Like most people, I entered COVID as a normal hobby geek with a Linux server I played around with and a healthy hardware habit with a side of home automation and DD-WRT. I emerged from COVID enrolled in college, now with two servers (one new build, one rebuilt from my first one), two Pi, multiple instances of Home Assistant (one dedicated) and putting sensors on everything a sensor could go on and rewiring switches for wifi control of overhead fans, flashing every compatible router I could find on Amazon Warehouse with DDWRT in my home for an ad hoc mesh network (no, it didn’t work, but I didn’t care) while cabling everything to switches and creating a really hilarious network deathtrap tripping hazard, a massive media library (discovered Handbrake and making multiple resolutions) and a Sonos home theatre system. And yes, played an unhealthy amount of Animal Crossing and got an NVIDIA Shield Pro for streaming and Plex, as you do. I’m sure everyone can relate.
SBC’s were the natural escalation; I had credit card bills to pay off and that’s going to take a while.
I gatewayed with Pi like ten years ago but it took off during Later COVID when I noticed my credit score and started testing it as a NAS, Media Server (later: Cassiope Media Server, my second end to end Linux build), then got into learning about the kernel itself. I already had an Odroid (Home Assistant Blue) so why not go on, so project-based SBCs seemed healthy; I had a reason for buying one. This led to more Pi’s–as I couldn’t use Kernel Pi (Eurydice) for it and Andromeda Pi was masking my personal network, then I needed one for a Pihole (Iphigenia, Hecuba), which is how I ended up with a BeagleBone Black (Medusa) for an Open Thread Border Router. Still pretending I wasn’t just collecting them like cats, I networked them together and just enjoyed looking at them and making them matching banners with figlet with the excuse I was learning how to do network-wide deployments over SSH (true) and learn Debian OS (technically, I am doing that) and started PoEing things (my credit card bills may not be getting lower, no).
The count stands at a total of 9: one (1) Pi Zero W, one (1) Pi Zero 2 W, one (1) Raspberry Pi 4B 4G, two (2) Raspberry PI 4B 8G, one (1) Odroid N2+, one (1) Beaglebone Black, one (1) PocketBeagle, and one (1) BeaglePlay. (Other: two Linux machines, Watson and Cassiope). Yes, they all have names and technically, each is associated with a project. The BeaglePlay’s (Circe) associated project is ‘create my own documentation on what it does because Beagles don’t document’.
So which ones do you use, why, origin story, feelings: go.
(I’m moving in a week and half my hardware is being packed. I’m about to have to take down my network and Home Assistant and may be freaking out. I’m not sure I know where any light switches are here, either.)
When it comes to SBC, the choice has always been a Raspberry Pi. Why? A Raspberry Pi may not have the best performance. But in return you can be sure that it will still be supported after a kernel update. And that is exactly the problem with many alternatives. They support a certain, mostly old, kernel. And that’s it. Furthermore, the community around the Raspberry Pi is simply huge.
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.
That explains why I had such a terrible experience with the BBB. Saw how out of date the OS was and assumed it had been abandoned. Guess I’ll hit up the forums!
Main forum: https://forum.beagleboard.org/ for ARM64 boards; https://forum.beagleboard.org/t/arm64-debian-11-x-bullseye-monthly-snapshots-2023-07-01/32318 for the rest: https://forum.beagleboard.org/t/debian-11-x-bullseye-monthly-snapshot-2023-07-01/31280
There’s also a discord, linked in the forum. Hit me up if you want my link collection for Beagle: I started bookmarking literally anywhere that I went that looked vaguely relevant.
Bookmarked. Thanks!
Go with God. The Beagles are amazing; if they can get their shit together, their price would make them a decent rival for Pi and if the eMMC is too small, the sd card boot–at least on my Black–is faster than either of my Zeros… I found out recently Texas Instruments does have an update to do USB boot on at lest some of the boards but can’t find documentation. Which is typical.
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…
Oh… that’s a huge question. It’s been a long time now. I have used these in various projects for a lot of engineering, research, home networks, and embedded projects. I almost always run them headless over a serial console then SSH in for management.
- RPi 1 - my son used it recently for the RCA TV out
- RPi 2B
- RPi 3A+
- RPi 3B+
- RPi Zero
- RPi Zero W
- RPi 4B+
- Beagle Bone Black - I ran a pair of these as TOR relays for years. They were tanks.
- NanoPi NEO-LTS
- NanoPi NEO Air-LTS - The current one in service is an OctoPi server for my 3D printer
- Orange Pi 5 (I got one of the 32GB ones! - currently a Plex server with an external SSD and onboard M.2)
- Orange Pi Zero2
- C.H.I.P. Computer - this BTW was one of the best little hacking computers. It was phenomenal to setup and run over the OTG USB console
- Bannana Pi (original) - It was great because it had a SATA port so we used them to back network Linux installs for smart home kits.
I do a ton of other work with embedded microcontrollers too. Lots of ATMega and SAMD boards, plus a bunch of ESP 8266/32 variants.
I think, you have a problem.
But a good one if you can afford it
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.
Chip is gone iirc. You can still find a few used I think. Colin over on This Does Not Compute recently did a small video covering using mini v-mac with it and a bit of the history.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/Z1_-kPvDmn4
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
pine64 …never lets me down
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 run linux with docker and portainer with lizzys application template list for easier use and also her Dashy dashboard besides the usual containers ppl on r/selfhosted would suggest. right now the pine is out of ram because nodejs is just so bulky. so i run stuff like uptimekuma,pihole,changedetection,unifi, nginx and sometimes start containers like firefly3, jellyfin, searxng or apache guacamole etc… and while both my pi2 and my pi3 at some point just died I am all for pine now. only pi still in service for me is a pi1 with rtl433 to collect data and send via mqtt.
I really want to get their riscV board. But waiting a bit for software ecosystem to shore up a bit.
Beagleboards are great. Good Support and nice community. Nearly as good as Pi. I used BBB because it was the only open hardware SBC available in my area.
BTW: Please recommend me other good Open Hardware/Open Firmware SBCs. I am always looking for something new. Maybe for a Router or Selfmade-NAS.
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.
I have my trusty raspberry pi 3b+, 4 years old now and been on 24/7 as a bit torrent box for 3 of those years. Never had it crash once other than deludge gtk having more leaks than a sieve.
I like Pine64 because they running any operating system that runs on ARM and has an open bootloader. The Pi has a proprietary booloader so they don’t work as well for BSD.
I’ve been using a Zima Board for my home network. I have the mid-range, 4Gb memory, 32GB onboard. It’s got two SATA ports, dual gigabit Ethernet, an Intel processor and PCI express port that I’m eventually going to use to run an old wifi card so i can isolate my IOT devices on a dedicated wifi network.
The only problem i have with it is RAM and transcoding. I have 22 containers running things from the “arr” suite (Prowlarr, Radarr, Readarr, ect), pihole, Jellyfin, Home Assistant, etc. I stay around 80% memory usage, so i should have gotten the 8GB. And forget about trying to transcode Blu-ray rips, which most of my devices can’t stream natively, so transcode is the only option. The audio stutters and playback pauses every ten seconds or so. I don’t have a problem streaming the file through samba, it just doesn’t have the “omph” that it needs for hardware transcoding of Blu-ray.
All that being said, i would get another one over the Raspi. Case/heatsink built in, SATA, PCI-E, dual gigabit, everything i need for a basic server.
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.
Glad i could help! My autism is finally helping someone at least.
I’m using a Netgear r7800 with ddwrt, with hopes to eventually move dhcp handling over to the Zima Board.
You’ve got me thinking about media streaming though, Zima uses the Intel quick sync for transcoding, so that might also have something to do with it. I eventually want to move to dedicated hardware for streaming, with some stronger hardware/software like an NVIDIA based solution. I do have an old graphics card kicking around, but i haven’t played with the pcie slot yet, so I’m not sure if that even a non starter?
I’m going to look into it more, since i don’t need 4k, but would be nice to have.
ADHD here: I live for finding people who know how to enjoy their hobby correctly: like you’re invading a country and taking no prisoners.
I’m using a Netgear r7800 with ddwrt, with hopes to eventually move dhcp handling over to the Zima Board.
I am seriously feeling the Zima, but I just went over to Orbi Pro 6–yes, I gave in for Wifi 6 and no regrets, the coverage with just one satellite and the router is unreal. I’m trying to decide if I’ll have time, but I really desperately want to learn OpenWRT; my first try was–well, there hasn’t been a second one. But there will be. I picked up some (read; too many) USB Wifi dongles via rmorrow’s list of linux compatible ones, so I could try and test drive a diy wifi router with it. God, that sounds fun.
The transcoding problem is one that keeps popping up. Depending on your price point, the NVIDIA SHIELD Pro (latest) can handle anything–and it is a genuinely amazing streamer and really spoils you for most of the rest–but that means it would only work when watching using that over Plex or whatever media server software you can put on it. And I think the X-Box? When I was researching during COVID, the only other all-in-one option was a full dedicated server with either Threadripper or something in that family; I think when I did the math, just for the processor, my minimum investment for 4K and Atmos/7.1 was roughly $600-$800 if I was lucky, and that’s before the board and like, a sound system that does Atmos.
I know there were some other possible options with hardware, but it’s been a while. If I think of anything, I’ll bookmark this page to post here. Hopefully you’ll find something you like and will work for you. I know exactly how frustrating it is finding a solution.
I started with an RPi 1b to read out my weatherstation (WH1080 clone) and post it online with weewx. Then a Bananapi R1 entered to replace my intel system as firewall/core router (savings on power usage, a lot). The RP 1 got replaced by a RPi 2, and tne 1 moved to the smartmeeter for readout. The main server (huge AMD tower) got replaced by a RPi 3 (again, power savings), Bpi R2 replaced the R1 when bananian development stopped. RPi 3 died on me (sd slot failed) and I got a replacement. As the 1st RPi3 was dead anyway, I tried to repair it (only use of the solderings at the side proved to be to keep the slot in place) and used it to replace the Bpi R2 as support got problematic.
The main server got upgraded to a RPi 4 8GB, with the RPi3 replacing the RPi2 that was handeling my weatherstation. I got an rflink, so I added domoticz and that now powers my kaku (dutch power switching system) in a mixed old/new setup. The RPi3 that was my main router (internet router via fiber) got replaced hh an RPi4 witn 4 GB mem, as the 2 GB mem version wasn’t available. (Not a bad move, with the on-board non-usb 1GB interface and a tad over 2 GB mem use)
The freed RPi3 is now for the smartmeter, so all RPi are 64 bit. (All running aarm64 Debian) Both Bpi’s and RPi 1 and 2 are collecting dust, as I haven’t found a use for them… yet. Looking for projects to use them. As media server they’re to light. (Although, Bpi R2 could be useful for that)
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 have a raspberry pi 3 running pihole. Been trying to get my hands on a pi4 but it’s been difficult.
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).
Thanks for the suggestions. I’ve been watching https://rpilocator.com/ for availability but still haven’t scored anything. I’m not in any kind of rush so I’m only sporadically checking.
I was going to leave the pihole on the 3 and use the 4 for other things. Maybe a small k8s box to mess around with.
Oh, that will be fun. Yeah, the Pi 4 is the universal screwdriver of SBCs and there’s so much community and documentation, it’s just amazing. Good luck!
I get the appeal of the single board computer but it never held much interest for me. That could possibly be because my manual dexterity isn’t that good and I found the assembly side of the SBC to be daunting. I’ve been more interested in using the tiny form factor Dell Wyse and Lenovo micro machines.
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?
I have a Dell OptiPlex 7050 micro with 16GB of RAM and 256GB SSD. All it’s doing is running OpenBSD as my firewall and router. But it is doing some complex routing and traffic shaping and queueing. It’s also a VPN termination point for the WireGuard tunnel between my cloud VPS and home network. My cloud VPS is, in this case, a reverse proxy.
Okay, this is cool. How does OpenBSD perform as a router? I’ve only experimented with DDWRT and–very briefly–openWRT that taught me I know nothing.
My complex–that I am leaving in a week–has community wifi only (they really did not tell me this during the tours) and only one (1) LAN that rejects routers (eventually, mine was caught). So by sheer accident, I ended up finding out I could use my Pi’s internet sharing to set up my network behind it using that ethernet outlet and not have to trust my security to them knowing how to set up multiple VLANS on a Class B network. Before I found the Pi solution, though, I googled a lot, but I don’t think I even thought of looking at OpenBSD to see what it could do.
I had a sheevaplug or something like that (I can’t remember the exact name, but it was around 2010). That thing was hot and it actually stopped too much times. Then the raspberry pi 1 (the original). Too slow. I’ve upgraded to a Raspberry Pi 3, that I used a couple of times as a desktop when my laptop broke. That wasn’t fun, it was slow too. During COVID I sold that and bought a Pi 4 from an authorized seller, so it was the official price. I bought an SSD and an Argon One case. The fan broke after a few month of usage, so I sold the whole thing. Finally I went to eBay and bought a Dell Optiplex Micro. That thing is the best. Used as a desktop, also as a server. It’s fast, smallish (not that small as a RPi, but it’s close. It can go to a backpack), and upgradable. It can have two monitors, two ram sticks, an SSD Nvme and also an SSD SATA. It’s a little beast.
My original Raspberry Pi model B I bought on release day, fighting the latency and downtime of the websites selling them. Never did much with it but was my introduction to SBCs.
What I actually use day to day are a Raspberry Pi 3 B+ which is attached to a 3d printer running Octoprint and a Pi 4 running as a small home server to host my NextCloud and IRC bouncer (amongst a couple of other things).
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.
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.
At work we develop instrumentation used in outdoor surveys, and I am writing a new version of the software which downloads the data logger and so forth. This is done by connecting a little USB dongle to the instrument.
Lately, I’ve been thinking about the possibility of adding an SBC to the dongle itself. My new generation of the software has a low-level component written in C++ which handles the USB I/O and a GUI component written in Python. So the idea is the C++ tool would run on the SBC and the Python would be a client that could run on any machine with LAN access to it.
So I am wondering at this point what would be a good candidate for the SBC? It would not need to be particularly high performance I think? Low power requirements would be good. And it should support wifi and ethernet and be rugged enough for outdoor use. (It would be protected by the metal enclosure of the dongle but may still be subject to temperature swings and some rough handling.)
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 haven’t gotten one yet, but Orange pi 5 plus.
Why
“Can’t use if I can’t maintain” – low power usage > performance, pretty much. And I’m 100% down on ditching my desktop PC for a couple of those little guys.
I have 2 Odroid C4 SBC’s that I use as desktop replacements and an Odroid C1 that is my pi hole and Quake 2 server.
All very capable for their intended purpose. Very happy with them. I chose them because they were more powerful than contemporary rpi devices.
