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.)
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?
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.
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.
The HP T620 is $275???
A used one from eBay goes for as little as $40. Businesses are dumping their old thin clients by the ton, so you can find them quite easy for cheap. The biggest problem with them is that it’s never all that clear what exact configuration you’ll get (e.g. some CPUs might be more power hungry than others).
They are quite a bit bigger than the N3350-based MiniPCs, but depending on what upgradability and ports you need, they can make a good alternative. It’s after all kind of the fun with the mini PC space, there is a ton of stuff with different configuration and price ranges. And unlike the SBC space, it’s all just plain old PC that you can boot stock Linux or Windows on, no need for special purpose RasbianOS and the like as in the ARM world.
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.