Alternatives to rasberry pi

rcoder

16 hours ago

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Uh oh, did someone ask about SBCs? ’Cause I have suggestions. :)

The nicest ARM boards I’ve worked with in recent memory are the Khadas VIM3 series. They use relatively modern Amlogic CPUs w/4-8 cores, built-in MMC, fast RAM, and onboard mPCI with a full NVMe slot and mini-PCIe for modems, etc. on a stacking expansion board. They’re more expensive than RPis – anywhere from $80 to $150 or so – but given that you don’t need to stack on a bunch of hats or find an SD card that won’t die on you after a few months I consider them a pretty great choice for a “soft embedded” (home server, media player, etc.) application. Their OS image build tool is tailored for Ubuntu, but at least it gives you a fully automated/reproducible – in the casual sense of, “I can run these scripts and get a working image out” – build toolchain.

Pine64 has already been suggested too, and worth consideration. I’d put them closer to the DIY end of the spectrum w.r.t. OS/distro support, available accessories, etc., but they do seem committed to keeping long-term availability of their hardware. They also document absolutely everything so you aren’t stuck running a weird vendor distro with no clear way to rebuild it on an updated kernel + base Ubuntu image. (I don’t particularly like being stuck on Ubuntu 18.04, and yet that seems to be the standard core that everyone uses for their off-the-shelf system image.)

If the ARM Linux ecosystem feels a little too fragmented and a NUC is too much, you could check out the LattePanda line from DFRobot. They’re running low-power Intel chips (Celerons and i3s, mostly) but the low-end model in particular has a bunch of GPIOs broken out into “Grove” connectors, runs happily with passive cooling, and is supported by basically every OS I’ve thrown at it. (I’ve tried Windows, your choice of Linux distro or BSD, and even Haiku.)