I Can Save You Money! – Raspberry Pi Alternatives

[James]

Check out the products we featured in this video in order of appearance:
Raspberry Pi 4 Model B: https://geni.us/RH5vfB
Banana PI M5: https://geni.us/KK6aB
Odroid C4: https://my.geni.us/links#!
Libre "Le Potato": https://geni.us/Qwsr
Libre "Renegade": https://geni.us/qNGet
Orange Pi 3 LTS: https://geni.us/Y1OlDj2
Odroid N2+: https://geni.us/2M12p
Orange Pi 5: https://geni.us/t9bsNin
Rock Pi 4C+: https://geni.us/iGwi
Nano Pi M4B: https://geni.us/Csx8uW
Seeed Mini Router: https://geni.us/3jAdA
Seeed Studio LinkStar-H68K-0232 Router: https://geni.us/jzad

 

You might not be able to get Raspberry Pi, but there are plenty of other flavors! We try to find the best alternative single board computer.

 

 

 

[Budget DIY]

And how do you plan on saving me moneys, when I'm not interested in such products?

[Rysters Tech]

I think the pi is overrated personally. The videocore gpu is horrible even for basic web browsing. 

[creesch]

What is glossed over in the video is the fact that software support for these competitors often enough is lacking at best. With some there initially is barely any support where they hope the community will somehow make it work, with others the initial software is all you get and there will rarely if ever be updates. 

 

Basically you maybe saving some money on the hardware but end up spending a lot more. Either in the extra amount of time in getting things to work or by eventually buying a Raspberry pi anyway.

[05032-Mendicant-Bias]

There are countless SBCs with various flavour of ARM cores, MALI GPU and pheriperals.

 

What makes a good SBC for thinkering is not the hardware. It's the software support and the open source community. The Pi wins by default. It's not even close. Like, not close at all.

 

With the Pi you can take advantage of countless packagess and projects. You can hit the ground running. E.g. Like the driver that uses the GPU to do transcoding and streaming of the camera using the GPU. It's there for the Pi. E.g. ROS is such an hassle to setup even when you have a blessed combination of hardware, OS, packages, etc... I tremble at the thought of compiling and porting to a new SOC! 

I remember playing around with the Jatson Nano to try the CUDA acceleration to do ML on my robots, and the OS image is garbage. Nvidia provides a binary blob and an OS that is a far cry from the Raspberry Pi OS in every respect, like no drivers for the raspicam V1. The CUDA acceleration, is mighty impressive.

 

If you have a special application in mind for a product you choose the right SOC for it, and it's very quick to grab a board that uses that SOC to get started. But then you keep the code private, and it doesn't help at all people that want to get started.

  

13 minutes ago, SiliconMagician said:

I think the pi is overrated personally. The videocore gpu is horrible even for basic web browsing. 

I bought a PI400 for my dad to replace his shambling computer. He doesn't even know he is using Linux, he just need a browser and bluetooth to transfer photos. It's competent, ultra small, consumes little power and never crashes.

[Radium_Angel]

9 minutes ago, creesch said:

What is glossed over in the video is the fact that software support for these competitors often enough is lacking at best.

I thought this was the case as well (I don't follow the SBC scene much) everyone talks about the Pi, but there isn't much chatter on the clones, and I was willing to bet the support that exists for the Pi, doesn't carry over to anything else.

13 minutes ago, SiliconMagician said:

The videocore gpu is horrible even for basic web browsing. 

I"m not certain these systems are designed for day to day use, so your comment may be unfair towards what the Pi is aimed at.

Could be wrong tho, I don't follow these SBC systems.

[Gokul_P]

Community support. Orange pi looks great on paper but the softwere is support is not great. If the video just targeted one thing and ltt community focused on one think may it just blew up. Rpi hardware isnt great but what makes rpi better is the community build stuff mostly install and play. And video completly missed some sbcs sbc seems to be good on paper Asus Tinker board https://www.asus.com/us/networking-iot-servers/aiot-industrial-solutions/tinker-board-series/tinker-board/  & nvidia jetson nano https://developer.nvidia.com/embedded/jetson-nano-developer-kit (expensive what do you expected from nvidia selling stuff for cheap(on us it is cheaper than scalped rpis))

[Ultraforce]

27 minutes ago, Radium_Angel said:

I thought this was the case as well (I don't follow the SBC scene much) everyone talks about the Pi, but there isn't much chatter on the clones, and I was willing to bet the support that exists for the Pi, doesn't carry over to anything else.

I"m not certain these systems are designed for day to day use, so your comment may be unfair towards what the Pi is aimed at.

Could be wrong tho, I don't follow these SBC systems.

I believe the Pi 4 series are the first ones that are aimed as for light usage it can be for day to day use.

[Bluebull]

I bought a pi4 almost 3 years ago. Today I wanted to buy 2 more to run one PiHole and another Retropie and was SHOCKED to see how much people were charging for them now. 

 

Amazingly you guys released this video today literally 30 after I stopped looking and now I think I am gonna just replace them with the "Le Potato". It should get small tasks done. 

 

Cant thank you guys enough for the info! <3

[squigy]

Hey, y'all

I'm looking to build my boomer parents a bare bones computer to replace their 18 year old dell. Is there an image of win 10 that can be installed and run on an Orange Pi 5? They have a much newer laptop for heavier workloads, they just need a 2nd machine that is capable of running a 5/6 person discord call and cardgames.io at the same time. 

I'm looking at this product:

 https://a.co/d/5NUjC2A

[Radium_Angel]

19 minutes ago, squigy said:

Hey, y'all

I'm looking to build my boomer parents a bare bones computer to replace their 18 year old dell. Is there an image of win 10 that can be installed and run on an Orange Pi 5? They have a much newer laptop for heavier workloads, they just need a 2nd machine that is capable of running a 5/6 person discord call and cardgames.io at the same time. 

I'm looking at this product:

https://a.co/d/5NUjC2A

That's an ARM chip, no Windows 10 image runs on ARM (that I am currently aware of) without serious work on your part

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windowsinsiderpreviewARM64

 

 

[creesch]

25 minutes ago, squigy said:

Hey, y'all

I'm looking to build my boomer parents a bare bones computer to replace their 18 year old dell. Is there an image of win 10 that can be installed and run on an Orange Pi 5? They have a much newer laptop for heavier workloads, they just need a 2nd machine that is capable of running a 5/6 person discord call and cardgames.io at the same time. 

I'm looking at this product:

https://a.co/d/5NUjC2A

 

No, there isn't an image of windows 10 suitable for any Pi like device as they all use ARM socs. While there is a version of windows for ARM it only works marginally well on a few devices with Qualcomm chips in them and even then I wouldn't subject boomer parents to it.  What you are looking for is a simple x86 nuc like device if you really want windows.

 

If you think your parents can handle Linux then you really want proper Raspberry PIs for the software support.

[Needfuldoer]

75% of the Raspberry Pi projects people build (I'm talking Octopi, Super Nintendo emulation boxes, very light duty home servers, and PiHole) could be done just as easily on an x86 thin client or old office PC. By the time you add a power supply, storage, and a case to a Pi, they're basically cost-equivalent. 

 

I'd get one of those before a mystery meat Pi knockoff with dodgy software support.

[Emzijs]

Just now, Needfuldoer said:

75% of the Raspberry Pi projects people build (I'm talking Octopi, Super Nintendo emulation boxes, very light duty home servers, and PiHole) could be done just as easily on an x86 thin client or old office PC. By the time you add a power supply, storage, and a case to a Pi, they're basically cost-equivalent. 

They are, but you need to count in the fact that RPi's are much more power-efficient than old office PC and they are somewhat easier to set up.

I am currently using Pi 4B as a light home server, but I want to move on to thin client eventually. Haven't done that yet because thin clients are not exactly dirt cheap either.

[silentdragon95]

Depending on what you want to do, a used thin client may also be a viable option for many things people tend to use a Raspberry Pi for. No, if you're planning to use the GPIO pins they're not for you, but if you want for example a PiHole, router/firewall, media player, SmartHome hub, ... they perform just as well as a Raspberry Pi. A lot of them are also fanless and they are also very energy efficient.

 

I myself am using a Fujitsu Futro S920 thin client with an Intel Quad Gigabit card (which is way better than having a bunch of USB ethernet dongles) as a router/firewall with OPNsense but you could feasibly use it for pretty much anything else that just requires a computer that's hooked up to the network as well. It's completely fanless and the power consumption is also very low. Oh, and the computer itself was also €35 on eBay, and even with an (ultimately unnecessary) RAM upgrade and the network card and PCIe riser it came in at significantly less than €100.

[Needfuldoer]

10 minutes ago, Emzijs said:

They are, but you need to count in the fact that RPi's are much more power-efficient than old office PC and they are somewhat easier to set up.

So it uses 5 watts instead of 15. That difference is going to take 100 hours of run time to save 1 kilowatt-hour, or about 7.4 kWh per month in the Pi's favor if they're both left running 24/7.

 

At USD $0.21/kWh, that's $1.56/mo.

At EU €0.25/kWh, that's €1.85/mo.

 

It's splitting hairs.

 

Used laptops are also an option if you're worried about power consumption.

[Emzijs]

6 minutes ago, Needfuldoer said:

So it uses 5 watts instead of 15. That difference is going to take 100 hours of run time to save 1 kilowatt-hour, or about 7.4 kWh per month in the Pi's favor if they're both left running 24/7.

 

At USD $0.21/kWh, that's $1.56/mo.

At EU €0.25/kWh, that's €1.85/mo.

 

It's splitting hairs.

 

Used laptops are also an option if you're worried about power consumption.

I'm not that much worried about power consumption but I wouldn't want to have another pc that consumes as much as my gaming pc right now. I'll be honest? I haven't looked into RPI vs Thin client vs old office pc power consumption. Thin clients are viable option, that much I agree. 

 

As I said in one of my previous comments, I am planning to move from RPI 4B to thin client. But I'm not sure what to look and what would be a decent enough to host same things I do on RPI and more. 

[709grows]

Any suggestions here for the best SBC for anyone that wants to diy a Steam Link?

[Zephyrmoth]

Would have liked more coverage on ones with integrated SATA ports. I use my Pi 4 as a media server so reliability is whatever but having to pay for external HDDs or slow third party enclosures doesn't feel ideal.

[Rysters Tech]

4 hours ago, Radium_Angel said:

I thought this was the case as well (I don't follow the SBC scene much) everyone talks about the Pi, but there isn't much chatter on the clones, and I was willing to bet the support that exists for the Pi, doesn't carry over to anything else.

I"m not certain these systems are designed for day to day use, so your comment may be unfair towards what the Pi is aimed at.

Could be wrong tho, I don't follow these SBC systems.

They straight up market it as a low cost pc replacement. A

[Rysters Tech]

21 minutes ago, Zephyrmoth said:

Would have liked more coverage on ones with integrated SATA ports. I use my Pi 4 as a media server so reliability is whatever but having to pay for external HDDs or slow third party enclosures doesn't feel ideal.

Same here, im not aware of any arm based sbc's with many sata ports. As long as you are using USB3.0 you shouldnt have any performance degredation. I know when i ran my pi4 on openmediavault i had stability problems. Even if it did have internal sata, where are you going to find a case that can mount 3.5 drives? Only a few exist for the pi4

[sliken]

4 hours ago, creesch said:

What is glossed over in the video is the fact that software support for these competitors often enough is lacking at best. With some there initially is barely any support where they hope the community will somehow make it work, with others the initial software is all you get and there will rarely if ever be updates. 

 

Basically you maybe saving some money on the hardware but end up spending a lot more. Either in the extra amount of time in getting things to work or by eventually buying a Raspberry pi anyway.

Dunno.  I bought a Nanopi R6S (rk3588).  I installed Ubuntu 22.04 LTS and it just worked.  From there I can install whatever I want, I can patch, install new packages, or compile things from source.  Not sure how that would be any easier on a RPi.

[sliken]

2 hours ago, Needfuldoer said:

So it uses 5 watts instead of 15. That difference is going to take 100 hours of run time to save 1 kilowatt-hour, or about 7.4 kWh per month in the Pi's favor if they're both left running 24/7.

 

At USD $0.21/kWh, that's $1.56/mo.

At EU €0.25/kWh, that's €1.85/mo.

 

It's splitting hairs.

 

Used laptops are also an option if you're worried about power consumption.

My rk3588 8GB, presumably more power intensive than a RPi (so claimed the LTT post) idles at 2 watts.  Most old PCs are going to be quite a bit more power than 15 watts, even at idle.  So the difference is quite a bit more than your example.

[Needfuldoer]

6 minutes ago, sliken said:

My rk3588 8GB, presumably more power intensive than a RPi (so claimed the LTT post) idles at 2 watts.  Most old PCs are going to be quite a bit more power than 15 watts, even at idle.  So the difference is quite a bit more than your example.

I'm talking about the tiny, paperback-size desktops like ServeTheHome's "TinyMiniMicro" project.

 

https://www.servethehome.com/introducing-project-tinyminimicro-home-lab-revolution/

 

Or, like I said, a Sandy Bridge or newer laptop would sip power too.

 

Even a desktop idling at 30 watts isn't the end of the universe. It wasn't that long ago that basic lighting used that much power. I'm not talking about replacing a Pi with a mining rig.

[sliken]

Anyone know what the 4 benchmarks used in the video are? 

 

I'd like to run them on my NanoPi R6S.  One benchmark I ran was compiling Rust from source, it was 7 times faster than a Rpi4 8GB.