Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Orange Pi RV2 $40 RISC-V SBC: Friendly Gateway to IoT and AI Projects

riscv.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 136 posts

Re: Orange Pi RV2 $40 RISC-V SBC: Friendly Gateway to IoT and AI Projects

#81

Post by camel-cdr »

leoedin wrote: post #67

The big ecosystem of SBCs confuses me a bit. Who is buying these? The work required to build an actual secure, maintainable product on top of an SBC is so big that you'd surely never use one of these. The hard work is all in software. You need a supplier with product lifetime guarantees and a known SoC manufacturer. If you're a hobbyist, unless you really don't value your time you'd be much better served buying an x8…

> Who is buying these?

All people who want to optimize software for the RISC-V Vector extension, as this is the most afordable SBC which supports it.

Re: Orange Pi RV2 $40 RISC-V SBC: Friendly Gateway to IoT and AI Projects

#84

Post by MisterTea »

leoedin wrote: post #67

The big ecosystem of SBCs confuses me a bit. Who is buying these? The work required to build an actual secure, maintainable product on top of an SBC is so big that you'd surely never use one of these. The hard work is all in software. You need a supplier with product lifetime guarantees and a known SoC manufacturer. If you're a hobbyist, unless you really don't value your time you'd be much better served buying an x8…

> The hard work is all in software. You need a supplier with product lifetime guarantees and a known SoC manufacturer.

We need easily accessible documentation on the hardware so anyone can maintain the software. The problem I see is most SoC makers either have poor or no publicly available documentation. Their poor excuse for "open source" are undocumented Linux drivers for their black box hardware and a near obsolete kernel that they may or may not update.

These chips are made by big companies for big companies and not hobby people. They expect that you're going to buy in volume, sign NDAs and possibly license IP from them. The chip goes into a product that is likely never going to be updated and thrown out in 5 years.

Re: Orange Pi RV2 $40 RISC-V SBC: Friendly Gateway to IoT and AI Projects

#85

Post by 999900000999 »

leoedin wrote: post #67

The big ecosystem of SBCs confuses me a bit. Who is buying these? The work required to build an actual secure, maintainable product on top of an SBC is so big that you'd surely never use one of these. The hard work is all in software. You need a supplier with product lifetime guarantees and a known SoC manufacturer. If you're a hobbyist, unless you really don't value your time you'd be much better served buying an x8…

The thing cost as much as two cocktails at my local bar.

I might just buy one to play with it for two or three hours and then throw it in a closet. Cheaper than going to a movie and more entertaining!

Re: Orange Pi RV2 $40 RISC-V SBC: Friendly Gateway to IoT and AI Projects

#86

Post by jech »

leoedin wrote: post #67

The big ecosystem of SBCs confuses me a bit. Who is buying these? The work required to build an actual secure, maintainable product on top of an SBC is so big that you'd surely never use one of these. The hard work is all in software. You need a supplier with product lifetime guarantees and a known SoC manufacturer. If you're a hobbyist, unless you really don't value your time you'd be much better served buying an x8…

> The big ecosystem of SBCs confuses me a bit. Who is buying these?

They make decent home servers, unless you need fast storage.

Re: Orange Pi RV2 $40 RISC-V SBC: Friendly Gateway to IoT and AI Projects

#87

Post by IshKebab »

Yeah I would wait until RISC-V SBCs have RVA23 and ideally ACPI & Unified Discovery support. Otherwise you're in abandoned software territory.

I'm not sure if any RISC-V boards support ACPI, and Unified Discovery is not even specified yet, so ... yeah probably don't buy this. We'll get there.

https://github.com/riscv/configuration-structure

Re: Orange Pi RV2 $40 RISC-V SBC: Friendly Gateway to IoT and AI Projects

#88

Post by johann8384 »

DoctorOetker wrote: post #59

Don't buy an Orange Lie. I used to occasionally buy a single board computer ~10 to ~5 years ago. Then I waited until SBC's reached the 32GB RAM level. The first such affordable and performant board was an Orange Pi 5+ or 5B (I should double check, may add a comment later). I believe I wanted the Orange Pi 5+ but it was sold out, so I ordered and paid for the Orange Pi 5B (the 2 ethernet port variant) which was a bit…

I've got dozens of various OrangePi models and I use them for a wide range of projects like drones, sdr receivers, home automation nodes, etc.

I'm sorry you have this experience but it's definitely not typical.

Re: Orange Pi RV2 $40 RISC-V SBC: Friendly Gateway to IoT and AI Projects

#89

Post by ge96 »

antonkochubey wrote: post #47

Ubuntu will not support RISC-V CPUs without RVA23 support going further, so this is stuck on 24.04 forever. There is no official Debian image either, and the Ubuntu version uses fixed kernel 6.6.47 with no further updates (it is not even installed from a repo). I own one since a couple months ago but I already regret the purchase.

Funny how software matters I bought a specific eink tablet and the lag and choppiness in drawing made me immediately sell it for something more well known.

Sucked too as I lost $300 but hopefully helps open source community anyway

Re: Orange Pi RV2 $40 RISC-V SBC: Friendly Gateway to IoT and AI Projects

#90

Post by sidewndr46 »

antonkochubey wrote: post #47

Ubuntu will not support RISC-V CPUs without RVA23 support going further, so this is stuck on 24.04 forever. There is no official Debian image either, and the Ubuntu version uses fixed kernel 6.6.47 with no further updates (it is not even installed from a repo). I own one since a couple months ago but I already regret the purchase.

It's actually worse than that, even getting updates kills the image. I did manage to work around it. but overall I don't consider it a platform for anything I would depend on. It's fun for experimentation, that is about it

My notes from that little project are here -

https://www.hydrogen18.com/blog/orange-pi-rv2-first-look-ker...

Post reply on HN