- Pxtl 3y agoYeah, that's what kills me with rpis. Yes they're cheap... until you add a chassis, a safe SD card, a 1st party power supply that won't give you the dreaded voltage warning icon, etc. I don't regret owning some since they basically taught me to do Linux adminning, but the shopping experience is a bit like buying an airline ticket.
- Scramblejams 3y agoYep, I often wonder how the story would've gone if they'd put a little cap and some circuitry on to make sure the SD card would come down gracefully, and configured the power circuitry so the Pi is comfortable running on a little less than 5v.
- ilyt 3y agoPower button was just a pair of wires to a switch and some settings in old rpi IIRC > Does it have some way to safely recover the filesystem after power-loss? that is not a hardware feature
- NotYourLawyer 3y ago> One thing worth pointing out is also the compatibility of software and the breadth of the community. >Obviously, the Raspberry Pi ecosystem and community is much stronger than the Orange Pi or Rock communities. However, I can basically promise you that the Orange Pi community and Rock community will both grow in coming years. This seems way more important than the differences in computing power, and even the (massive) differences in price. Until I can seamlessly use raspberry pi OS and all the RPi software, those other boards are just non-starters for me.
- ComputerGuru 3y agoNot one word about upstream/mainline support, which is realistically the biggest issue for most people.
- FullyFunctional 3y agoIgnoring that the article is just an ad for his store, the thing that shocked me was the Orange Pi 5 Plus which includes "onboard microphone". I would NEVER want an onboard microphone unless it was a device I had far more than average trust in. What a great way to reward security breaches!
- megous 3y agoI think you hit the nail on the head. I completely aggree with you. You'd need something advanced like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pliers#/media/File:Long-nosePliers.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pliers#/media/File:Long-nosePl... to even be able to remove the mic. It's impossible. Don't reward those hackers!
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- sinuhe69 3y agoUnlike standardized PCs, embedded systems are not just about specs and prices, but much more about stability and the whole ecosystem. What helps a higher spec if you can not find a stable driver or the documents are so bad, you can not make heads or tails from that? What helps a cheaper price tag if you have to spend days trying to figure out why sometimes a hardware connection works but sometimes not? Ultimately, time is money. If I manufacture something en-masse, obviously a few dollars difference is important. But for my one-off hobby project? I'll stick with what works.
- mekster 3y agoI've stopped shopping for ARM boards when I realized not all docker images support ARM architecture making it hard to install apps that I might want to. Otoh, Odroid H3 is a quite capable x86 machine and these days parts are so cheap, I bought a quad core Odroid with 32GB mem and 1TB nvme for around $300 and figured I'd retire my cloud server that costs $50+/mo (pitiful 4GB memory) for a much better spec.
- lefixx 3y agoI wouldn't trust a shop's article about their competitor's pricing and availability claims.
- retrocryptid 3y agoDo we know how easy it is to remove the microphone from the orange pi's motherboard? A microphone mixed with proprietary firmware is sort of a deal killer for me.