
Single Board Computers Introduced in 2017 - bcaulfield
https://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1332763
======
metaphor
To save others the pain of EETimes' annoying ass ad exploits:

    
    
      1. Raspberry Pi Zero W -- $10
      2: Asus Tinker Board -- $54.99
      3: Marvell Espressobin -- $79.99
      4: 96Boards HiKey 960 -- $239.99
      5: PINE64 Rock64 -- $24.95
      6: Orange Pi R1 -- $13.90
      7: MYIR MYS-6ULX -- $24.80
      8: LeMaker Banana Pi Pro -- $47.99
      9: LattePanda -- $209
      10: Sparkfun BBC micro:bit -- $17.50

~~~
forinti
Micro:bit seems a bit expensive when you compare its features with the other
options.

~~~
brazzledazzle
I think it's intended as more of an all-in-one board for the educational
purposes (specifically educating children, I believe). It has a couple of
buttons, an LED array (basic display and light sensor), compass, temp sensor,
an accelerometer and some edge pins that you can use alligator clips with. It
might not be the best and/or most affordable platform for general purpose
stuff but I can't be certain as I've only used it for teaching kids how to
program.

------
mch82
BeagleBone Blue was also released for sale this year,
[https://beagleboard.org/blue](https://beagleboard.org/blue)

> BeagleBone® Blue is a complete, Linux-enabled robotics computer. Community-
> supported and fully open-source, the real-time performance, flexible
> networking and rich set of robotics-oriented peripherals make building
> mobile robots quick and affordable.

Unlike the Raspberry Pi line of single-board computers, the BeagleBone line is
completely open source and permissively licensed. The design files for Blue
are at [https://github.com/beagleboard/beaglebone-
blue](https://github.com/beagleboard/beaglebone-blue)

UC San Diego is developing coursework based on the Blue,
[https://www.ucsdrobotics.org/](https://www.ucsdrobotics.org/)

~~~
elcritch
Wasn’t sure what made the BeagleBone Blue variant variant good for robotics
until I read about the 8 servo drivers and 4 DC motor drivers built into the
SBC! That’s going to be really handy for lab robotics projects. Buying a servo
hat for Raspberry Pi’s or wiring up my own driver chips for one off projects
has been annoying. Thanks!

Question, do you know if the UCSD course is using the PRU’s and/or porting ROS
to the PRU’s? That’d be really excellent.

And of course there’s the Pocket BeagleBone [1] that was released this year. I
just preferred 4 for prototyping, primarily since they have the onboard dual
200 mhz real-time processors, are in stock, and have really good support and
design specs.

1: [https://beagleboard.org/pocket](https://beagleboard.org/pocket)

~~~
mch82
Unfortunately, I'm waiting on the publication of the MOOC and course materials
to find out.

It looks like the latest book, "BeagleBone Robotics Projects, 2nd Ed",
[https://www.amazon.com/BeagleBone-Robotic-Projects-Second-
co...](https://www.amazon.com/BeagleBone-Robotic-Projects-Second-
control/dp/1788293134/), came out in June and I haven't had a chance to look
through it. The 2014 book, "Mastering BeagleBone Robotics", by the same author
walked through multiple robotics examples implemented using Python and didn't
involve the PRUs. Using only Python, there were examples of a rotary aircraft,
fixed wing aircraft, sailboat, wheeled vehicle, and computer vision tracking.

My understanding is that TI only recently began improving the PRU
documentation to make it more accessible and that Code Composer and other
tools TI has created for working with the PRU are maturing slowly. I've never
tried using it. Here's the PRU page on the BeagleBone wiki:
[https://elinux.org/Ti_AM33XX_PRUSSv2#C_Compiler](https://elinux.org/Ti_AM33XX_PRUSSv2#C_Compiler)

Another thing I've never tried, but that might be of interest to HN readers,
is the Nerves project for Elixir development on single board computers
including BeagleBone Black.
[https://hexdocs.pm/nerves/targets.html](https://hexdocs.pm/nerves/targets.html)

------
zzzcpan
How do people deal with the software side of these boards? AFAIK, Raspberry
Pies are the only ones with good support, plus there are a few boards that
have Tier 1 support on NetBSD. The rest seem too risky to rely on if you don't
want to live with vulnerable kernels after a year or two.

~~~
joezydeco
There are a number of Freescale and NXP SBCs that have good software support
(including Mbed support, Yocto recipes and Github kernel repos), but they
don't catch the interest of hobbyists like these other boards do.

------
floren
I've been looking for a SBC with at least 2 gigabit Ethernet ports to use as a
router, firewall, and netflow generator on my home network.

I almost bought an Espressobin, but English-language websites only had the 1GB
version and I just couldn't figure out Taobao to try and order the bigger one.

At this point I'm probably going to get a PC Engines APU 2 board, which is a
quad-core AMD Geode processor w/ 4 GB of RAM. I can get it with a 60GB mSATA
drive, a case, a wifi miniPCI board, and all the wiring for external wifi
antennas for $243 shipped. That's a little steep but the other advantage is
that the x86-64 architecture should make OS support easier, unlike all these
little ARM boards that get one hacked-up kernel release and no updates after
that.

~~~
thenewwazoo
You may be interested in UBNT’s ERLite 3. It runs a fork of VyOS on MIPS, and
is a really nice product. I’ll never build my own network box again (and
pfSense has ceased to exist in my universe).

~~~
cmcginty
I came here to say this! There is also a newer (cheaper) ERX, but some of the
specs are not as good.

------
lazyjones
1\. Terrible website, Safari complains about unsafe form submit attempts on
every page.

2\. They omitted at least

* nanopi neo2 (my favourite). 40x40mm Allwinner H5 (4 cores A53), gigabit Ethernet.

* nanopi A64, 64x60mm Allwinner A64.

~~~
morganvachon
1\. Same on Firefox and Edge.

It would have been nice to see the updated version of the C.H.I.P. Pro from
Next Thing on the list. It's a fairly capable board at a good price, and it's
more open than the Pi and other ARM boards.

[https://getchip.com/pages/chippro](https://getchip.com/pages/chippro)

The Intel Atom board looks like a good foundation to build a customized
portable computer; AFAIK there's no IME mess involved and it can run pretty
much any Linux or BSD OS out there. I'm thinking it would make a great base
for a portable OpenBSD machine.

------
jhallenworld
What? No mention of the single board relay computer?

[http://relaysbc.sourceforge.net/](http://relaysbc.sourceforge.net/)

I sold 8 fully assembled computers and 20 bare boards in 2017.

~~~
Johnythree
Wonderful! Thank you for showng us.

------
insanebits
For anyone looking for cheapest SBC. Best I've found was Orange pi zero at
$6.99 for 256mb version. That includes wireless wifi onboard.

I'm not affiliated with them in any way. They can be found at their official
aliexpress shop.

~~~
lucaspiller
Be advised that Orange Pi have many different boards with similar names, but
vastly different specs. The $6.99 model is for 256MB RAM and a Allwinner H2
chipset.

Also a lot of the boards can only be powered by a DC jack, not the onboard
MicroUSB.

~~~
kogepathic
_> Be advised that Orange Pi have many different boards with similar names,
but vastly different specs._

How is this any different than the general SBC market? You could make the same
point about the "Raspberry Pi" which has:

* Raspberry Pi model A/B

* Raspberry Pi 2 model B

* Raspberry Pi 3 model B

* Raspberry Pi Zero

* Raspberry Pi Zero W

 _> Also a lot of the boards can only be powered by a DC jack, not the onboard
MicroUSB._

Almost all boards can also be powered via 5V GPIO pins, so you can wire a DC
jack to that to avoid using micro USB.

~~~
rullgrus
Yes, the Raspberry Pi models are a little confusing, especially with the '+'
versions and PCB-revisions. But I don't think the purpose of the parent
comment was to say that it was worse than others, more of a heads-up to
someone looking to order a model to take a second look and verify the
specifications.

------
ComputerGuru
All on one page for those that hate the “here’s a picture with some text, now
click ‘next’ 10 more times so we can artificially boost our page views”
approach:
[https://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1332763&print=ye...](https://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1332763&print=yes)

It’s not mobile friendly (viewport issues) but if you use reader mode in it
becomes great.

------
2bluesc
Checkout the fitlet2 for those wanting an Intel J3455[0] based platform.

I'm waiting for stock to show up at Amazon so I can upgrade my pfSense
machine.

[0] [https://fit-iot.com/web/products/fitlet2/](https://fit-
iot.com/web/products/fitlet2/)

~~~
voltagex_
I thought Intel were getting out Atom chips. I'll be looking to upgrade my
C2758 NAS at some point - maybe there's some hope after all.

~~~
2bluesc
Intel is pouring fuel on the fire for the C3000 chips with features like 2x 10
Gbps network interfaces on the SoC.

Checkout SuperMicro's C3000 offering:
[https://www.supermicro.com/products/nfo/atom.cfm](https://www.supermicro.com/products/nfo/atom.cfm)

~~~
voltagex_
For some reason the SOHO / lower end SuperMicro gear is almost impossible to
get in Australia.

------
rasz
Quick glance (click PRINT instead of 10 sub pages) and memory capacity is
wrong in almost every single listing.

I expected better from eetimes (owned by Arrow, serious Fortune 500 electronic
components supplier giant).

------
anfractuosity
I like the sound of the Pine64 ROCK64 one, with the 4k HDMI, USB3 port and
1Gbps ethernet, does anyone have that board, I'm curious how the software
support is?

~~~
polartx
As one of the suckers that preordered the 4gb version, I'd strongly caution
against getting one.

I've tried every OS released for it, and they're all rife with bugs producing
kernel panics aplenty. This makes running the unit as headless unfeasible. I
drawer'd it and replaced it with a tried-and-true Odroid c-2. Btw if you're
looking at SMBs, check out dietpi.com, its well maintained and brings a world
of functionality to SMBs

~~~
anfractuosity
Thanks a lot for your reply! This is exactly the kind of thing I was worried
about and is one of the reasons I do like the RPis I have so much which seem
to have very decent OS support.

------
waytogo
I am looking for a 4k single board computer to run a cheap 4k Arch Linux i3
workstation (mainly for Vim and Chrome). Any ideas?

~~~
candiodari
Something like this would probably fit the bill and be pretty fast:

[https://www.gearbest.com/tv-box-mini-
pc/pp_562952.html](https://www.gearbest.com/tv-box-mini-pc/pp_562952.html) (2G
ram)

(youtube reviews seem to imply ram is usually upgradeable, with laptop DDR3
sticks you may have lying around)

or just go straight to 4G ram

[https://www.gearbest.com/tv-box-mini-
pc/pp_635382.html](https://www.gearbest.com/tv-box-mini-pc/pp_635382.html) (4G
ram)

These are intel boxes, support linux better than most laptops, have slow SSDs
(which are still far faster than normal disks, and also usually upgradeable).

They are especially far, far faster than most boards listed here, and they
support a lot more software. (including portal 2 which is incredible and on
sale:
[http://store.steampowered.com/app/620/Portal_2/](http://store.steampowered.com/app/620/Portal_2/)
)

------
carussell
Previous discussion from last week:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15975229](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15975229)

------
bpye
The Marvell board looks pretty interesting. Would be nice to get FreeBSD or
OpenBSD with pf up and running on it.

------
raarts
I'm looking for a cheap-ass VPS setup at home. Need 2 nodes with 16Gb each.
Any recommendations?

~~~
krylon
Depending on your definition of cheap, I can highly recommend the HP ProLiant
Microserver - it's small (about one cubic foot), an entry level model with 16
GB RAM (without HDDs/SSDs) is about € 300-350.

I have used it as my home server for the last two years, and it has worked
very well for me. Quiet, reliable. The Gen8 which runs on an Intel CPU can be
equipped with a low-end Xeon, if needed, but that drives up the price
accordingly.

~~~
bpye
I like the Gen8, limited to Intel Ivy Bridge at best but I have a Xeon
E3-1230v2 in mine with 12GB RAM and it works great. If you can find a cheap
license for iLO Advanced the remote administration is really useful too.

~~~
krylon
For the price, it is amazing how much server HP managed to cram into that
little box. Mine has Celeron CPU, 16 GB RAM, runs FreeBSD, is mainly a file
server (ZFS w/ 8 GB ARC) plus a few virtual machines via bhyve. The entire
machine, including HDDs was about € 800,-

CPU-wise, performance is not exciting, of course, but disk- and network-
performance is totally sufficient to serve a small home or office network.
Which is what they were made for, I guess. ;-)

In two years, this little box has not let me down once.

~~~
bpye
I love my little microserver. I've ran Ubuntu for a while, then FreeNAS and
now Alpine Linux though I've been playing with FreeBSD on my second laptop and
am tempted to try running it instead. I'm already using ZFS for storage
(migrated the pool between each OS).

~~~
krylon
FWIW, mine runs FreeBSD, and it has not given me any trouble. Virtualization
support is present even in the Celeron GT1610, so bhyve works as well. Jails
and ZFS play together very nicely.

------
voltagex_
This article has been here recently although I can't find it

