1y ago

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

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.)

98 comments

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.
  
  BBB was my entry into SBCs but had to shift over to the Pi as my requirements got complex. Apart from what you've mentioned, there's also the fact that BBB is waaaay less powerful than the Pi, I mean we're talking 512 MB RAM and a single-core 1GHz processor here.
  
  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!
- 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 ??

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.
- 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.
  
  I owned several of them from the Kickstarter and second round. I wish I would have gotten the handheld version.
  Unfortunately Next thing co went out of business during their second Kickstarter for an in car voice assistant box. I can't remember the name of that project, but I lost $50 on it. They got sued over the name they chose, my guess is that is what caused them to go out of business.
  
  My C.H.I.P is still rocking in a special project sitting on my desk.
  For those that don't know, it is like a RPi but smaller, cheaper (originally $9), more I/O, and had WiFi & Bluetooth (whereas the RPi2 of the time didn't). DIPs (aka hats) were available giving HDMI, VGA, and other capabilities including the PocketCHIP which turned it into a handheld computer by providing a display, button-keyboard, and battery.
  While the project is now defunct, kept alive only by the community, there was an attempt to resurrect it in concept and form-factor as the Popcorn Computer on Kickstarter. But that one didn't fund so, alas, it is now an endangered species.
  "There he goes. One of God's own prototypes. A high-powered mutant of some kind never even considered for mass production. Too weird to live, and too rare to die." -HST
- I think, you have a problem.
  
  But a good one if you can afford it
  
  I can quit anytime I want to.
  Of course, with the RPi production and distribution pipelines being so slanted towards commercial/industrial users right now I can't even get a new RPi board for a reasonable price (if at all) anymore. I picked up the Orange Pi 5 instead of a scalper-priced RPi 4 to give the OPi 5 a try and it's really good. I like it a ton more than the RPi boards for network services, which should be true given the price differential.
  I also have been using the boards as part of university research and engineering projects for years now. Many of the ones I have on the shelf are pulled from projects when they wrapped up.

For SBC, you can’t beat Raspberry Pi. The ecosystem is just there and the support outclasses every other board.
For hardware based on SBCs, Pine64 hands down. Devices like the Pinebook and Pinetab are SBCs in a hardware shell and as such should feel like cheap gadgets, but their build quality is excellent and these feel like premium devices. I have just started messing with the Pinetab 2 and it feels like a device 3x its price, to the degree that I don’t mind that the drivers and software for it are still a work in progress.
- 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.
  
  Do yourself a favor and nab Pinetab 2. The wifi and bluetooth drivers aren’t ready yet (you’ll need a dongle or to tether a phone,) but that’s part of the fun: you can join the Discord channel and watch the discussions and commits happening in real time.

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.
My old RaspberryPi's all just work as webcam these days.
- 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?
  
  Where can I find a cheaper mini PC?
  The N3350 ones are the cheapest, they go for around $90 on Aliexpress. Finding a used one for $50 isn't all that difficult either.
  Before RPis went up in cost they were $35.
  For $35 you didn't get a full computer. You still needed a case, a power supply, a USB powersupply, a fragile SDcard and a stupid microHDMI cable. And that $35 is only for the 1GB model. The miniPCs in contrast come with everything included and even the cheapest models have a 64GB SSD and 4GB RAM.
  
  You can buy a quad core hp t620 thinclient for that. Make sure you search for quad core because they did come in Dual core variants.
  Pros: upgradeable, cheaper, standard architecture, comes with everything you need including a power supply, available with a PCI-E slot (Those models are more expensive though)
  Cons: bigger than an rpi, no gpio (does have serial port and you can buy USB gpio things), probably uses more power than pi.
  For 99% of use cases this is what most people need and not an sbc.
  
  I still love my rpi's, was on the wait list for the first run when they came out! But the chip shortage and subsequent scalping drove me away to buying recycled lenovo tiny PCs.
  Dirt cheap on eBay, like $60 without storage. Got three of them clustered for VM and LXC hosting loaded up w/ 32gb ram, 1tb data ssd, and 500gb nvme each. About the price for a top model pi4 these days after all the accessories and they absolutely smoke the pi's. Even have pcie on some models if you want to add a network card to build a router, or a small graphics card etc.
  
  No, and even with the Pis, that woud be only the Pi Zero/Zero 2 range. I bought Andromeda Pi (Pi4 8GB) right before COVID and the board alone generally ran $64 for that model (less for 1, 2, 4 GB) but that was before mandatory accessorise; Andromeda's kit was $115 therabouts.
  The only equivalentish board with low overhead is the BeagleBone Black (~$65 for the board, ~$10 for the case, ~$7 for the power, ~$8 for the sd card = ~$90). It has eMMC but only 4GB (you can actually run from that but only Single Project use cases) or you use sd card. I will say, either sd cards have improved tremendously since I first ran my Pi's off them or Beagle and Pi Zero 2 are witches, because other than during initial install/updates (which yeah, is slow as hell) or running some heavy work, response time is fine. On my Black, boot is roughly equal to my Pis who all run on the fastest usb drives I could find or a dedicated NVME. My Play is the fastest going off eMMC (it has 16 GB so I can run from it), but that's 'holy shit' territory so I don't use it as a baseline for anyone else.
  In case anyone ever needs this: Silicon Power 3D NAND is almost shockingly fast. I got the rec off a tech website, invested $8, and was indeed shocked. Boot time is great. I haven't gone above 64 GB cards, though.
  I'm testing the SAMSUNG PRO Plus, which also seems to be performing amazingly, but the size (128 GB) is still giving me pause.
  Completely subjective experience: above 64 GB, sd cards seem to slow down faster regardless of how much data you actually have on them. I could be imagining it, but that feeling goes back to before Pi's were bootable from USB.
- 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.

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'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 don't know how well they do as routers, but Orange Pi has at least a few multi-Ethernet port SBC options: http://www.orangepi.org/html/hardWare/computerAndMicrocontrollers/details/orange-pi-R1-Plus-LTS.html
  They specifically mention running WRT on the R1 Plus, so there's at least some path to using it as a router.
  I'm using one of their Orange Pi 5 boards as a Plex server running Debian and it's been a tank.
  NanoPi/FriendlyElec has a ton of multi-Ethernet boards. I haven't had as much luck with their hardware, but they're still trucking along, so it might work for you.
  https://www.friendlyelec.com/index.php?route=product/category&path=69
- I love my Beagles but the mess that is Getting Started and the latest OS releases alone is just...why.

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.

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.
- 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.

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 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.

Have an old Pi3b that works as a little 1080p Plex server. Wish I could get a four but I'll probably get a mini PC when I decide to upgrade.
- 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 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.

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 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 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.

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.

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.

I installed Arch on all my PIs just so I can reinstall every single one because they have abandoned new packages. But it also was unofficial. Now I just generally want to move to Star64 because Risc-V sounds interesting.

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.
  
  Thanks! I was looking at the Pi Zero due to general familiarity with the Pi ecosystem, but BeaglePlay sounds interesting. I will definitely investigate.
  One other thing I'm wondering about is what sort of linux distro would be best? It should boot fast and be robust in terms of not easily getting corrupted if it gets powered off without a proper shutdown. I have intentionally made the C++ software not manage any files locally for this reason, so it would only be the OS that could potentially bork itself.

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.

I've had an Odroid running for many years, just as a Linux server to play with and automate some stuff on my home LAN. I was looking to upgrade to something with more RAM and found that the SBCs with more RAM get expensive pretty quick. Plus, there is the limitation of depending on a custom Linux build from the manufacturer that runs on the device. So I ended up buying a mini PC for not much more than an SBC with lots of RAM. There's this one, as an example for $150
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BYD8SFBW
I ended going higher in price with this one
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0B74GGMBG
But for just playing with Linux, these are much more useful because you can run any normal Linux distro.
- 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.
  
  Did this bc there were no Pis to buy a year ago and I'm really glad. Learning Proxmox and hosting a ton of stuff on a little thin client the size of a VHS tape that was about 200€ and sits quietly in the corner of my room was totally worth it. There are alot of offers for used ones on ebay, e.g. lenovo thinkcentre mini, hp prodesk mini, dell optiplex mini.

A pi 3 model b for a hosting project in high school and a pi zero w to host discord bots. I like the Pis and I basically ran them headless. I had a plan to turn a portable display into an AIO computer of sorts. But that costs money I do not have at the moment.

I had a few Raspberry Pis and some Libre Computer boards a while back, but I recently decided to just build a beefy small form factor PC and put Proxmox on it, and honestly couldn’t be happier with the results. The ability to allocate resources for services and containers on the fly is a game changer. I can spin up a fresh container running whatever service I want in a matter of minutes without the hassle of flashing to a device and setting up networking, etc.

Pi4 for HomeAssistant + audio streamer with a HiFiBerry card, with external SSD, google Coral stick for Frigate, and a Zwave stick. Running OSMC as OS.
Pi3b with OSMC as audio streamer
Small fanless HTPC on a six year old Apollo lake mini ITX mobo. Looking forward to upgrading this one soon with one of the recently announced alderlake N100 fanless mini itx mobos.

I initially got a Z80-MBC2, a Z80-based SBC that runs CP/M and other operating systems, as I had developed an Intel 8080 cross assembler and wanted to run on actual hardware the code assembled with it. It was so fun I got a V20-MBC, an SBC by the same maker that features a Nec V20 (8088 + 8080) and can run CP/M-86.
Both SBCs led me down a fascinating retrocomputing rabbit hole.

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