Your single-board computer (SBC) setup ?

Rahul

@TheLinuxBug be the lead

and showoff your setup with pretty images,use case and total cost involved.

Also did you face any difficulties with the setup?

abnoeh

Is router with openwrt SBC?

TheLinuxBug

Appreciate the tag, however, currently busy doing errands so posting from phone. The other issue is it isn't like I have just one... Having helped develope H3Droid I have almost all the H3 based boards they produce that are worth having. On top of that I have pretty much all RPi's except RPi4, have a Khadas Vim, several ESPRESSOBins v5 running raid arrays, several A20's and A10's from when I started out, and a few H5 devices I am still to find a good use for.

When I get a chance I can post some pics later if people are interested.

As per usage, everything from a media player, to a desktop, to a server operating raid arrays. The fact they are low power makes it easy to put them to use or have them idle without wasting too much power (not suggesting I use all at once or anything like that) but just saying that to demonstrate the use cases are vast.

My 2 cents.

Cheers!

rockinmusicgv

Question, should I include my hoard that isn't doing anything but I just have because I want them?

uhu

Do ESP32 and ESP8266 count?

burble

I appear to have got myself quite a collection of SBC, including all Pi versions from the original up to 4.

Currently active SBCs are:

• RPi 3, RPi 3+ and RPi 4 acting as media servers. The 4 makes for a great media player and will happily stream 10bit 4k @ 60hz.
• The 3+ and 4 also act as 802.11ac hot spots.
• RPi Zero W acting as an OctoPrint controller.
• 2 x Beaglebone Black attached to GPS and OCXO providing stable, stratum 1, NTP servers

For picture porn, here's what the smaller BBB NTP servers looks like, with a small OCXO on a cape and GPS at the top right:

TheLinuxBug

Sadly I again find my self too busy to add much here, but I do have a bunch of pictures of at least (most of) my H3 boards: here

Cheers!

havoc

One rasp 4 as router for fibre

One rasp 4 for experiments

One rasp 3 for WiFi AP

One tinkerboard for home automation

Two esp8266 and a esp32. Not yet unboxed. And same another rasp 3

WSS

I had a handful of Arduinos doing dumb shit until I boxed them up and never unboxed after the move. I was most of the way through interfacing a Mega 2560 to an ELM 327 for nearly-realtime data on an external color LCD matrix, but then decided it made more sense to just buy a damn decent code reader.

SagnikS

@havoc said:
One rasp 3 for WiFi AP

Do you use an external antenna for WiFi??

FlamingSpaceJunk

I have a RPi3B+ sitting in my closet. Former job gave it to me for a project that never happened, and I haven't really thought of anything to do with it. My biggest problem with setup was getting Fedora or CentOS running on it.

There are lots of things out there that look interesting. I've been thinking about picking up something from Pine64. The ROCK64 and ROCKPro64 look interesting, and they have a cluster board for their SOPINE card, which would be a lot of fun.

I was very close to buying a bunch of ODROID-HC1/HC2 to build a prototype distributed, storage cluster with some old hard drives, but there are reports about them being pretty flaky, which didn't sound great.

terrorgen

I have a Pi Zero W acting as a UPS server (telling clients to shutdown after x minutes when on UPS power)

Other SBCs laying around doing nothing (yet):
An original Pi: wanted to use it as garage opener
A Pi 2 attached to the official touchscreen LCD and case: candidate for PiAuto
A Pine64 I got for their crowdfund: maybe run a centralized resource monitor for all the VPS I have?

TheLinuxBug

Ohh I forgot to mention, probably because it is in my signature, I do also have an AtomicPi x86 board that I use as an all-in-one terminal attached to the back of a 17" VGA monitor. Works great for simple browsing and simple web based games. My niece will often sit and play games on it when she is over and I think eventually I may just give it to her as she is old enough.

You can see a picture of my AtomicPi on my little mirror site I have made, https://atomicpi.systemonachip.net if you want to check it out.

If you are interested in seeing a picture of it attached to the back of the monitor, let me know and I will take one later and post it.

Also, during the Holidays, if you are in the USA, Amazon has it now on sale with the power board and camera module for $29.95 (note: you still need a 5v2.5A DC adapter as well).

To give you an idea, they were originally $35.95 with no power board or camera included, just the board it's self.

Cheers!

WSS

I might just have to grab another Pi to play around with. I swapped my last one for car parts.

Jake4

I have a Raspberry Pi zero running TVheadend with an Xbox TV tuner connected up to turn OTA channels into IPTV so I can record TV with Plex.

I also have a nodemcu (esp8266) hooked up to a small display acting as my local bus stops timetable.

Rahul

@burble @havoc

How much $ did the Raspberry Pi 4 cost for you from the re-seller ?

@TheLinuxBug Global availability of AtomicPi as of now?

burble

@Rahul mine is the 4G variant that I bought the day they came out. £45 from Pimoroni.

I use it with an external SSD in a USB3 enclosure which would up the cost a bit if you didn't already have one to hand. With 4G and an SSD though it is now much better balanced then previous gen Pi which tended to bottleneck on something (memory, network or disk depending on usage).

SpeedBus

Any good ARM based SBC which does 2x HDD/SSD support? Looking for something like a NAS for home.

Closest I've seen is the Odroid HC-2 but that does only 1 Disk.

burble

@SpeedBus said:
Any good ARM based SBC which does 2x HDD/SSD support? Looking for something like a NAS for home.

The Pi 4 now has Gigabit ethernet and USB3 so should be a serious contender here. I haven't tried it though, nor seen any benchmarks.

For what it's worth, a quick test on my pi 4 + SSD suggests a read speed of 232MB/sec, write of 150MB/sec, and I was able to pretty much saturate the gigabit network (100MB/sec) copying a file from it. Your mileage may vary, I have no idea if the speeds were limited by the Pi, USB3 interface or the disk itself and this will all very depending on your own usage.

SpeedBus

@burble said:

@SpeedBus said:
Any good ARM based SBC which does 2x HDD/SSD support? Looking for something like a NAS for home.

The Pi 4 now has Gigabit ethernet and USB3 so should be a serious contender here. I haven't tried it though, nor seen any benchmarks.

For what it's worth, a quick test on my pi 4 + SSD suggests a read speed of 232MB/sec, write of 150MB/sec, and I was able to pretty much saturate the gigabit network (100MB/sec) copying a file from it. Your mileage may vary, I have no idea if the speeds were limited by the Pi, USB3 interface or the disk itself and this will all very depending on your own usage.

The SSD was connected via the USB Port right (ie, via an external SATA->USB converter) ?

burble

@SpeedBus said:
The SSD was connected via the USB Port right (ie, via an external SATA->USB converter) ?

Yup.

SpeedBus

@burble said:

@SpeedBus said:
The SSD was connected via the USB Port right (ie, via an external SATA->USB converter) ?

Yup.

That is pretty neat, even if the speed is halved (say for 2 disks over the USB), seems to be pretty usable.

Any idea how well it could handle software raid1 by chance?

TheLinuxBug

@SpeedBus said:
Any good ARM based SBC which does 2x HDD/SSD support? Looking for something like a NAS for home.

Closest I've seen is the Odroid HC-2 but that does only 1 Disk.

Yes and No. Not out of the box, however, the two boards that I can suggest as long as you are comfortable with compiling your own kernels / purchasing additional expansion boards:

• ESPRESSOBin - to note I have 3 of the v5 version in 'production' (which it looks like they have stopped selling with v7 in it's place) as NAS using additional 4-port mPCI-E to SATA board in the m-pcie slot on the boards and running 5 drive raid5 arrays -- I have not yet used v7 though and it does have slightly different drive headers, requiring a more specialized sata cable now if you want to connect a drive and not have it directly connected on the board. They also now require you to purchase the case, which if you are planning to use it for storage is basically useless. Also has a built in 3 port gigabit switch, which if you want to do port bonding or use it as a switch is useful.
• NanoPi M4 /(v2) - I have not used this board yet, however, FriendlyArm provides a 4 port SATA hat for it for only $25.00 and provides a nice selection of add-ons, such as eMMC which isn't an option on ESPRESSOBin (they assume you will use a sata drive instead) and a lot more cores so if you intend to use it for more than just NAS / storage, this may be a better option.

The only concern in both cases is software support. The Marvell based ESPRESSOBin board is a lot closer to mainline than the NanoPi M4 but that is also because the M4 is a much newer product / SoC that doesn't have as much support yet. On the ESPRESSOBin's I have not used mainline so far though, as in my case stability was most important and I found the 4.4.8 kernel originally provided with it has so far been the most stable for me (one more note while I am thinking about it - in the case of the ESPRESSOBin if you intend to add the m-pcie adapter you do need to make changes to the kernel and compile it your self to enable port-multipliers, if you do get one and get stuck on this feel free to DM).

Hopefully you find this information useful.

my 2 cents.

Cheers!

SpeedBus

@TheLinuxBug said: NanoPi M4 /(v2) - I have not used this board yet, however, FriendlyArm provides a 4 port SATA hat for it for only $25.00 and provides a nice selection of add-ons, such as eMMC which isn't an option on ESPRESSOBin (they assume you will use a sata drive instead) and a lot more cores so if you intend to use it for more than just NAS / storage, this may be a better option.

oh wow this is neat, they have a NVMe adapter too. I wonder now where to find a nice and sleek 2-4 Disk NAS enclosure,

I did find this on Aliexpress, which seems decent-ish https://www.aliexpress.com/item/33038670915.html

TheLinuxBug

@SpeedBus said:

@TheLinuxBug said: NanoPi M4 /(v2) - I have not used this board yet, however, FriendlyArm provides a 4 port SATA hat for it for only $25.00 and provides a nice selection of add-ons, such as eMMC which isn't an option on ESPRESSOBin (they assume you will use a sata drive instead) and a lot more cores so if you intend to use it for more than just NAS / storage, this may be a better option.

oh wow this is neat, they have a NVMe adapter too. I wonder now where to find a nice and sleek 2-4 Disk NAS enclosure,

I did find this on Aliexpress, which seems decent-ish https://www.aliexpress.com/item/33038670915.html

To be honest with you, unless you need something classy, I have always just used a mini-itx or server ATX case and then powered the board via ATX power supply as well as the drives. The NanoPi M4 SATA hat actually provides a ATX plug on it so you can actually power the whole system from the ATX power supply easily instead of buying the DC adapter, the ESPRESSOBin you can purchase for about $5.00 a MOLEX to DC adapter and then also power it from ATX supply similarly. In my case I have two of my ESPRESSOBin in a really large EATX server case with a 600watt power supply, it powers 2 boards and 10 drives no issue in single case. Depending on your use case you may want to consider doing similarly.

Edit: I actually looked at those enclosures before, issue I anticipated in my use case was not having enough room for the board and a power supply (plus if a power supply fits your talking about an expensive small power supply). However, maybe it could work? Let me know what you decide on, would be interested to know how well a case like that works if you choose to get it. More I look though it seems if your going to order from Aliexpress anyways you may be able to get a power supply for even $18 that fits that, if that is true it may actually be worth it. When you get to spending $50 for a power supply though, I rather just get like an EVGA 500-600watt with 80+ bronze as a overall protection to the drives / system and longer life expectation.

my 2 cents.

Cheers!

Rahul

@TheLinuxBug

Global availability of AtomicPi as of now?

havoc

@Rahul said:

Global availability of AtomicPi as of now?

I'd stay clear of the more exotic boards tbh. Even if they're more powerful than a raspberry (thats why I bought a tinkerboard during rasp3 days) - the lower maturity on software support & community side is a complete pain in the ass.

TheLinuxBug

@havoc said:

@Rahul said:

Global availability of AtomicPi as of now?

I'd stay clear of the more exotic boards tbh. Even if they're more powerful than a raspberry (thats why I bought a tinkerboard during rasp3 days) - the lower maturity on software support & community side is a complete pain in the ass.

In this case maybe your a bit confused, AtomicPi is x86 with UEFI bios, so, pretty much as far as SBCs go it's probably one of the lowest learning curves as pretty much any x86 operating system runs on it, including Windows 10, Android, Linux, etc. This can though be true of some of the newer Rockchip SoCs where they are Linux / Android only and the software isn't as mature.

@Rahul I have no idea about Global availability of AtomicPi, thus my lack of response, if you can not order through that Amazon link then you will need to search out some local supplier near you.

Cheers!

havoc

@TheLinuxBug said:
In this case maybe your a bit confused, AtomicPi is x86 with UEFI bios, so, pretty much as far as SBCs go it's probably one of the lowest learning curves as pretty much any x86 operating system runs on it, including Windows 10, Android, Linux, etc. This can though be true of some of the newer Rockchip SoCs thought where they are Linux / Android only and the software isn't as mature.

ah fair. Didn't realise it's x86.

rajprakash

Not to bump this older thread, but those of you who have Atomic Pis, what your thoughts on the ease/performance of the board after a half or full year of usage. I have a line on a handful of similar tv box type machines with the same specs as the atomic pi, but cheap ($9 each including the power adapters).

Ympker

Got a RPi3B+ running Plex at home