What is the cheapest RPi kit containing everything needed to get started?
The ASUS Tinker Board is a compelling upgrade from a Raspberry Pi 3 B+
51–60 of 232 posts
Re: The ASUS Tinker Board is a compelling upgrade from a Raspberry Pi 3 B+
#52Tinkerboard has amazingly performant GPU. Peak performance is 81.6GFlops, comparable to mid-range desktop GPUs from 2007 (e.g. GeForce 8400 GS had 67 GFlops, GeForce 8600 GT had 114 GFlops). It also supports 4k HDMI output resolution. RPi is more compatible i.e. the software stack supports OpenGL. But for cases where it’s OK to code against GLES, Mali-T764 is awesome. I once used NanoVG to build a very nice looking r…
does it require codes to unlock native x264 processing, like the RBP does (or did, back when I used it)?
Also, does it have hardware support for HEVC? My poor RBP 2 can't handle HEVC at all.
Re: The ASUS Tinker Board is a compelling upgrade from a Raspberry Pi 3 B+
#53"Once an SBC approaches $100 or so, there are other options (like a used Intel core i5 desktop) which offer 10-100x the performance and infinite expansion options"
Anyone knows what kind of board he means? I have been searching and it seems that the next step from the pi would be something like the Intel NUC, which is quite a lot more than $100 when considering a full, minimum system build.
Edit: totally missed the "used" in that sentence, which totally changes things. Thanks for the tips though!
Re: The ASUS Tinker Board is a compelling upgrade from a Raspberry Pi 3 B+
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
1) Is actually more expensive than RPi 3s; and 2) Hasn't been updated in a while; thus 3) Lower RAM; 4) Lower perf;
> 1) Is actually more expensive than RPi 3s; and The RPi people quote this incessantly casually leaving out the fact that the BeagleBone already includes 4GB eMMC (a uSD card is at least $5) > 3) Lower RAM; > 4) Lower perf; Less RAM but FASTER RAM. RPi3 is DDR2 vs BeagleBone Black's DDR3. So, between the eMMC being much faster than uSD and the faster RAM (and the Ethernet on the BBB is way faster), I suspect that the…
> The RPi people quote this incessantly casually leaving out the fact that the BeagleBone already includes 4GB eMMC (a uSD card is at least $5)
> Less RAM but FASTER RAM. RPi3 is DDR2 vs BeagleBone Black's DDR3.
Most people buying don't notice such things. Also, the BBB is at-least $10 more expensive.
> In addition, people just blithely skip past the whole closed nature of the Broadcom SoC. If you are serious about creating a product ever shipping in real quantities, that's a killer.
For people with principles in favour of Free & Open computing (like me) who are buying for personal use, perhaps. Unfortunately for this argument, most people don't care about that. In fact, I'm currently supporting a product shipping with the RPi 3B in quantities large enough to qualify as "real quantities".
Re: The ASUS Tinker Board is a compelling upgrade from a Raspberry Pi 3 B+
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
Allwinner based boards have mainline kernel support for most features, they're one of a handful of vendors that has mainline support (primarily due to community efforts). I personally like the OrangePi boards due to price & reliability, easy to set and forget without worrying about mSD corruption. http://linux-sunxi.org/Main_Page is pretty useful for a list of boards and info.
Not for any of the GPUs. If all you want is a terminal, you can pretty much buy anything..
You can run Gnome just fine, hardware accelerated video decoding/encoding works, HDMI with a few features is mainline, the only thing left is the Mali GPU, which is a fairly simple GPU as far as that kind of hardware goes, as compared to AMD or Nvidia GPUs.
On that note, there has been a fair bit of activity on Lima as of late, which is a big change from a few years ago: https://github.com/yuq/linux-lima/tree/lima-4.16-rc5/drivers...
Re: The ASUS Tinker Board is a compelling upgrade from a Raspberry Pi 3 B+
#56"Once an SBC approaches $100 or so, there are other options (like a used Intel core i5 desktop) which offer 10-100x the performance and infinite expansion options" Anyone knows what kind of board he means? I have been searching and it seems that the next step from the pi would be something like the Intel NUC, which is quite a lot more than $100 when considering a full, minimum system build. Edit: totally missed the "…
"Used Core i5" is not buying a NUC. At least, I don't think there's a huge aftermarket of NUCs at this point. I don't think they sell in the volume that leads to large aftermarkets, like your average Dell business machine.
A five year old OptiPlex SFF PC though is available for around $100 or so, and capable of much more than any single-board PC.
Re: The ASUS Tinker Board is a compelling upgrade from a Raspberry Pi 3 B+
#57What is the cheapest RPi kit containing everything needed to get started?
I found the kits on pishop.us to be nice and priced well. For example, the PiZero W kit includes a case, Pi Zero W board, case with camera cable, and 2.5A usb power supply for $20+shipping.
Re: The ASUS Tinker Board is a compelling upgrade from a Raspberry Pi 3 B+
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
1) Is actually more expensive than RPi 3s; and 2) Hasn't been updated in a while; thus 3) Lower RAM; 4) Lower perf;
> 1) Is actually more expensive than RPi 3s; and The RPi people quote this incessantly casually leaving out the fact that the BeagleBone already includes 4GB eMMC (a uSD card is at least $5) > 3) Lower RAM; > 4) Lower perf; Less RAM but FASTER RAM. RPi3 is DDR2 vs BeagleBone Black's DDR3. So, between the eMMC being much faster than uSD and the faster RAM (and the Ethernet on the BBB is way faster), I suspect that the…
My Beagle Bone Black gets no use at all. I find its only redeeming quality the little deterministic helper cores, but in practice I'd rather use an FPGA/CPLD.
For everything else, memory size, network speed, and flash speed trumps everything. For me ODROID XU4 is the best, followed by ODROID C2. The thinker board looks like a contender but I was disappointed by the comparison to RPi3 whose strengths (community) and weaknesses (everything else) are long well understood.
Re: The ASUS Tinker Board is a compelling upgrade from a Raspberry Pi 3 B+
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
That hasn't been my experience during the design our last product. Allwinner was the vendor we had to pass on because their then-best-offering (H5) had poor mainline support and fragile, crappy code in the kernel dump. We decided to go with the slightly more expensive RPi 3B precisely because it had both usable mainline support and the handful of patches in the RaspberryPi Foundation's kernel were much better written…
We use H3 based boards, but the H5 seems to be fairly mature. I know its been under heavy development wrt mainline kernel support for the last year, might want to take a peek at the status matrix: https://linux-sunxi.org/Linux_mainlining_effort#Status_Matri...
H3 was already quite old back when we looked. The support offered by Allwinner for old chips (like the H3) back then was basically "If you're buying a ton, sure we'll support!", which was very off-putting.
H5's mainline support is still lacking in key areas. I2C, I2S, and cpufreq are deal-breakers for our product. Of course, combined with the fact that it will soon be out of support for a not-huge-buyer like us, it is out-of-question.
The status of their latest offering, the H6, in that matrix shows how bleak it was when we were looking at H5 for our board design. It was when the latest release of Linux was 4.4. You can see how few H5 features were supported with 4.4, almost exactly like how few are supported on the H6 today.
Re: The ASUS Tinker Board is a compelling upgrade from a Raspberry Pi 3 B+
#60"Once an SBC approaches $100 or so, there are other options (like a used Intel core i5 desktop) which offer 10-100x the performance and infinite expansion options" Anyone knows what kind of board he means? I have been searching and it seems that the next step from the pi would be something like the Intel NUC, which is quite a lot more than $100 when considering a full, minimum system build. Edit: totally missed the "…
https://www.labgopher.com/
Starting from about $121 shipped you can get an 8GB, 4 core Xeon E5620 (HP DL380 G6) with 10-100x the performance of a Pi. Probably better performance/W value in the used desktop sector (which labgopher doesn't focus on, unfortunately).