What Are Your Favorite SBCs (Single Board Computers), Why, and How Did You Get Into Them?

That is a lesson I learned dipping into BeagleBoard and it's driving me insane.

Like, the BeagleBone Black and BeaglePlay are extremely solid SBCs; the Black, which I run off an SD card, is incredibly solid and the Play is--I mean, reading the specs it may literally be able to do anything. They're also easy to get and at a reasonable price point. But the ecology and documentation, even the official Getting Started page, are nightmare fuel and by the way, do not use those instructions as they are broken and the associated OS is three years old. If you google enough, however, you may eventually realize you have to go to the forums and find the two threads where the latest OS updates--as in, this month--are being posted or go to the individual documentation linked off of the board, where you will probably find up something like a workflow or will give you enough for some extrapolation.

There are attempts to get the OS and kernel up to date and integrate them with Beagle-specific packages and cape firmware, but this is not just like a whole bunch of separate groups doing different things not talking to each other; it's like they don't even know the other groups exist when everyone is technically working on the same projects. It's depressing.

Got a 3b a loong time ago and I love it, I use it as a jukebox and a tinker station.

Would love to get another one but man are they crazily expensive now. Tried the banana and orange pis and the are like okay but yep, they are different and doesn't seem to have the same community at all.

Chip shortage please go away!

Edit: I buy old dell optiplexes for like 40€ instead but they do take up quite the space...

A million posts here on SBC's and nobody mentions all the work done over at Armbian ??

My dude, that is beautiful I now need to google C.H.I.P to see what's going on. And yeah, my Black is seriously solid.

I think, you have a problem.

God, tell me about it. I did not fully appreciate the Pi until the Beagle, which has an ecosystem that seems to be following some branch of chaos theory when it comes to organization.

Pine64: I honestly regret I didn't follow up on this more before now because I had no idea about the Pinebook and Pinetab and I've been thinking about diy tablets, since diy laptops are still--really not a thing and it occurred to me just recently to see what's up with open source tablets. I use a kindle for reading but when I went back to school, most of my books aren't really Kindle-compatible so I bought a Galaxy Tab Ultra (10 inch, as eyesight) both so I could use Kindle search functions and a readable text size and so I blow up the diagrams. It wasn't as horrendously expensive as it could have been because, like my phone, I trade in yearly to upgrade, not because i need to but because--depressingly--it's more affordable when I can get max trade-in value and watch carefully for Samsung's random discounts.

So yes, I am excited about this. My tablet is a very different use case from my phone (which no, no way to switch to open-source or Linux there at this point); migrating to an open source tablet is actually a possibility. So very cool.

Often even cheaper

Where can I find a cheaper mini PC? They all seem to be like $250+ on Amazon, Beelink included.

Before RPis went up in cost they were $35. Isn't there anything in that price range?

I consider SBCs drastically overhyped these days. RaspberryPi was nice enough when it was released a decade ago, but these days you can just get a Beelink or similar miniPC, which is much more capable and often even cheaper. It doesn’t have the GPIO, but even if you need that, you are generally better served with a cheap MCU connected to USB.

I would put it another way; they're ideal for You Have One Vital Job Only projects; Home Assistant and Pihole are my two specific,, but robotics, a router, even a dedicated NAS would be a use case. I could run a lot of things on a mini PC with a hypervisor--soon, I shall start be experimenting with that--but One Vital Job Only projects are ones that do their thing without me ideally ever noticing them other than maintenance, if that makes sense. And even more important, things I should not tinker with because they're just fine, which is why I ended up building a second, dedicated Media Server/media ripping/encoding/NAS machine; once I did that, I finally had a stable media library I could access for more than a month at a time before I got An Idea That Would Be Fun and Oops Time To Reinstall (seriously; before I built that machine, I had to run my media and plex from a Pi (aka One Vital Job) because if I put it on my main machine, I'd tinker it to death; hence, separate everything. I am basically hiding the cookies from a three year old and I am the three year old).

Tentatively--and this applies to a much smaller population--they're perfect for deconstructing the Linux kernel and operating systems in general because you get to work at a reduced scale. I have the repository for the Pi kernel in my bookmarks and go to just read through it and get familiar when I have some time or if I remember something I want to look for (my usb wifi dongle testing project was invaluable for how much kernel homework I had to do, it's hilarious). I know and can write in basic C++, I know how to compile, but I still don't pretend to understand the kernel; with the Pi's scale, though, I can grasp it, if that makes sense. I can recognize the structure and begin to get how things fit together. I can even--tentatively--find specific parts, identify drivers, especially when it comes to specific removable hardware where it's fairly obvious and easy to follow (following actual driver files....that's in progress). My goal before I die is to be able to read and follow the entire kernel end to end; I think I'm going to need to look into the benefits of reincarnation or cryogenics admittedly, but hope springs eternal.

(BeagleBones--if nothing else--has seriously upped my game on Figure It Out For Yourself. Which yes is a very me-specific use case, requires more homework to get context than literally every class I'm taking combined including TCP/IP class, and I literally don't have time to do in more than sprints, but did lead to me literally being able to making my first Universal New Install Checklist (covers every Linux operating system I've ever used including all my personal configurations and scripts, in order, with all exceptions) and my first foray into creating an auto-install-and-configure script I can run on a new machine. Yes, those Beagles had me doing a clean install that many times. No idea what I'm doing there and I really wish there was a universal template for that.)

Having said that, I haven't jumped into MiniPC/hypervisor culture so I am up for changing my mind the minute I make the leap. And seriously, this thread has moved it actively up my priority list, which I did not see coming, so thank you for that.

I would love to replace my tp link archer c7 v5 with something more powerful, but it has to be flashable with OpenWRT and kind of an all in one box router with wifi (i know, seperation of concerns would be better, but i don't care atm).

The options i see atm:

• Turris Omnia
• Banana Pi BPI-R4 (or R3 until R4 hits the shelves)

Problem is, they are both prohibitively expensive for a simple wifi-router.

I love my Beagles but the mess that is Getting Started and the latest OS releases alone is just...why.

I'm watching this thread to see the recommendations. The only SBC I have seen that was designed for routers was a Pi that was on Vilros; you had to get special permission or something to even order it.

My dude, you made me google, but fine; RockPro on Ameridroid is on my short list. I've been meaning to follow up on that one, so bookmarked the homepage.

What do you use it for?

I really want to get their riscV board. But waiting a bit for software ecosystem to shore up a bit.

ODroids are massively underrated. The first Pi we bought is dead. The second one is now so underpowered for what we want that it's been turned into retro arcade machine. It still finds ways to cause problems too. Whereas our first ODroid is still going strong after many years of faithful service. We added an ODroid toaster to the mix a couple of years ago that's also given us zero issues and works wonderfully.

I bought Home Assistant Blue from Ameridroid, which was Home Assistant's first (and happily still continuing) jump into making Home Assistant more accessible and easy if you weren't a hobbyist or tinkerer: Odroid N2+ preloaded with Home Assistant OS, a super adorable blue case, and power supply. That was my first experience with that board and with eMMC; 128 GB of it, talk about turning my head (also 4 GB RAM). Honestly, the only reason I didn't get another is I didn't have a project that required it; the reason I even found out the Beagles existed was the Open Source Border Router project I wanted to do had it as an option for the walk-through and gave me a reason to test drive.

But I have to agree: I've been running it straight for three years now and the Odroid does its job with zero issues. Home Assistant and its parts have given me problems, but Blue (yes, it's name is Blue, it was just there) never does.

Oh, this is a nice collection!! If you want to experiment, either RPi will support Open Thread Board Router if you're into that, or a NAS; I ran one off Pi 4 with OpenMediaVault and it did not even dent its resources.

I am now wondering if I should start looking into my own firewalls.

I was lucky enough to get a 4 before the supply issues. I wish I could get any replacements.

Nowadays I just buy thin clients and pay the 40-50$ premium for projects. Better then than waiting for a pi.

I was looking at the same situation. I decided to give an Orange Pi 5 a chance as the new Plex server and so far it's phenomenal. Once I got the OS onto the M.2 SSD everything started flying, which makes sense when comparing an M.2 against an SD card for R/W speeds!

I'm using an external USB SSD for the media and aside from a spinup time after the disk goes to sleep, it's worked great. It's even handling h265 encoded files, which my RPi couldn't do due to the extra CPU overhead from the transcoding compression. The OPi 5 is doing very well.

My favourite toy at the moment is actually my StarFive VisionFive 2 RISCV board, its been fun trying it out and getting applications to compile on it which don’t officially support RISC-V.

You are living the dream. And I need to google that more.

One of my friends set up Proxmox on a Lenovo M93 he got on Amazon and runs Home Assistant, Pihole, and some other things off there, and I seriously seriously want. I've been curious about hypervisors since we went over them in class, and seeing his interface hit my 'yes now' button.

What do you use yours for?

Watch Vilros and American Raspberry Pi Shop; that's where I picked up my Zero 2 and second Pi 4 8GB respectively. I tend to like Vilros better; they're fairly consistent in regularly getting stock, you just have to check in consistently to catch it. The Zero 2 was an actual fluke; I was evangelizing about the Pihole to a friend and went to the site to show her what to buy and the Zero 2 was right there.

Canakit's good too, but somehow, I am always coming in right after pre-orders close, which is weird, as the one thing you cannot say about me is I am not focused as hell (the COVID Switch and NVIDIA Shortage was very educational on how to stalk merchandise into submission).

Truthfully, for a Pihole, you really don't need a Pi 4; my Zero 2 runs it with resources to spare (the regular zero technically could, but there was more than one bottleneck).

Friend, this reply is beautiful. And reading the Zima site, I may be sold. What do you use to run the network? OpenWRT, DDWRT, Tomato?

And forget about trying to transcode Blu-ray rips, which most of my devices can’t stream natively, so transcode is the only option.

Ninety-nine percent of the time, I am unqualified to advise on anything; thanks to COVID, I got deathly into making a media server and ran into the transcoding problem followed by making a spreadsheet and experimenting and documenting my results.

My results (other can disagree): all my transcoding problems came down to audio streams and subtitles. None of this may apply to you, but just in case.

I approached it from three points: a.) I got the NVIDIA Pro to run Plex as NVIDIA can handle anything; b.) I made a server just for my media processing and storage (it also runs Plex as a secondary instance when my Shield is in use). I use MakeMKV for the raw rip into an mkv container with all audio streams. The rip I process through Handbrake so I can get as close to a clone as I can (4K to 4K, 1080p to 1080p, etc) with full original audio then make a copy of each and every audio stream into the equivalent container that was compatible with the sound limitations of whatever I was planning to stream it on. Example: my Sonos speakers wanted Dolby: DTS 7.1 to TrueHD. I also did a third copy of each stream into the equivalent AAC containers: TrueHD to AAC 7.1 to future proof. I also added a fourth copy that's a basic AAC 2.0 that rolls with anything; and c.) Subtitles: turn them off and use open subtitles files so no one has to deal with bitmaps. I tested through Plex to make sure, and watched for the switch from direct play to transcode, then reverified on my Windows machine, etc.

Yes, it will eat hard drive space like whoa--uncompressed audio streams do that--but with surprisingly few exceptions, I can get direct play for 4K on pretty much anything now, not just Plex. I also create multiple resolutions using either original rip 4K or original rip 1080p as source but with the same audio mapping (that's a me-thing and also, Covid). I know this sounds like a ridic amount of work, but once I set all the profiles, it's basically a batch job. My total movie library sits at 400 movies with about 1200 files; last year I re-audited my Handbrake profiles, deleted everything but my source rips (and actually did a mass re-rip on the older ones that I did before I started compiling the latest ffmpeg to use when compiling MakeMKV), and re-encoded everything using those profiles. Total time was about two weeks end to end; I did them in batches of fifty and checked in every six hours to move completed files back into my media drives and also restart.

The only ones now that need me to personally go in and make corrections are the remastered releases like Apocalypse Now and Scarface (my files were twice the size of the original, it was unreal). Every one of them rips huge and needs slightly different profile tweaks, so those I oversee personally.

I don't know if any of this is relevant to your setup, but I reverified running Plex on one of my Pis and it could direct play at least 90% of the 4K and anything lower, and the 4K problems seem to all be with those remasters.

I am seriously regretting that I haven't bought more SBCs so I could give you an informed opinion and I desperately hope someone answers this.

With my Pi and Beagle limitations: the Pi Zero 2 with an ethernet hat and battery hat or power block would probably do it; the hats aren't hugely expensive and if there's one thing the Pi ecosystem has in abundance, it has cases for eveyrthing (Argon has a jawdropping modular case design for the Pi Zero; it's like art and that costs more than even the ridiculously inflated price of a Pi Zero 2, which is saying something). Right now, it's also--for what it is--overpriced. I'm trying to decide if the BeaglePlay would be worth your time to look into; it has wifi, bluetooth, ethernet and single-pair ethernet and integrates with Freedom Connect but it's very new, the documentation is bad to literally non-existent, you'd need to custom build the case, and it's design seems geared toward IoT, automation, monitoring and controlling remote sensors with any existing network protocol, and existing as a vague super cool enigma I am still not sure what to do with as it has a lot of onboard functionality built in and no idea how to use most of it.

I am totally watching this thread for people's suggestions.

I love how my post about SBCs is slowly but surely pushing me to test out a mini-PC sooner than later. Added to hardware wish list for future mulling after the move; I really do want to start learning the ins and outs of how to use a hypervisor and it's really convenient to have recommended options to pick from for what to run it on.