I Can Save You Money! – Raspberry Pi Alternatives

[BondiBlue]

@Needfuldoer Something to keep in mind with the power consumption is that boards like the Pi usually run on low voltage sources, often through USB ports at 5V. Machines like the Lenovo ThinkCentre Tiny rely on an external power brick with a mains power input (100-240V AC), so unless you're willing to do some modifications it can be easier to power a Pi (or other boards powered from 5V) from something like a small solar setup without having to take into account converting DC to AC. 

 

I'm a big fan of using thin client machines for home server tasks and other similar projects (I was working on a ThinkCentre M710q unit earlier today, in fact), but sometimes the power usage and voltages can play a bigger role than just a slight cost savings. 

[k3kp]

4 hours ago, sliken said:

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.

Any ARM software will run on most of these boards. The biggest difference is the closed source drivers, binary blobs and kernels that are needed to run on the raspberry pi competitors. Often they are shipped with drivers and a kernel that will never be updated or supported, it's a "one and done" sort of approach. This is in stark contrast to a raspberry pi board where the raspberry pi foundation contributes upstream to the Linux kernel. There is no "free as in speech" with a lot of the competitor boards, and many are in violation of the Linux GPL open source software license for not releasing source code appropriately. While it was briefly mentioned at the beginning of the video that the raspberry pi is "open source" I feel it was a huge misstep to not dive deeper into the differences on this. Anthony could have provided valuable insight on this I would imagine.

[geerlingguy]

6 hours ago, 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.

Right now this, sadly, is the reality.

 

Unless you're patient and/or lucky with rpilocator.com, getting a used Mini/Tiny PC (I have a Lenovo m710q I picked up for $120) is a much better option for many use cases (those not requiring GPIO or ultra low power requirements).

 

It uses only a little more power, it's much faster, it has SATA and NVMe expansion built in, removable RAM, upgradeable WiFi, and way more IO... plus a nice case and power supply.

Sometimes it even includes an SSD and Windows license!

[creesch]

5 hours ago, sliken said:

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.

 I am betting that the Ubuntu image you had to install was provided not by ubuntu. But the manufacture of the board. This is likely because they provided a custom kernel with code blobs to make it work. With many of these boards it means you are effectively stuck with that kernel version as they are not actively maintaining them after the release of the board.

 

This aspect specifically is where the Raspberry pi foundation has stood out from the crowd. The first Pi was released on February 29, 2012 and it is still supported and will be until at least January 2026.  That is well over a decade of software support, none of these competitors so far have been able to match that kind of support. 

 

And to be clear, that isn't to say these other boards are useless. But you need to know what you are getting into and depending on your use case they might still be suitable. As a control board for a CNC that isn't connected to the internet and doesn't need updates, probably fine. As a device connected to the internet interacting with the world, probably a pass from me out of security concerns in the long term.

[DarkSwordsman]

I was actually looking into pi alternatives just today before I saw this video was released. I wanted something light to possibly support VR wireless streaming (basically just the video decoding part anyways). Something like the potato with a Wifi6 receiver and a battery bank could probably turn a wired VR headset into a wireless one for less than $100. There is an open source VR project already too that could hint at how to do this, plus Virtual Desktop supports a variety of SteamVR setups including wireless. I'd love to try it out, especially if it means I could get H265 10-bit 4:4:4 full range to work on any headset.

[WolframaticAlpha]

I am surprised they did not mention the Jetson Nano. It is much better at GPU workloads, has a better encode/decode, a very good CPU(tegra X1, similar to the nvidia shield), ML performance and more importantly the works out-of-box nature of CUDA for many projects, and has official software support from Nvidia. And Nvidia's ubuntu image has steadily gotten better. It is way better than the *pi, and is one of the best alternatives to the Pi.

[Kilrah]

10 hours ago, sliken said:

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.

It's not for generic desktop or server/network stuff that it becomes a problem, it's if you're going to start interfacing with the hardware (GPU acceleration, hardware encoding/decoding, GPIO, SPI, camera,...)

Yes they all physically have those interfaces but they'll all be working a bit differently in software, have different libraries available to use them etc, which means that on a project that's dependent on these there's almost zero chance you can just take the version that was designed for the Rpi and run it on another board as is. There will be things to change, and since the docs / community for those other boards is often way subpar / smaller good luck even finding the information to try and sort it out yourself if you're even able to. 

 

That's the main problem, there are lots of cool hardware projects around to build, but for a lot of those if you just want to get going you'll need a real pi and nothing else.

[Spindel]

15 hours ago, 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. 

 

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

I can't fit an old x86 system in a match box, tape it to the back of the TV/Monitor, power it of a USB port in the router/TV/Monitor, have it running in the car or run it completely silent (without fans).

 

Given I've not tinkered with my RPi (versin 2b) for years now. But what I said was specially true when the 2b was new.  

[sliken]

14 hours ago, Kilrah said:

It's not for generic desktop or server/network stuff that it becomes a problem, it's if you're going to start interfacing with the hardware (GPU acceleration, hardware encoding/decoding, GPIO, SPI, camera,...)

Yes they all physically have those interfaces but they'll all be working a bit differently in software, have different libraries available to use them etc, which means that on a project that's dependent on these there's almost zero chance you can just take the version that was designed for the Rpi and run it on another board as is. There will be things to change, and since the docs / community for those other boards is often way subpar / smaller good luck even finding the information to try and sort it out yourself if you're even able to. 

 

That's the main problem, there are lots of cool hardware projects around to build, but for a lot of those if you just want to get going you'll need a real pi and nothing else.

The RPi does get much right and just works and for hardware projects I would lean towards the RPI.  Anything talking to GPIOs or over the proprietary camera (DRM protected) interface.  My interest is in SBCs for small/low power servers.  Pi-hole, file server, router/firewall, DNS, DHCP, RADVD, vaultwarden, object detection, motion detection, home automation, streaming media to TV etc.

 

The RK3588 has MUCH better CPU, ram, PCIe, ethernet/storage (PCIe connected), etc.  People mention the "one and done" kernels, and yes I did use a Ubuntu 22.04 image from Friendly Elec.

 

However, I looked around and found the Rockchip kernel list, seems quite lively.  It's had 150+ patches/pull requests since Feb 1st.  Including things like improvements for ethernet controller support (R8125), PCIe improvements, eMMC improvements, AV1 decoder (8 bit and 10 bit bitstreams up to 7680x4320, adding film grain with postprocessor, support for 5 pixel formats) etc.  Not bad for 2 weeks.

I agree that if your goal is a hardware project using GPIO, use whatever SBC (most likely RPI) the project used.  However if your goal is running some software/network services you might well find that the community around the software is *MUCH* larger than the RPI community.  

[Bitter]

On 2/13/2023 at 2:20 PM, 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/5NUjC2Ao

You'd be better off buying some Intel hardware from within the last 10yrs (haswell and up) and running that, a Lenovo Tiny or Dell Mini with a SSD, 8GB of SoDimm RAM, and an i5 4590T would be easier to work with, support Win10, have a lot more power to run complex websites, take up little space and use little power, and is directly compatible with any desktop Linux you'd ever want to use.

[Chiyawa]

I'm surprise he hasn't talk about Latte Panda. I know it's a different league than all the Pi since it uses x86-64 processor and more of a mini computer than tinker board, but it is technically an SBC worth to take into consideration.

[SorryBella]

7 minutes ago, Chiyawa said:

I'm surprise he hasn't talk about Latte Panda. I know it's a different league than all the Pi since it uses x86-64 processor and more of a mini computer than tinker board, but it is technically an SBC worth to take into consideration.

Theyve done it, thats why.

[Kilrah]

10 hours ago, sliken said:

My interest is in SBCs for small/low power servers.  Pi-hole, file server, router/firewall, DNS, DHCP, RADVD, vaultwarden, object detection, motion detection, home automation, streaming media to TV etc.

Yeah I've gone that route and it's fun for a while, but then just consolidated all of it and more onto a "normal" X86 server, much less maintenance hassle, power usage not much higher and not more expensive than a fleet of SBCs and most importantly has the "oomph" to boost and actually respond quickly when needed for any of the more demanding services.

On SBCs any service is limited to the capability of that one SBC it's running on, on my server any service can tap into the spare capacity of "however many SBCs' worth combined".

[gRaN-Ma project]

On 2/13/2023 at 6:58 PM, James said:

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.

A system on a chip or system-on-chip is good for propaedeutic purpose, but you should pay attention to the paradox of thrift (or paradox of saving).

[wasab]

Unless I can watch 4k vid on youtube with it, it is not really viable for day to day consumption. It can be a good web server tho

[tweekzilla]

New to the forum.  Is there a link to look at the performance graphs that doesn't involve pausing the video?

[RonBurgandy2010]

I just want to try making a Magic Mirror that will connect to my Home Assistant instance running on my UnRaid server in a VM. Surely one of these random SBCs (say the Orange Pi 3 LTS) could do that?

[steelo]

On 2/13/2023 at 1:25 PM, SiliconMagician said:

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

It's not meant to be a PC replacement by any means. It is a small form factor SBC that works great for hobbyist projects.

[steelo]

On 2/13/2023 at 12:58 PM, James said:

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.

 

 

 

I thought I've read somewhere that there are compatibility issues with these 'off' brand pi's and running Raspberry pi OS? It may be a nightmare finding a Linux distro that works and does everything you want it to do. This IMO was an pretty major oversight by Linus.