I really hope that the community will start looking into other SBC projects besides RPi's since the whole chip shortage situation. The whole idea behind RPi's were to be "affordable". I really hope the other vendors would up their game in/for the future and we can see a competitive environment where RPi's are not a king of the hill but one of many players.
The issue at the moment is that Raspberry Pi are so far ahead of the game on the support and documentation side that it's a major hill to climb for competitors to get anywhere close. They seem to burn up their budget on the hardware and then forget about the product.
I like RPi, but for my own microserver I use an Odroid XU4. It has slower single core performance and it has less RAM, but having 8 cores available at all times is amazing
The problem with a lot of the alternatives is lack of libraries and documentation for developers. Also hardware support for videeo acceleration is often missing lots of features (or completely missing, so software rendering only, which sucks).
I use Texas Instruments BeagleBone Black and write software for it, and I can absolutely say that the PowerVR SGX530 GPU it has is the most difficult GPU to use by far of any that I have ever used, even NVIDIA. Imagine every GPU issue you have ever seen all at once on one device, and on top of that, it is actually not even physically wired into the display controller correctly due to a mistake that was made during its PCB design, causing a hardware bug that further limits its features. Technically it does work though and can be used to play games
I needed a second Pi 4. Just got a Pi400 for HamPi etc. Works great and excellent built in cooling. Stock frequency is higher at 1.8 GHz and safely overclocks to 2 and remains cool. The price of the Pi400 is reasonable considering it has everything you need.
Yeah, have mentioned that for a bit of extra space taken up and a few ports lost, a 400 is pretty much cheaper than getting a 4GB 4B and a decent case/cooling for it. If keyboard layout doesn't matter/you're happy with an external keyboard, they're actually available in plenty here - if you're really desperate, you could get the official keyboard hub and swap it (on that note, black and red is sexy 😍)
The reason youtube was stuttering under debian/ubuntu is because lack/poor of hardware acceleration support. Poor CPU is decoding the video instead of a dedicated chip.
@Making Tech That's a limited solution. It's like suggesting to someone running on their hands to hydrate : sure, it will help, however using their legs will help them more. It's exactly the same here, using the dedicated hardware is magnitudes faster than the general purpose CPU. This is why it worked fine in android but not in Linux. For more serious usage, enabling it is the solution.
Agree with all the conclusions in the video; thank you for putting it together. Would point out that if you intend to use these as “video players” as you said, you simply need to run one of the ELEC distros like CoreELEC or Libreelec. Don’t spend even a second messing around with those junky Android builds or trying to use a bloated desktop Linux. Something like Libreelec will deliver flawless 1080p/5.1 DTS/x264 playback all day long. They do it on a Pi2 so I’m pretty sure all of these boards (if you can find a build for them) will work fine. That big boy will probably do 4K/x265 and still have enough clock cycles left over to do some bitcoin mining for you.
I do believe this is the end of Raspberry Pi... Due to their board shortages and the high cost of exciting boards have turned alot of people, I am one of them. I teach and develop on the Raspberry Pi with my students, but now that a new school year is coming... my students will not be able to find or purchase them. So, this will lead me into other single board computers. With having to redevelop a new program around a new board, this is be my end to Raspberry Pi.
I highly recommend looking into getting older POS machines. Plenty of them run Atom systems and are plenty powerful enough for your needs. They are pretty power-efficient, dirt-cheap (since they are so weak), mini-ITX, so not too big, run off a laptop power supply, and also support both modern Windows and plenty of Linux distributions. I myself have 12 Atom-based machines, and they are excellent for teaching. Highly recommend looking into it.
It really ended up a huge smack with Covid-19. Most critical components I need have lead times of over a year right now. So it's mostly electronics no one have wanted to buy and that has been collecting dust that is available. Or some devices with all-Chinese components - because they managed to keep their component factories running while so many other factories slowed down or took a permanent break.
"When you play with these boards you quickly realize why Rpis are so sought after" . My experience exactly ! But I will say Orange Pi Zeros are FANTASTIC lightweight servers with low price and trivial power consumption & Lan. I have 2 running at the router for years now with no problem. Also the EEMC is not to be overlooked. I have a 3+ year old Orangepi3 non LTS I run Octoprint server on and it blows RPi 4b out of the water. (but some octoprint plugins wont work on it), so i run the server on a slower Rpi because its more widely supported on the community.
I think what you've said is the best general conclusion - they're great if there's an image available for the particular software package you intend to run on them and you're then going to leave them to run in the background. If you need to add to or moidfy the package, or you're going to be actively working on them, then you'll probably run into issues.
Yeah the orangi pi with Armbian is really good for general server purposes (thanks Armbian devs). For applications that needs hardware accelerations, rpi is the go-to choice. BTW orange pi 4 with rk3399 now costs ~$45 used and $65 new in Chinese market. Hope price elsewhere in the world settle soon.
I wouldn't recommend orange pi to anyone. FriendlyElec boards are easily the best chinese boards and things actually fully work on them for the most part. Luckily the armbian & dietpi teams have fixed many of the software issues that existed for orange pi but there still are many versions that are broken in various areas. Other than that there is pine and odroid which are I guess right under raspberry pi as far as peoples usage goes
@@gg-gn3re i just looked up friendlyElc, oh man these boards are expensive. the main reason i tried Orangepi the first time was because it has superior hardware for a lower pricepoint. I guess while Rpis are selling for the price they do these ELC boards are actually a viable option.
Yeah ... I was like, "let me get a bunch more for a home cluster" .... and ... almost $200 for an 8GB. For $250 you can get a mini-pc with Ryzen, RAM/SSD, case, PSU, ready to run with much better performance. For Homeassistant or a home server, at this point it's just a better deal to get a mini PC. Which is sad. This was supposed to be the $40 SOC that's $200 now :( The "hats" and cases/addons/stands/display and support for Raspi is still a big thing though. Sure, for Android I would still go with an SBC, but at this price point for the performance I will be looking at mini PCs rather then these. Well... actually I still have 4 PI's running at home, but I just ended up throwing everything onto a 12 core Ryzen 3900x with 64GB ram.... just spin up a new QEMU VM, and call it a day.... except stuff that occasionally has to run on a battery, like my homeassistant and MQTT.
Honestly though, except for experimentation (and assuming lower costs in the future again), a single little mini PC is going to give better price/performance than a Pi. Especially now that the Pis price is astronomical :(
Yeah, with the current market , a mini PC is probably better value for money and will give you better overall performance. You could then offload your I/O to devices like an ESP32 or RP2040 and have them reporting to containers on you mini PC.
A ryzen is a much better deal than a Pi for running a server, so I would say that the shortage forced you to get something really nice and future proof.
This is exactly what I did. Been looking for a pi4 forever and ended up getting a refurb mini that costs the same and is more powerful than an entire bakery of pi.
Ryzans are unuseable their idle power simply sucks. Thats why i not only bought a 12900k for my deskop after a very short thinking time. But i will also get an Intel 8th Gen i3 NUC now as 2nd hand.
I really think Pine64's SBCs (Rock64/Quartz64) have some of the best support after RPi, they really seem to believe in long term support / manufacturing; pity you couldn't check them out. The chinese manufacturers of a lot of other SBCs seem to be running like pump'n'dump schemes of cheap SoCs in comparison.
I've never used one of their boards, but I'll look into them. Have you got any recommendation between the Rock64 and Quart64 (it looks like the Quartz64 model b is similar to a Pi)?
@@MichaelKlements the Rock64 is more like a pi3 competitor but as far as I know pretty stable software/kernel support. While the pi4 continues to be out of stock at MSRP, it's a very solid bet if you just need a value SBC to do pi-like things. The Quartz64 is more pi4 competitor, it's taken them longer to get mainline kernel patches than RPi foundation would but they do seem to be constantly working on it. The choice of models is interesting, you can get pcie on the A version if you wish, or traditional RPi form factor with B version, and you can get emmc storage instead of relying on a microsd
The reason behind the bad performance of TH-cam on Linux vs Android is quite simple and does not depend on the board itself. None of the modern browsers under linux support YT video encoding on GPU, but rather they use software (CPU) decoding. The same applies to Intel x86-64 PC computers and it is especially visible on laptops.
My local shop manages to stock the 4B every month, although not a lot and they are gone within the day. What I want is a few pi zero 2 and I can't find any at a reasonable price.
I recently bought a used Fujitsu Futro S720. Comparable power, x86_AMD64, $25 including shipping and 2GB RAM. Has a built-in SATA-port and power consumption is great with the original power supply. Great! With a little trickery you can convert the mSATA-slot to SATA as well and built a neat server. The S920 (around $40) is even more powerful.
I hope the Pi comes back once chip fabs catch up. I used the Pi Zero W for so many projects at home and at school. The library, documentation, and full video projects for it online just overshadows all other alternatives.
The Odroid C4 is now two years old, but a good tinker or low power home server board. I've been running one non stop for just over two years. I chose it over a RPi because it had a dedicated Gigabit network chip (RTL8211F) instead of sharing bandwidth with the USB like the RPis did. Still seems to run around $65-$70, but I recommend also buying a eMMC module vs booting off a microSD. It made a difference for me.
I think the other thing we have to do is look at all the other units that you have covered and we build documentation for those as well. I remember though using the Asus tinker board and I just realized that the OS on that doesn't go past Debian 9. I guess it means we all have to learn a lot more especially me. We need to know what type of processor these are and making sure we have linux support all the various types of drivers for each type of embedded board. Its good that you are looking at all these different pi alternatives. I haven't played with them all yet. I have started playing with Fedora on a Raspberry Pi 3 instead of the usual Raspberry Pi OS (Debian). We as a community need to do more (including myself) , learn more and contribute more.
I think thats part of the reason that the Raspberry Pi platform has done so well, for a number of years almost all SBC makers were working on delvopment on just this platform. As you soon as you have the community working on multiple platforms, the skills and resources get diluted.
@@MichaelKlements With the advent of the bot scalpers I think this is merely one facet that we have to look into. Its unconscionable to even give these scalpers a single penny. I think it will take many different ways to make it unrewarding for the bot scalpers.
I recently needed a pi compatible board to run some arm-specific software and was shocked at the pi prices. The replacement I went with was the "Le Potato" (Libre Computer Board AML-S905X-CC) which installed Armbian with no issues and has so far fulfilled all necessary requirements. It cost $50 at the time of posting, so not terrible.
The only problem with that is Libre has pretty much gone belly up. Maybe they are still supporting other boards, but they definitely aren’t supporting the Potato. Their website hasn’t been updated since around 2019 and most of the builds out there are slowly dying as nobody wants to support an abandoned platform. Armbian, as you say, is a good choice. If you are looking for a good video player for the Le Potato, it is still supported by CoreELEC. And it works excellent for that. Ask me how I know 😉. You will need a heat sink and a fan though. The S905X runs hot and high 60s are not uncommon. I think the danger range is well over 100 degrees, but heat sinks and fans are super easy and will get you 15-20 degrees to the good.
I recently purchased the Le Potato. They just released Ubuntu 20.04 for it. I'm using it for some amateur radio projects. I did get the case with the fan and a heat sink.
@@PaulGriffith Let us know your experience with amateur radio and our software. We're trying to wrap our head around how people use our products. If you need any assistance, let us know.
"...I eventually figured out that pin 12 referred to in the script mapped to CPU pin 146 which corresponds to physical pin 32 which was labelled GPIO pin 4C2..." Well, that seems perfectly straightforward...
Stock everywhere here. They've just hiked the prices by 300% so I presume they'll keep their stock for a long time. I'm just grateful I got enough of them when there was no supply issue.
@@3nertia ? I did not argue it wasn't a function of capitalism. I just said it was unfortunate and ill-timed for me personally. "outside forces" just means things outside of the control of Pi manufacturers.
Been there, I stopped using SBC for hardware projects/tinkering. Using boards now with the RP2040 with WIZnet (ethernet or WiFi) or with a ESP32. Development is quicker, I/O blazing fast. When heavy lifting is needed, it is offload to a NAS running docker containers and/or Debian vm's.
This is probably the best approach for hardware projects - almost all hardware projects that people do on Raspberry Pi's using the GPIO pins would be better suited to the RP2040 or an ESP32, at least for the I/O and data capture portions.
I bought numerous alternatives in the past (Orange Pis, Odroid,...), but I have stopped - after 3 to 4 years, the support /software for these boards become unavailable or do not get updates anymore. Old Rpi models are still fully supported documented and usable. This is enough for me to keep buying only Rpis now.
@@robbietorkelsonn8509 How is this related to my comment in any way? I explained I get stuck on old distros because of lack of community support for non pi SBCs, and you are suggesting to 'learn linux instead'? Recompiling the kernel every time I need a new driver is just too time consuming while Pi documentation and software is up to date making it easy to integrate even with recent peripherals. I still have 2 Orange Pis monitoring UPS devices, but will probably replace them with Pis when the time comes. (unless I "actually lear linux instead" (??))
@@v1ncen715 instead of taking any comment on youtube as a personal attack, you might want to consider it's sound advice All peripherals you might want to connect to the header can be attached using user mode functionality, be it GPIO, SPI or I2C, so they don't need a new driver incorporating new driver modules isn't even all that hard to do either. I just think it's a waste to either buy a new board because you don't know how to use the one you already have, or pay high prices for a raspberry pi while better boards can be had for less money
@@robbietorkelsonn8509 I am not saying it is a waste, my comment was only to highlight the better community support for Pis that may be positive for most people. Your comment about 'you should just learn linux instead implies I do not know how to use it, which sounds like an attack indeed. I am not saying adding drivers is hard, it is just time consuming and not worth it to me. I wont buy a new board just because I do not know how to use the ones I have. But next time I have to open my UPS to replace the batteries, I may switch to Pis for convenience, and to avoid having to look for updated or working images on outdated sites. I replaced the Odroid on my TV for a Pi4 recently because Kodi is more up to date out of the box for instance. I use the Odroid for other purpose now, it is still a good board. But yeah, I don't think you understand the point, it is about convenience and saving time. I am happy to pay a few euros more to make sure to have a product that I will find documentation and software for 5 or 6 years after purchase.
This has been my experience with some of the other boards and microcontrollers I've tried in the past too - they're supported for a short period of time and then the company either disappears or they move on and forget about the older product lines.
"The documentation is great and you can find help for trouble" 😂😂😂 Thanks, I needed a good laugh. Unless you have a simple problem, like it just stopped working and only red LED comes on. The hundreds of files, forums and user groups and all I can get is "Reflash the SD card"! Like I didn't try that BEFORE wasting a week looking online.
My alternative for a Raspberry Pi is thin clients. Locally, a Pi 4 is ~250 (!!!!!!) USD, but a Dell Wyse 7020 (with 4GB of RAM and 16 or 32GB SSD), a quad core AMD CPU, PSU USB 3 and Gigabit Ethernet is around 50 USD. They consume slightly more power, and lack GPIO pins... But are 1/5th of the price.
It seems like they're prioritising customers making commercial use of the Pis. I don't think Pi's are used in things that would be considered "critical".
At least here it seems like layouts for our own country are harder to get, but there are quite a few available with layouts for other countries (and at the same "normal" price as the country based ones). Don't know whether it's the same elsewhere (which would make sense) but I guess you could use one if your use case doesn't rely on a keyboard, or you don't mind using an external one, that could fit your case? Apparently as well, the 400 and official keyboard are interchangeable with a bit of work (and with some tiny wrong labelling, though it's not recommended and will void your warranty) - been thinking of trying that out on one 400 I already have which has a bad keyboard (and I didn't think to try get replaced!) as I quite like the integrated keyboard and am satisfied with it on the other 400 I have...
I recently tried to use mainline Armbian patched by inovato, flashed on an SD card and booted on Android TV box Q+ with H616 quad-core CPU and 2 GB RAM from Turewell. This sells for less then 30 pounds in a case with power supply. TH-cam playback on 720p30 is reasonable and without SD card plugged in Android is booting from built-in eMMC and even FIFA on Stadia is enjoyable at 720p30.
Raspberry pi sold in my country cost almost the same as an old budget pc which is crazy for just a single board (furthermore almost all stores are currently out of stock until next year)... i think i would give a try on orange pi.. as it is within the reasonable price range
Yep, if you want one for a small server, retro games, or media server it is cheaper and you get a lot more power buying an old micro i5-6500T system for $100.
@@B5152g yupp, Dell's thin client pc has more power and has extra ports with included power supply that cost less than $100.. You can't go wrong buying it, if your intention is to setup a server. But if you have existing projects and need a replacement that is a big bummer...
Thanks, it seems a great guide, so finally I have RPi compatible board.
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As homeserver I use an odroid-m1, just 4 cores but 8GB of ram for 120€, supporting SATA/NVMe M.2 and eMMC storage. OS installing via Petitboot is a snap and chances are good to get full mainline kernel support as RockChip is known as community-friendly and an orange-pi router board with same cpu is already nearly full supported in mainline. Power consumption is fabulous.
I see some simplicity in moving our huge old server and large desktop pcs into more single purpose devices. I could have two or three m1 "servers" that would be easy to replace and then "desktops" are just another m1 on the back of a monitor. Seems 100x less expensive and easier to service. Is there a preferred way to learn about the M1? I've almost purchased 3-5 different odroids at various points in time.
5:00 Not sure any of those were even HD considering the settings gear in the player didn't show the "HD" in red/white like it typically does if it's using an HD-based stream.
The media playback is almost for sure because the lack of hardware acceleration on the linux setup. If you set it up properly they should all do 1080P playback at least. And that AmLogic chipset will do a ton of codecs too and even HDR IIRC (although not on linux)
I got a refurbished Fujitsu Futro S740 instead. Has a x86 Intel J4105, accepts specific 16GB Mem Modules, also accepts a M2 SATA SSD and M2 A E Key stuff like wifi module etc. Cost for the Futro in german eBay was below 50€.
So I wonder how hard it is to put something like retro pie or octopi on one of the alternatives, that’s my main use case as of now and they both are made for pi
If you can find a prepared OS image for the alternative board you're wanting to use then it should be pretty easy to use something like Retropie or Octopi.
I recently built my own home server and wanted to get a couple pi’s to make a cluster. Wow was I surprised! Looks like it’s off to eBay to buy some older computers instead. Just insane.
Android *is* a Linux based operating system. The reason video isn‘t running so well on Debian is probably, because it is missing a proprietary video driver.
I bought a Dell Optiplex 3060 (i3 8th gen 8gb 240ssd) refurbished for my home assistant setup, it's over kill. Wasn't dirt cheap but the only option cause we have no other SBC in India except for RPi. While there was NanoPi5s, it had the same price as the Optiplex but less ram and storage and I couldn't find proper documentation for installing any os except openwrt. So x86 was a better option in any way possible.
I'll wait it out. Not going for sub- optimal choices and also not going to get scalped. There are still plenty of projects to tinker with where a fast microcontroller is sufficient.
Prob missed one of the best alternatives Radxa which Okdo and RS have picked up after the split with Raspberry. You will see Okdo advertising the ROCK 4 SE and more to come. The upcoming killer RK3588 Rock5b SBC for $120 is actually a true desktop alternative and really begins to blur the lines between desktop and SBC but is still very fresh and like still better with a now long term mainline linux supported ROCK 4 SE. The strange fruits of Orange & Bannana Pi give a false impressions as they are 'open source' but they are extremely lacking to the likes of Radxa, Pine & Khadas. Orange Pi are good for cost but often have much less support than others.
I have a Tinker Board S that I currently use as an Android HTPC. It's pretty comfy so far, playing high quality videos on TH-cam and Kodi. You can even run some emulators without issue. I know that you can do plenty of interesting projects on it, but its software support is not stellar. The integrated eMMC is useful, though. I wish this hardware could have gotten a larger community.
It's quite dissappointing as it really looked the most promising to me when I initially looked at them. I'm surprised that they haven't put much effort into developing the software and support further - the hardware is great.
Are there any Raspberry Pi alternatives that allow installing official linux distro and live test different linux distros? As it seems most require their own modified version of the linux distro which is a security risk :( please help
@@09f9 oh thanks, yeah I see Ubuntu has made an official image for RaspberryPi but its not their main thing. I wish there was a de facto standard boot process, why don't ARM just copy Intel/AMD based boot process?
I am using the RPi 4B 8G, luckily I bought it early it was relatively cheap, I pushed it to the limit overclocked, it is barely enough for everyday use as a basic desktop, I always want an upgrade, still waiting for the Pi 5 to come. There are handful of similar ARM SBC in the market, the problem is, as far as I know, unlike the x86 counterpart, there is no standard architecture for ARM computer yet, so that I could not simply buy any model I want to run the same system on it, I must stick with one which is the PRi that can easily get support from various sources.
Yes there are but many of the projects have insisted in releasing boot images instead of providing a install script.. libree 905 runs just as fast as the 4 and the audio put is mixh better
bro, @ 10:02 you say that it's running at 4k... yes the MONITOR is at 4k, but the video is STILL just 720p ... if it's HD or 4K you will see the red icon over top of the youtube settings icon... which neither were there during the orangePi or the VIM2 video... (although I think only the VIM2 would be able to run it at 4k anyway) - :) Figured I would let you know
The ASUS CN62 with a Celeron 3215U in it, blows the Raspberry Pi away, and I can find them semi-reliably right now for $20-40 on fleabay. I just ejected 2 Pis from my home network for this very reason. I can't seem to find a Chrome_book_ for this low with a good CPU, but as soon as I can, I'll be grabbing one of those because it's got it's own built-in UPS.
Radxa zero is an absolute powerhouse for its size..i heard that the new radxa zero 2 will be sold at the end of this year..the orange pi zero 2 is also another good alternative if you want to use android os.. However I personally dislike the WiFi antenna it has.. Banana pi m2 zero is also another viable option
I do have a Raspberry Pi 4B 8GB RAM model. It is great but installing different Linux OS distros to is is a pain. I follow instructions to install a distro, and when I boot it up on the Pi, I get nothing but errors.
tip when video profiling. If you right click on a youtube video, you can open "stats for nerds" which tells you the dropped frames so you aren't just eyeballing it
In India, I was continuously checking all official seller's website for last few months first manually then using a script (That records RPI stock In Timestamp), but never found a single PI. So i think they are never coming to official resellers but going directly to black market( * 2 to 3 times price). I have Messaged RPI Foundation about this but no response or action. I think RPI Co. is hopeless on supply issues.
No, there is no "suitable Pi alternatives", end of story. Buying into the Pi ecosystem isn't just about price or hardware specs. Arguably, 80% of the reason we buy Pi's is for the software support and large community around them, and you absolutely will NOT find that with any Pi alternatives. Hardware specs and price are really only a very small consideration for most Pi buyers, as there are certainly better spec boards out there for reasonable prices if specs were all we cared about, they just don't have the software support and large community behind them like the Pi.
There is no real alternative to the RPi 4B. The other SBCs on the market all lack proper documentation and support, and in any case their prices have risen similarly to RPis. This RPi shortage and the resulting absurd prices are unfortunately killing a number of projects and vastly diminishing the attractiveness of the RPi as a hobbyist SBC.
The Rockchip line is quite cheap and open source from the bare metal up, and just as capable as Raspberry Pi's proprietary chips, minus the developer support. They're very easy to get.
The developer support is usually the biggest difference between these boards and a Raspberry Pi, for some that’s not an issue but it’s a dealbreaker for most.
The majority of Rpis are bought by companies, not individuals. I think it's something like 600K per year. Tragic. On the flip side, you can put an Armbian imagine on almost any SBC.
@@wiegraf9009 Development and testing on the cheap. It's borderline criminal in my opinion, because the Raspberry Pi was meant to teach individuals, especially kids, about computers and coding. You can do an internet search with some keywords and find some interesting articles on the topic.
@@BeeRich33 I read 50k per month for the Rpi 4 specifically. I think maybe that's 100k in total for all models. I'll have to look that up again though. I think the long-term result of lack of availability will lead to the Rpi falling out of popularity and use among individuals. I'm already looking into the Orange Pi 5 as soon as it comes out.
I really sympathize with these nerds getting scalped on Pi 4 prices. Like... if they're BeagleBone prices and you know what you're doing that means you get a BeagleBone, and holy hell is it more capable. To anyone who feels stuck in the Pi ecosystem I say this: Spite is a moral imperative. Some guy on Amazon wants to screw you and you've gotta screw em right back. Let the hate flow through you. Learn whatever you need to learn to get your stuff working on the other board. There's a reason spite got a pass when they wrote the seven deadly sins in the bible. For all the evil it does, it does an equal amount of good. Do it for spite.
When the pi 5 comes in the store's starting at a price from $100, im gonna buy a Intel Nuc or thin client. I mean with all the extra Pi accessories like case, coolingfan and radiator, psu, they are way out of the affordable pi game. All the other boards are not interested for me price wise. Like LattePanda, OrangePi,Thinkerboard. And the GPIO i fix with some external USB rs232 .
It's probably going to be much the same as the Orange Pi, it looks great on the hardware side but the software, documentation and support aren't nearly as good.
Yep, standard ASUS affair. The hardware has some interesting capabilities, but the documentation makes you feel like you're stranded in a forest with nothing but torchlight and a broken compass.
Hi, Regarding the Orange PI 3 LTS: The Allwinner H6 Got H264, H265H hardware decoder. Is it possible that the driver for this decoder were missing from the Debian installation? Can't you check again Video Playback w/ original OS installed?
TBH a lot of projects people are using PIs for like home assistant octoprint ect that don't require gpio, they would be better off with a re utilised thin client like a wise thin client last 2 I bought were under £40 already in a case with SSD and PSU.
If you're running something that you only need to set up once (so you don't mind a few hours of tinkering) and doesn't need any GPIO pins then this is a great alternative
If you're trying to find the IP of Orange Pi on the net, without a monitor and keyboard, make sure you've removed the MicroSD card from the reader in the PC and inserted it into Orange Pi. Don't ask me why I emphasize this point.
It's strange that you are having so much trouble with video. These processors are all used on high end Android tv boxes. Are you seeing any Mali GPU chips on those boards? The AMlogic S912 is more than capable of playing 4K and some of the more demanding games. So is that RockChip, although not quite as good as the S912. The issues are software/ firmware based. The hardware is actually more capable than the RasPi. I'm playing with the esp32 boards right now. Not exactly a replacement for RasPi but much more capable than I realized.
The issue is software related, the browser on all of these boards uses software encoding which doesn't take advantage of the boars hardware. They all run media playback better when running Android.
Awesome video Mike! I'm just getting into raspberry boards. Hoping my son gets interested. (He's 13). Before getting a Rpi V3+ I looked into cheaper options but decided against it due to lack of user communities and projects my son may like. Thanks for reassuring I made the correct choice
Yeah if your primarily interest is in tinkering with electronics and different software packages then I'd definitely suggest sticking with a Raspberry Pi.
I really hope that the community will start looking into other SBC projects besides RPi's since the whole chip shortage situation. The whole idea behind RPi's were to be "affordable". I really hope the other vendors would up their game in/for the future and we can see a competitive environment where RPi's are not a king of the hill but one of many players.
The issue at the moment is that Raspberry Pi are so far ahead of the game on the support and documentation side that it's a major hill to climb for competitors to get anywhere close. They seem to burn up their budget on the hardware and then forget about the product.
I like RPi, but for my own microserver I use an Odroid XU4. It has slower single core performance and it has less RAM, but having 8 cores available at all times is amazing
What os are you using?
@@orangezeroalpha Arch Linux ARM
It seems like my next video should be trying out some Odroid boards, there are quite a few recommendations for them here in the comments.
@@MichaelKlements I’ve had a few of them, they’ve been unreliable.
@@c1ph3rpunk I have Several HC2s, an N2 and an HC4 and they've all been solid.
The problem with a lot of the alternatives is lack of libraries and documentation for developers. Also hardware support for videeo acceleration is often missing lots of features (or completely missing, so software rendering only, which sucks).
I use Texas Instruments BeagleBone Black and write software for it, and I can absolutely say that the PowerVR SGX530 GPU it has is the most difficult GPU to use by far of any that I have ever used, even NVIDIA. Imagine every GPU issue you have ever seen all at once on one device, and on top of that, it is actually not even physically wired into the display controller correctly due to a mistake that was made during its PCB design, causing a hardware bug that further limits its features. Technically it does work though and can be used to play games
I needed a second Pi 4. Just got a Pi400 for HamPi etc. Works great and excellent built in cooling. Stock frequency is higher at 1.8 GHz and safely overclocks to 2 and remains cool. The price of the Pi400 is reasonable considering it has everything you need.
Yeah, have mentioned that for a bit of extra space taken up and a few ports lost, a 400 is pretty much cheaper than getting a 4GB 4B and a decent case/cooling for it. If keyboard layout doesn't matter/you're happy with an external keyboard, they're actually available in plenty here - if you're really desperate, you could get the official keyboard hub and swap it (on that note, black and red is sexy 😍)
The reason youtube was stuttering under debian/ubuntu is because lack/poor of hardware acceleration support. Poor CPU is decoding the video instead of a dedicated chip.
@Making Tech That's a limited solution. It's like suggesting to someone running on their hands to hydrate : sure, it will help, however using their legs will help them more.
It's exactly the same here, using the dedicated hardware is magnitudes faster than the general purpose CPU. This is why it worked fine in android but not in Linux. For more serious usage, enabling it is the solution.
At Sunxi site, there is a Linux kernel with GPU firmware embedded into the kernel. I don't know will it work on Debian, but it works on Arch
Rpi os aarch64 does not provide vpu out of the box inside chromium last time I've tried, and wasn't even working on vlc/mpv, like on armhf does.
@Axer101 that's the most stupid today's comment I've read so far. It doesn't add anything, and wasn't a horrible mistake.
Agree with all the conclusions in the video; thank you for putting it together. Would point out that if you intend to use these as “video players” as you said, you simply need to run one of the ELEC distros like CoreELEC or Libreelec. Don’t spend even a second messing around with those junky Android builds or trying to use a bloated desktop Linux. Something like Libreelec will deliver flawless 1080p/5.1 DTS/x264 playback all day long. They do it on a Pi2 so I’m pretty sure all of these boards (if you can find a build for them) will work fine. That big boy will probably do 4K/x265 and still have enough clock cycles left over to do some bitcoin mining for you.
I do believe this is the end of Raspberry Pi... Due to their board shortages and the high cost of exciting boards have turned alot of people, I am one of them. I teach and develop on the Raspberry Pi with my students, but now that a new school year is coming... my students will not be able to find or purchase them. So, this will lead me into other single board computers. With having to redevelop a new program around a new board, this is be my end to Raspberry Pi.
I highly recommend looking into getting older POS machines. Plenty of them run Atom systems and are plenty powerful enough for your needs. They are pretty power-efficient, dirt-cheap (since they are so weak), mini-ITX, so not too big, run off a laptop power supply, and also support both modern Windows and plenty of Linux distributions. I myself have 12 Atom-based machines, and they are excellent for teaching. Highly recommend looking into it.
@@xPLAYnOfficial thank you for the information...
why not use the pico, if it is about to teach programming ?
@@jyvben1520 Features and horsepower. It's incredibly weak and limited, making it difficult to teach the basics of computers with.
It really ended up a huge smack with Covid-19.
Most critical components I need have lead times of over a year right now. So it's mostly electronics no one have wanted to buy and that has been collecting dust that is available. Or some devices with all-Chinese components - because they managed to keep their component factories running while so many other factories slowed down or took a permanent break.
"When you play with these boards you quickly realize why Rpis are so sought after" . My experience exactly !
But I will say Orange Pi Zeros are FANTASTIC lightweight servers with low price and trivial power consumption & Lan. I have 2 running at the router for years now with no problem.
Also the EEMC is not to be overlooked. I have a 3+ year old Orangepi3 non LTS I run Octoprint server on and it blows RPi 4b out of the water. (but some octoprint plugins wont work on it), so i run the server on a slower Rpi because its more widely supported on the community.
I think what you've said is the best general conclusion - they're great if there's an image available for the particular software package you intend to run on them and you're then going to leave them to run in the background. If you need to add to or moidfy the package, or you're going to be actively working on them, then you'll probably run into issues.
Yeah the orangi pi with Armbian is really good for general server purposes (thanks Armbian devs). For applications that needs hardware accelerations, rpi is the go-to choice. BTW orange pi 4 with rk3399 now costs ~$45 used and $65 new in Chinese market. Hope price elsewhere in the world settle soon.
I wouldn't recommend orange pi to anyone. FriendlyElec boards are easily the best chinese boards and things actually fully work on them for the most part. Luckily the armbian & dietpi teams have fixed many of the software issues that existed for orange pi but there still are many versions that are broken in various areas. Other than that there is pine and odroid which are I guess right under raspberry pi as far as peoples usage goes
@@gg-gn3re i just looked up friendlyElc, oh man these boards are expensive. the main reason i tried Orangepi the first time was because it has superior hardware for a lower pricepoint. I guess while Rpis are selling for the price they do these ELC boards are actually a viable option.
@@fortheregm1249 RK3399 for $50 isn't expensive
Yeah ... I was like, "let me get a bunch more for a home cluster" .... and ... almost $200 for an 8GB.
For $250 you can get a mini-pc with Ryzen, RAM/SSD, case, PSU, ready to run with much better performance. For Homeassistant or a home server, at this point it's just a better deal to get a mini PC.
Which is sad. This was supposed to be the $40 SOC that's $200 now :(
The "hats" and cases/addons/stands/display and support for Raspi is still a big thing though.
Sure, for Android I would still go with an SBC, but at this price point for the performance I will be looking at mini PCs rather then these. Well... actually I still have 4 PI's running at home, but I just ended up throwing everything onto a 12 core Ryzen 3900x with 64GB ram.... just spin up a new QEMU VM, and call it a day.... except stuff that occasionally has to run on a battery, like my homeassistant and MQTT.
Honestly though, except for experimentation (and assuming lower costs in the future again), a single little mini PC is going to give better price/performance than a Pi. Especially now that the Pis price is astronomical :(
Yeah, with the current market , a mini PC is probably better value for money and will give you better overall performance. You could then offload your I/O to devices like an ESP32 or RP2040 and have them reporting to containers on you mini PC.
A ryzen is a much better deal than a Pi for running a server, so I would say that the shortage forced you to get something really nice and future proof.
This is exactly what I did. Been looking for a pi4 forever and ended up getting a refurb mini that costs the same and is more powerful than an entire bakery of pi.
Ryzans are unuseable their idle power simply sucks. Thats why i not only bought a 12900k for my deskop after a very short thinking time. But i will also get an Intel 8th Gen i3 NUC now as 2nd hand.
I really think Pine64's SBCs (Rock64/Quartz64) have some of the best support after RPi, they really seem to believe in long term support / manufacturing; pity you couldn't check them out. The chinese manufacturers of a lot of other SBCs seem to be running like pump'n'dump schemes of cheap SoCs in comparison.
I've never used one of their boards, but I'll look into them. Have you got any recommendation between the Rock64 and Quart64 (it looks like the Quartz64 model b is similar to a Pi)?
yea. as far as support goes
rpi > pine => odroid > friendlyelec > others
@@MichaelKlements the Rock64 is more like a pi3 competitor but as far as I know pretty stable software/kernel support. While the pi4 continues to be out of stock at MSRP, it's a very solid bet if you just need a value SBC to do pi-like things. The Quartz64 is more pi4 competitor, it's taken them longer to get mainline kernel patches than RPi foundation would but they do seem to be constantly working on it. The choice of models is interesting, you can get pcie on the A version if you wish, or traditional RPi form factor with B version, and you can get emmc storage instead of relying on a microsd
Rockchip Soc's are surplus Android chips at best in my opinion.
but they're all sold out everywhere as well!
The reason behind the bad performance of TH-cam on Linux vs Android is quite simple and does not depend on the board itself. None of the modern browsers under linux support YT video encoding on GPU, but rather they use software (CPU) decoding.
The same applies to Intel x86-64 PC computers and it is especially visible on laptops.
My local shop manages to stock the 4B every month, although not a lot and they are gone within the day. What I want is a few pi zero 2 and I can't find any at a reasonable price.
That moment when you live near the Raspberry Pi store in Cambridge UK :D
I am using a ODROID HC4 as my NAS. It has 2 dedicated SATA port and it is amazing!
I recently bought a used Fujitsu Futro S720. Comparable power, x86_AMD64, $25 including shipping and 2GB RAM. Has a built-in SATA-port and power consumption is great with the original power supply. Great!
With a little trickery you can convert the mSATA-slot to SATA as well and built a neat server. The S920 (around $40) is even more powerful.
I hope the Pi comes back once chip fabs catch up. I used the Pi Zero W for so many projects at home and at school. The library, documentation, and full video projects for it online just overshadows all other alternatives.
The Odroid C4 is now two years old, but a good tinker or low power home server board. I've been running one non stop for just over two years. I chose it over a RPi because it had a dedicated Gigabit network chip (RTL8211F) instead of sharing bandwidth with the USB like the RPis did. Still seems to run around $65-$70, but I recommend also buying a eMMC module vs booting off a microSD. It made a difference for me.
Old means mature. furthermore, Odroid C4 use a 12nm chip. It's in fact more modern than rpi4.
I think the other thing we have to do is look at all the other units that you have covered and we build documentation for those as well. I remember though using the Asus tinker board and I just realized that the OS on that doesn't go past Debian 9. I guess it means we all have to learn a lot more especially me. We need to know what type of processor these are and making sure we have linux support all the various types of drivers for each type of embedded board. Its good that you are looking at all these different pi alternatives. I haven't played with them all yet. I have started playing with Fedora on a Raspberry Pi 3 instead of the usual Raspberry Pi OS (Debian). We as a community need to do more (including myself) , learn more and contribute more.
I think thats part of the reason that the Raspberry Pi platform has done so well, for a number of years almost all SBC makers were working on delvopment on just this platform. As you soon as you have the community working on multiple platforms, the skills and resources get diluted.
@@MichaelKlements With the advent of the bot scalpers I think this is merely one facet that we have to look into. Its unconscionable to even give these scalpers a single penny. I think it will take many different ways to make it unrewarding for the bot scalpers.
I recently needed a pi compatible board to run some arm-specific software and was shocked at the pi prices. The replacement I went with was the "Le Potato" (Libre Computer Board AML-S905X-CC) which installed Armbian with no issues and has so far fulfilled all necessary requirements. It cost $50 at the time of posting, so not terrible.
The only problem with that is Libre has pretty much gone belly up. Maybe they are still supporting other boards, but they definitely aren’t supporting the Potato. Their website hasn’t been updated since around 2019 and most of the builds out there are slowly dying as nobody wants to support an abandoned platform. Armbian, as you say, is a good choice. If you are looking for a good video player for the Le Potato, it is still supported by CoreELEC. And it works excellent for that. Ask me how I know 😉. You will need a heat sink and a fan though. The S905X runs hot and high 60s are not uncommon. I think the danger range is well over 100 degrees, but heat sinks and fans are super easy and will get you 15-20 degrees to the good.
@@JohnSmith-gs4lw th-cam.com/video/q7lSC1FH_2o/w-d-xo.html th-cam.com/video/xetHqVwrjkE/w-d-xo.html
I recently purchased the Le Potato. They just released Ubuntu 20.04 for it. I'm using it for some amateur radio projects. I did get the case with the fan and a heat sink.
@@PaulGriffith Let us know your experience with amateur radio and our software. We're trying to wrap our head around how people use our products. If you need any assistance, let us know.
@@PaulGriffith Are you by chance using it for an Allstar node? I’d be interested if you can can get the Asterisk suite running on it.
"...I eventually figured out that pin 12 referred to in the script mapped to CPU pin 146 which corresponds to physical pin 32 which was labelled GPIO pin 4C2..."
Well, that seems perfectly straightforward...
If you don't need the GPIO, the camera, or LCD connector, buy a used mini pc or android box (many android boxes can run armbian).
You can also get USB GPIO modules
The main reason nothing will ever be as good as the pi is that raspberry pi has lots of official and community software support
and a gpu
I bought one of the libre computers. It doesn't have much support but i was able to set it up as a pihole.
Stock everywhere here. They've just hiked the prices by 300% so I presume they'll keep their stock for a long time. I'm just grateful I got enough of them when there was no supply issue.
Yeah seems like scalpers have switched from GPU's to Raspberry Pi's.
@@TheNefastor Welcome to capitalism - profiting off of hardship since literally forever heh
@@3nertia it's an unfortunate result of outside forces. *Sigh* and right as I was finally interested enough to check out RPis...
@@MindForgedManacle It's not though, this is literally how capitalism was *designed* to function ...
@@3nertia ? I did not argue it wasn't a function of capitalism. I just said it was unfortunate and ill-timed for me personally. "outside forces" just means things outside of the control of Pi manufacturers.
If I needed a Pi-like board right now, I would first check to see which boards have "full support" from Armbian and go from there.
Been there, I stopped using SBC for hardware projects/tinkering.
Using boards now with the RP2040 with WIZnet (ethernet or WiFi) or with a ESP32. Development is quicker, I/O blazing fast.
When heavy lifting is needed, it is offload to a NAS running docker containers and/or Debian vm's.
This is probably the best approach for hardware projects - almost all hardware projects that people do on Raspberry Pi's using the GPIO pins would be better suited to the RP2040 or an ESP32, at least for the I/O and data capture portions.
I bought numerous alternatives in the past (Orange Pis, Odroid,...), but I have stopped - after 3 to 4 years, the support /software for these boards become unavailable or do not get updates anymore. Old Rpi models are still fully supported documented and usable. This is enough for me to keep buying only Rpis now.
maybe actually learn using linux instead?
@@robbietorkelsonn8509 How is this related to my comment in any way? I explained I get stuck on old distros because of lack of community support for non pi SBCs, and you are suggesting to 'learn linux instead'? Recompiling the kernel every time I need a new driver is just too time consuming while Pi documentation and software is up to date making it easy to integrate even with recent peripherals. I still have 2 Orange Pis monitoring UPS devices, but will probably replace them with Pis when the time comes. (unless I "actually lear linux instead" (??))
@@v1ncen715 instead of taking any comment on youtube as a personal attack, you might want to consider it's sound advice
All peripherals you might want to connect to the header can be attached using user mode functionality, be it GPIO, SPI or I2C, so they don't need a new driver
incorporating new driver modules isn't even all that hard to do either.
I just think it's a waste to either buy a new board because you don't know how to use the one you already have, or pay high prices for a raspberry pi while better boards can be had for less money
@@robbietorkelsonn8509 I am not saying it is a waste, my comment was only to highlight the better community support for Pis that may be positive for most people. Your comment about 'you should just learn linux instead implies I do not know how to use it, which sounds like an attack indeed.
I am not saying adding drivers is hard, it is just time consuming and not worth it to me. I wont buy a new board just because I do not know how to use the ones I have. But next time I have to open my UPS to replace the batteries, I may switch to Pis for convenience, and to avoid having to look for updated or working images on outdated sites. I replaced the Odroid on my TV for a Pi4 recently because Kodi is more up to date out of the box for instance. I use the Odroid for other purpose now, it is still a good board.
But yeah, I don't think you understand the point, it is about convenience and saving time. I am happy to pay a few euros more to make sure to have a product that I will find documentation and software for 5 or 6 years after purchase.
This has been my experience with some of the other boards and microcontrollers I've tried in the past too - they're supported for a short period of time and then the company either disappears or they move on and forget about the older product lines.
"The documentation is great and you can find help for trouble" 😂😂😂 Thanks, I needed a good laugh. Unless you have a simple problem, like it just stopped working and only red LED comes on. The hundreds of files, forums and user groups and all I can get is "Reflash the SD card"! Like I didn't try that BEFORE wasting a week looking online.
My alternative for a Raspberry Pi is thin clients. Locally, a Pi 4 is ~250 (!!!!!!) USD, but a Dell Wyse 7020 (with 4GB of RAM and 16 or 32GB SSD), a quad core AMD CPU, PSU USB 3 and Gigabit Ethernet is around 50 USD. They consume slightly more power, and lack GPIO pins... But are 1/5th of the price.
sounds like a nonsense
Add arduino and voila! Le GPIO.
The Rock64 from pine is quite good; they also make a Rock64pro which is RK3399.
Odd you can buy a pi 400, is that because the other versions are going to business customers for critical business applications?
It seems like they're prioritising customers making commercial use of the Pis. I don't think Pi's are used in things that would be considered "critical".
I've completely given up on Raspberry. I've moved to ESP32 now and slowly porting everything I can.
I don't know about right now but the raspberry pi 400 was/is available at pretty close to the normal price.
At least here it seems like layouts for our own country are harder to get, but there are quite a few available with layouts for other countries (and at the same "normal" price as the country based ones). Don't know whether it's the same elsewhere (which would make sense) but I guess you could use one if your use case doesn't rely on a keyboard, or you don't mind using an external one, that could fit your case?
Apparently as well, the 400 and official keyboard are interchangeable with a bit of work (and with some tiny wrong labelling, though it's not recommended and will void your warranty) - been thinking of trying that out on one 400 I already have which has a bad keyboard (and I didn't think to try get replaced!) as I quite like the integrated keyboard and am satisfied with it on the other 400 I have...
I recently tried to use mainline Armbian patched by inovato, flashed on an SD card and booted on Android TV box Q+ with H616 quad-core CPU and 2 GB RAM from Turewell. This sells for less then 30 pounds in a case with power supply. TH-cam playback on 720p30 is reasonable and without SD card plugged in Android is booting from built-in eMMC and even FIFA on Stadia is enjoyable at 720p30.
i was lucky to get one 2 years ago. i use it for retro gaming when i travel
Raspberry pi sold in my country cost almost the same as an old budget pc which is crazy for just a single board (furthermore almost all stores are currently out of stock until next year)... i think i would give a try on orange pi.. as it is within the reasonable price range
Yep, if you want one for a small server, retro games, or media server it is cheaper and you get a lot more power buying an old micro i5-6500T system for $100.
@@B5152g yupp, Dell's thin client pc has more power and has extra ports with included power supply that cost less than $100.. You can't go wrong buying it, if your intention is to setup a server. But if you have existing projects and need a replacement that is a big bummer...
I just preordered the orange pi 5
FYI: Plex is *not* a "media OS"... You still need an OS to run the server/client.
Thanks, it seems a great guide, so finally I have RPi compatible board.
As homeserver I use an odroid-m1, just 4 cores but 8GB of ram for 120€, supporting SATA/NVMe M.2 and eMMC storage. OS installing via Petitboot is a snap and chances are good to get full mainline kernel support as RockChip is known as community-friendly and an orange-pi router board with same cpu is already nearly full supported in mainline. Power consumption is fabulous.
I see some simplicity in moving our huge old server and large desktop pcs into more single purpose devices. I could have two or three m1 "servers" that would be easy to replace and then "desktops" are just another m1 on the back of a monitor. Seems 100x less expensive and easier to service. Is there a preferred way to learn about the M1? I've almost purchased 3-5 different odroids at various points in time.
5:00
Not sure any of those were even HD considering the settings gear in the player didn't show the "HD" in red/white like it typically does if it's using an HD-based stream.
I've finally decided to get me a raspberry pi but of course I chose the worst time lol
The media playback is almost for sure because the lack of hardware acceleration on the linux setup. If you set it up properly they should all do 1080P playback at least. And that AmLogic chipset will do a ton of codecs too and even HDR IIRC (although not on linux)
Yeah it's most likely an issue with hardware acceleration, they seem to do a lot better on media oriented software packages like Kodi, Plex etc.
I got a refurbished Fujitsu Futro S740 instead. Has a x86 Intel J4105, accepts specific 16GB Mem Modules, also accepts a M2 SATA SSD and M2 A E Key stuff like wifi module etc. Cost for the Futro in german eBay was below 50€.
So I wonder how hard it is to put something like retro pie or octopi on one of the alternatives, that’s my main use case as of now and they both are made for pi
If you can find a prepared OS image for the alternative board you're wanting to use then it should be pretty easy to use something like Retropie or Octopi.
I recently built my own home server and wanted to get a couple pi’s to make a cluster. Wow was I surprised! Looks like it’s off to eBay to buy some older computers instead. Just insane.
Yep I bought an old chrome box and "hacked" it to linux machine to run my plex server.
The developer community is what's missing for these alt boards.
And docs.
I love pine products! They are great alternatives.
Android *is* a Linux based operating system. The reason video isn‘t running so well on Debian is probably, because it is missing a proprietary video driver.
I remember when they were just 35 dollars
Almost all browsers on Linux do not support hardware acceleration. This is also the case for these three boards. The CPU is decoding the video.
Would love to find an alternative to the Pi for use with Octoprint for 3D printing….. can’t justify the high prices for a Pi right now….
I use the orange pi zero 2 with octoprint and it works well if you disable write through in the filesystem.
I bought a Dell Optiplex 3060 (i3 8th gen 8gb 240ssd) refurbished for my home assistant setup, it's over kill. Wasn't dirt cheap but the only option cause we have no other SBC in India except for RPi.
While there was NanoPi5s, it had the same price as the Optiplex but less ram and storage and I couldn't find proper documentation for installing any os except openwrt. So x86 was a better option in any way possible.
Can't you order other boards from overseas?
I'll wait it out. Not going for sub- optimal choices and also not going to get scalped. There are still plenty of projects to tinker with where a fast microcontroller is sufficient.
Prob missed one of the best alternatives Radxa which Okdo and RS have picked up after the split with Raspberry.
You will see Okdo advertising the ROCK 4 SE and more to come.
The upcoming killer RK3588 Rock5b SBC for $120 is actually a true desktop alternative and really begins to blur the lines between desktop and SBC but is still very fresh and like still better with a now long term mainline linux supported ROCK 4 SE.
The strange fruits of Orange & Bannana Pi give a false impressions as they are 'open source' but they are extremely lacking to the likes of Radxa, Pine & Khadas.
Orange Pi are good for cost but often have much less support than others.
These alternatives have their place. The OrangePi versions are great for klipper installs on 3D printers.
Yes they're great if your community already has images prepared for them for a particular use case
I have a Tinker Board S that I currently use as an Android HTPC. It's pretty comfy so far, playing high quality videos on TH-cam and Kodi. You can even run some emulators without issue. I know that you can do plenty of interesting projects on it, but its software support is not stellar. The integrated eMMC is useful, though. I wish this hardware could have gotten a larger community.
It's quite dissappointing as it really looked the most promising to me when I initially looked at them. I'm surprised that they haven't put much effort into developing the software and support further - the hardware is great.
Are there any Raspberry Pi alternatives that allow installing official linux distro and live test different linux distros? As it seems most require their own modified version of the linux distro which is a security risk :( please help
@@09f9 oh thanks, yeah I see Ubuntu has made an official image for RaspberryPi but its not their main thing. I wish there was a de facto standard boot process, why don't ARM just copy Intel/AMD based boot process?
Thanks for the video and the tests.
It's a pity that there were no RADXA cards, like the RADXA pi zero or the RADXA pi4 card.
I'll look into these, thanks for the suggestion
I am using the RPi 4B 8G, luckily I bought it early it was relatively cheap, I pushed it to the limit overclocked, it is barely enough for everyday use as a basic desktop, I always want an upgrade, still waiting for the Pi 5 to come. There are handful of similar ARM SBC in the market, the problem is, as far as I know, unlike the x86 counterpart, there is no standard architecture for ARM computer yet, so that I could not simply buy any model I want to run the same system on it, I must stick with one which is the PRi that can easily get support from various sources.
not really aslong as you just use it as a computer and don't care about the gpio features, its pretty easly replaceable.
@@damian007567 So I can boot a Pi image on the Tinker board for example ?
Yes there are but many of the projects have insisted in releasing boot images instead of providing a install script.. libree 905 runs just as fast as the 4 and the audio put is mixh better
bro, @ 10:02 you say that it's running at 4k... yes the MONITOR is at 4k, but the video is STILL just 720p ... if it's HD or 4K you will see the red icon over top of the youtube settings icon... which neither were there during the orangePi or the VIM2 video... (although I think only the VIM2 would be able to run it at 4k anyway) - :)
Figured I would let you know
Thanks for the pick up, yes this was a stupid oversight!
Two weeks ago I sold my Raspberry Pi's on eBay. They sold at the $50 mark. Now I will move on to use something that is in ssick. So long Pi.
The ASUS CN62 with a Celeron 3215U in it, blows the Raspberry Pi away, and I can find them semi-reliably right now for $20-40 on fleabay. I just ejected 2 Pis from my home network for this very reason. I can't seem to find a Chrome_book_ for this low with a good CPU, but as soon as I can, I'll be grabbing one of those because it's got it's own built-in UPS.
Are you running Linux or chromeos on it?
Pi Zero 2 W at 120€ ----- 8x the original price.
Are there any good alternatives for the Pi Zero 2 W? (Or the original Pi Zero)
Radxa zero is an absolute powerhouse for its size..i heard that the new radxa zero 2 will be sold at the end of this year..the orange pi zero 2 is also another good alternative if you want to use android os.. However I personally dislike the WiFi antenna it has.. Banana pi m2 zero is also another viable option
I do have a Raspberry Pi 4B 8GB RAM model. It is great but installing different Linux OS distros to is is a pain. I follow instructions to install a distro, and when I boot it up on the Pi, I get nothing but errors.
tip when video profiling. If you right click on a youtube video, you can open "stats for nerds" which tells you the dropped frames so you aren't just eyeballing it
Thanks for the tip Matthew
which of of the boards have the same form factor as raspberry pi?
In India,
I was continuously checking all official seller's website for last few months first manually then using a script (That records RPI stock In Timestamp), but never found a single PI. So i think they are never coming to official resellers but going directly to black market( * 2 to 3 times price). I have Messaged RPI Foundation about this but no response or action.
I think RPI Co. is hopeless on supply issues.
No, there is no "suitable Pi alternatives", end of story. Buying into the Pi ecosystem isn't just about price or hardware specs. Arguably, 80% of the reason we buy Pi's is for the software support and large community around them, and you absolutely will NOT find that with any Pi alternatives. Hardware specs and price are really only a very small consideration for most Pi buyers, as there are certainly better spec boards out there for reasonable prices if specs were all we cared about, they just don't have the software support and large community behind them like the Pi.
There is no real alternative to the RPi 4B. The other SBCs on the market all lack proper documentation and support, and in any case their prices have risen similarly to RPis.
This RPi shortage and the resulting absurd prices are unfortunately killing a number of projects and vastly diminishing the attractiveness of the RPi as a hobbyist SBC.
wow I been looking to get into a pi like project but I got to admit nothings gotten cheaper, even the alternatives have gone up in price.
Year? I haven’t been able to get one since 2018 for a reasonable price.
2GB RAM in 2022? Hope you are running a text mode OS only.
The Rockchip line is quite cheap and open source from the bare metal up, and just as capable as Raspberry Pi's proprietary chips, minus the developer support.
They're very easy to get.
The developer support is usually the biggest difference between these boards and a Raspberry Pi, for some that’s not an issue but it’s a dealbreaker for most.
I've got several pi flavors and a tinker board. I can't get the tinker board to run anything.
I was pretty dissappointed with it as well - the software is way behind where it could be.
The majority of Rpis are bought by companies, not individuals. I think it's something like 600K per year. Tragic. On the flip side, you can put an Armbian imagine on almost any SBC.
Wow what the hell are they using them for?
@@wiegraf9009 Development and testing on the cheap. It's borderline criminal in my opinion, because the Raspberry Pi was meant to teach individuals, especially kids, about computers and coding. You can do an internet search with some keywords and find some interesting articles on the topic.
Apparently the company is producing 100k per month, all models.
@@BeeRich33 I read 50k per month for the Rpi 4 specifically. I think maybe that's 100k in total for all models. I'll have to look that up again though. I think the long-term result of lack of availability will lead to the Rpi falling out of popularity and use among individuals. I'm already looking into the Orange Pi 5 as soon as it comes out.
I really sympathize with these nerds getting scalped on Pi 4 prices.
Like... if they're BeagleBone prices and you know what you're doing that means you get a BeagleBone, and holy hell is it more capable.
To anyone who feels stuck in the Pi ecosystem I say this: Spite is a moral imperative.
Some guy on Amazon wants to screw you and you've gotta screw em right back. Let the hate flow through you. Learn whatever you need to learn to get your stuff working on the other board.
There's a reason spite got a pass when they wrote the seven deadly sins in the bible. For all the evil it does, it does an equal amount of good. Do it for spite.
When the pi 5 comes in the store's starting at a price from $100, im gonna buy a Intel Nuc or thin client.
I mean with all the extra Pi accessories like case, coolingfan and radiator, psu, they are way out of the affordable pi game.
All the other boards are not interested for me price wise. Like LattePanda, OrangePi,Thinkerboard.
And the GPIO i fix with some external USB rs232 .
Any thoughts on alternative boards with 8GB? (that's what I've been looking for). Thanks!
I'm not aware of any offering 8GB apart from the Pi 4B, the others all seem to offer a maximum of 4GB.
odroid and pine64 both offer SBCs with 8GB of ram, they are slightly bigger boards though.. but also generally better CPU
Purchase a odroid m1 from amaradroid they have the ram and a m.2 22/80 nvme slot 111usd
Try a androit tv box with klipper??
what about the radxa zero? it's apparently only 35 USD on ameridroid for a 2gb model and they claim 70% the power of a pi 4
It's probably going to be much the same as the Orange Pi, it looks great on the hardware side but the software, documentation and support aren't nearly as good.
Yep, standard ASUS affair. The hardware has some interesting capabilities, but the documentation makes you feel like you're stranded in a forest with nothing but torchlight and a broken compass.
I got a raspberry pi 1 v2 what can I do with it
Most projects that will run on a Pi Zero will also run on a Pi 1, so have a look at some of those.
This is great stuff! Well done
Thank you
Hi, Regarding the Orange PI 3 LTS: The Allwinner H6 Got H264, H265H hardware decoder. Is it possible that the driver for this decoder were missing from the Debian installation? Can't you check again Video Playback w/ original OS installed?
Possibly, I’ll look into that
Looking for a Pi4 to upgrade my Arcade Cabinet but there's no way I'm paying 3 times what it's worth in a over priced kit setup
A retro gaming setup is perfect for an alternate board - the Khadas and Orange Pi boards are probably best for this application
ASUS would be great to run VMware horizon client.
I'm still partial to Odroid products.
damn thanks now these boards are undergoing shortage as well
TBH a lot of projects people are using PIs for like home assistant octoprint ect that don't require gpio, they would be better off with a re utilised thin client like a wise thin client last 2 I bought were under £40 already in a case with SSD and PSU.
If you're running something that you only need to set up once (so you don't mind a few hours of tinkering) and doesn't need any GPIO pins then this is a great alternative
I don't know but in Canada i always find hard too find any pie at any moment and when available it's overpriced.
If you're trying to find the IP of Orange Pi on the net, without a monitor and keyboard, make sure you've removed the MicroSD card from the reader in the PC and inserted it into Orange Pi. Don't ask me why I emphasize this point.
Haha
It's strange that you are having so much trouble with video. These processors are all used on high end Android tv boxes. Are you seeing any Mali GPU chips on those boards? The AMlogic S912 is more than capable of playing 4K and some of the more demanding games. So is that RockChip, although not quite as good as the S912. The issues are software/ firmware based. The hardware is actually more capable than the RasPi. I'm playing with the esp32 boards right now. Not exactly a replacement for RasPi but much more capable than I realized.
The issue is software related, the browser on all of these boards uses software encoding which doesn't take advantage of the boars hardware. They all run media playback better when running Android.
Awesome video Mike! I'm just getting into raspberry boards. Hoping my son gets interested. (He's 13). Before getting a Rpi V3+ I looked into cheaper options but decided against it due to lack of user communities and projects my son may like. Thanks for reassuring I made the correct choice
Yeah if your primarily interest is in tinkering with electronics and different software packages then I'd definitely suggest sticking with a Raspberry Pi.
I didn't realize Orange PI was a separate company from Raspberry PI. I thought it was just a different model.
Diffrent fruit
Orange Pi is very cost-effective.
It seems like every time I look into getting a rapsberry pi project started there is a shortage...
There has been a shortage for the last few years and it seems like it's only likely to start improving sometime towards the middle of next year.
Lol, I wonder how much I could get for my barely used pi 4
I've got about 15 or 20 of them.
😎😎