I love looking back 10+ years for the cheapest Linux thing you could buy. People were buying devices that were for kids or a router or something and repurposing it because it was open enough to get a shell on / flash Linux to it and start doing projects with.
In the 2020s or somewhere before that we got a bunch of dedicated cheap MCUs that were good enough and I think stole the thunder from full Linux but there are still projects to run it on things like the ESP32 family.
Either way, hardware hacking is still my favorite hobby to watch.
For a while, and I think even still today, the cheapest linux thing you can buy that has USB ports, wifi, and a power adapter are those Rockchip CPU powered Android TV boxes that are super popular from aliexpress and the like. There were people getting pretty mainline Linux distros on them. They have all moved on to be more expensive now (with 8GB RAM and way more cores than needed), but if you look back at ones from a few years ago you can find ones that were 1GB or 2GB of ram with a bit of eMMC storage and a quad core arm CPU roughly equivalent to a Raspberry Pi 3 in performance. Unlike a lot of these linux microcontroller-sized boards, you got barrel jack power in, HDMI video out, wifi, usb ports, an audio out, and a nice case for it. What you lack is exposed GPIO usually. At one point you could find them for around $24. FOr people who don't need the GPIO and instead want to use a keyboard/mouse/monitor with one, I think those are often better options than the SBC market embedded-style dev boards. I think you still can if you look hard enough.
One of these days, I will do a project with linux on a cheap Rockchip handheld game console. Many already have builds of rocknix which is a retro game focused OS with mainline latest kernels. Many of these can be had for < $50 and boot from sdcard, and have wifi and bluetooth.
> They have all moved on to be more expensive now (with 8GB RAM and way more cores than needed)
even the exact same model that I use for, ahem, iptv purposes has ballooned in price by 50% over the past few years, despite no design upgrades/changes :(
Milk-V Duo has been a pretty popular RISC-V board, one of the more mainstream affordable RISC-V boards. We did a reading group on RISC-V machine code where we used this as the initial board. It even has it's own fcked up vector instructions that are based an RVV draft with some extensions. gcc has its own arch specifier for it (xtheadvector*, e.g. -march=rv64gc_xtheadvector).
When they were that cheap, I would grab my one on every trip to Microcenter, just because I'd probably find a use for it, and if I didn't, I knew someone else would want it. Fun times.
To be fair, you're comparing a Pi Zero which I can still walk into Micro Center and buy for $10 today to a 16GB Pi 5, where the insane 3× price hike is almost entirely due to the RAM: I can buy an 8GB Pi 5 for $175, less than half the price of the 16GB model, again quoting in stock prices at my nearest Micro Center.
For reference, the cheapest 16GB LPDDR4 (not 4X as used in the Pi 5) DIMM in stock is more than $150, which is about what I paid for the 64GB of DDR4 in my desktop a couple years ago.
Zero at $5 was never profitable. I think it was reported that they consulted Eric Schmidt and followed his advice to sell the core hardware at loss and recoup from accessories and bundle sales, which didn't suit their business, but did it anyway. This was why it was limited to 1 per customer and also because Pi Zero and Pico models have a more overpriced/appropriately-priced "WH" variants with no purchase limits.
> RPi is horrible value now you can get so much more from a lot of other boards it's not even a comparison now.
They didn't really exist before. And software support is still best on RPi. But they did really lose the plot because you could buy a whole x86 mini PC (new) for less and they're much better (unless you need GPIO).
This is something that a lot of people seem to forget. I remember a friend showing me a low-performance Linux-based devboard shortly before the release of the Raspberry Pi. It cost hundreds of dollars. On top of that, support for the board was worse than the support for most of the Linux devboards released after the Raspberry Pi (which often has poor support compared to the Raspberry Pi).
> unless you need GPIO
I'm not even sure how that is relevant in most use cases if cost is a factor. Microcontroller development boards are inexpensive and will hook up to the x86 mini PC via USB. If you're willing to pay a bit more, many Wi-Fi based options are available.
I wouldn't say they lost the plot as they really don't have much choice with the current inflated component prices. It's either increase the prices or discontinue the products.
Personally I think the LicheeRV nano on SG2002 is worth the investment of 15-20 bucks.
This thing has USB OTG, multiple usable GPIO and can be flashed via microSD and has a display out with touch support.
I was in the process on building a little iPod Nano clone[1] with Rust / Slint but i was too busy for a while, yet I plan to get back to it in the future. Unfortunately the sg2002 image has no CPU governor yet.
Maybe I switch to the tinyembedded dual with a custom PCB to save power[2].
One could buy an old router or Android device for media playback on a TV for less. So the main attraction here is not that it's cheap, but that it's small and has convenient GPIO.
A credit-card sized system seems like it would require a very small screen, a very small battery, or both.
With that said, add NFC, maybe a USB-A connector made accessible by part of the card folding back, and some UI mechanism to select TKIP codes, and a device like that could make an nice universal hardware security token.
This article motivated me to buy three of these, it was fun, I had to get a pico to build the interface.
I still intend to go back, but time keeps on slipping...
I'm sure many have collected an impressive number of SBCs since the beaglebone, someday I want to build a display case that runs them all on some distributed process as a visual art piece
This is like desktop computers from 30-40 years ago I guess. There were quite a few types of applications those could run.
I'd guess that this board is inexpensive as a cheap entry-level board into the pine64 ecosystem, other boards by pine64 are more expensive. ($60-$80 range.)
If the intent is to play with RISC-V cheaply rather than getting the absolute cheapest computer, I'd look at something with C908 (a small cpu that is vector capable, RVV 1.0).
A particularly good deal is the Banana Pi BPI-RV2: It has 4xC908@1.25GHz, 512MB DDR3, M.2, miniPCIe, 1x 2.5GbE, 5xGbE.
There is a cheaper Banana Pi BPI-CanMV-K230D-Zero. 2xC908, 128MB LPDDR4, KPU, MIPI CSI/DSI, Wi-Fi, 40x GPIO.
If serious about RISC-V, then of course RVA23 is desirable. Unfortunately any SBC with that is currently expensive due to the RAM shortage situation.
The C906 core that runs Linux on the BL808 SoC on this device has roughly the same integer performance as a P3 on a per Mhz basis. The C906 is about 2.4 DMIPS / Mhz and the P3 is roughly 2.4 (Katmai core) - 2.8 (Tualatin core) DMPIS / Mhz depending on the version. You are looking at roughly P3 450 integer performance
Its an interesting comparison that Im not sure reflects positively on the RISC-V C906 core when you factor in core area and process nodes and core area, 22nm vs 250nm. Even if we choose the worst case scenario for the P3 cores to compare which would be the Katmai core. We are basically look at ~parity with a 30 year old core design
C906 core only @ 22nm = ~0.6 mm2
C906 core only @ 250nm = ~78 mm2 (geometric transform)
P3 core only @ 22nm = ~0.5 mm2 (geometric transform)
P3 core only @ 250nm = ~76 mm2
Apologies if this is messy and badly formatted. Im currently at a wedding, sat waiting between the ceremony and the after party and Ive quite a few beers. I responded because its something I looked at previously with RISC-V cores and I already had the answers in my head
Damn, I just checked eBay prices - even second hand some people are asking close to this! I should dig mine out and cash in too.
Out of interest I just dug out my invoice for the pi500+ I brought almost exactly 12 months ago - looks I got it at around 40% of the price it goes for today.
I agree with the other poster though, ESP32 is a good alternative if you don't need linux - these things are great ...
I got a proxmox server hosting many stuff on a T530 thinkpad I got for less than $5, now beat that! Actually, I have a 2015 imac running archos that I got free from an old boomer, he even incl the magic mouse and keyboard.
In the 2020s or somewhere before that we got a bunch of dedicated cheap MCUs that were good enough and I think stole the thunder from full Linux but there are still projects to run it on things like the ESP32 family.
Either way, hardware hacking is still my favorite hobby to watch.
even the exact same model that I use for, ahem, iptv purposes has ballooned in price by 50% over the past few years, despite no design upgrades/changes :(
These days we'd be lucky to see certain models discounted to $314.
For reference, the cheapest 16GB LPDDR4 (not 4X as used in the Pi 5) DIMM in stock is more than $150, which is about what I paid for the 64GB of DDR4 in my desktop a couple years ago.
bit of an over-wrouught unit of time, ha
https://youtu.be/AEKbFMvkLIc
Personally the pricing changes are absurd even with inflation and memory prices in mind.
RPi is horrible value now you can get so much more from a lot of other boards it's not even a comparison now.
They didn't really exist before. And software support is still best on RPi. But they did really lose the plot because you could buy a whole x86 mini PC (new) for less and they're much better (unless you need GPIO).
This is something that a lot of people seem to forget. I remember a friend showing me a low-performance Linux-based devboard shortly before the release of the Raspberry Pi. It cost hundreds of dollars. On top of that, support for the board was worse than the support for most of the Linux devboards released after the Raspberry Pi (which often has poor support compared to the Raspberry Pi).
> unless you need GPIO
I'm not even sure how that is relevant in most use cases if cost is a factor. Microcontroller development boards are inexpensive and will hook up to the x86 mini PC via USB. If you're willing to pay a bit more, many Wi-Fi based options are available.
This thing has USB OTG, multiple usable GPIO and can be flashed via microSD and has a display out with touch support.
I was in the process on building a little iPod Nano clone[1] with Rust / Slint but i was too busy for a while, yet I plan to get back to it in the future. Unfortunately the sg2002 image has no CPU governor yet.
Maybe I switch to the tinyembedded dual with a custom PCB to save power[2].
1: https://github.com/nanowave-player/nanowave-ui
2: https://github.com/yuansco/TinyEmbedded-Dual/
https://kiisu.io/
1: https://esp32s.com/wiki/cyd-28-esp32/
With that said, add NFC, maybe a USB-A connector made accessible by part of the card folding back, and some UI mechanism to select TKIP codes, and a device like that could make an nice universal hardware security token.
They’re awful to use but they are very cheap.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casio_Film_Card_calculators
I don't think it's too wild to expect Linux to run in this form factor, 40 years later.
I still intend to go back, but time keeps on slipping...
I'm sure many have collected an impressive number of SBCs since the beaglebone, someday I want to build a display case that runs them all on some distributed process as a visual art piece
https://pine64.com/product/128mb-ox64-sbc-available-on-decem...
It has 64 MB of internal psram and these cores:
- 64-bit 480MHz RV64 C906
- 32-bit 320MHz RV32 E907
- 32-bit 150MHz RV32 E902
This is like desktop computers from 30-40 years ago I guess. There were quite a few types of applications those could run.
I'd guess that this board is inexpensive as a cheap entry-level board into the pine64 ecosystem, other boards by pine64 are more expensive. ($60-$80 range.)
A particularly good deal is the Banana Pi BPI-RV2: It has 4xC908@1.25GHz, 512MB DDR3, M.2, miniPCIe, 1x 2.5GbE, 5xGbE.
There is a cheaper Banana Pi BPI-CanMV-K230D-Zero. 2xC908, 128MB LPDDR4, KPU, MIPI CSI/DSI, Wi-Fi, 40x GPIO.
If serious about RISC-V, then of course RVA23 is desirable. Unfortunately any SBC with that is currently expensive due to the RAM shortage situation.
https://thelittleengineerthatcould.blogspot.com/2019/10/horr...
Sam Altman is just catching on ;)
This might be the most Linux sentence ever!
Probably a little faster than a Pentium 3
Its an interesting comparison that Im not sure reflects positively on the RISC-V C906 core when you factor in core area and process nodes and core area, 22nm vs 250nm. Even if we choose the worst case scenario for the P3 cores to compare which would be the Katmai core. We are basically look at ~parity with a 30 year old core design
C906 core only @ 22nm = ~0.6 mm2
C906 core only @ 250nm = ~78 mm2 (geometric transform)
P3 core only @ 22nm = ~0.5 mm2 (geometric transform)
P3 core only @ 250nm = ~76 mm2
Apologies if this is messy and badly formatted. Im currently at a wedding, sat waiting between the ceremony and the after party and Ive quite a few beers. I responded because its something I looked at previously with RISC-V cores and I already had the answers in my head
But online it's very hard to find
https://www.canakit.com/raspberry-pi-zero-2-w.html?cid=usd&s...
Out of interest I just dug out my invoice for the pi500+ I brought almost exactly 12 months ago - looks I got it at around 40% of the price it goes for today.
I agree with the other poster though, ESP32 is a good alternative if you don't need linux - these things are great ...
https://shop.m5stack.com/products/atom-lite-esp32-developmen...