Low-End SBCs

2021-04-10

I am a big fan of single-board computers which I will henceforth refer to as SBCs for brevity's sake. It is far too embarrassing to tell you how many I have and would take more time than I'm willing to spend to accurately count them. The Raspberry Pi is the most well-known of the breed but there are many others that are often superior in some ways as well. The low end of the SBC market I find very interesting and I wish there were a few more options.

Sub $20 SBCs

About the least expensive and most ubiquitous in this category is the Pi 0/0W. Officially $5 for the 0 and $10 for the 0W with wireless and BlueTooth. I have quite a few of these because MicroCenter has often had them on promotional sales for $0.99 for the 0 and $5 for the 0W! The Pi 0/0W is neat and a great price but has a number of limitations. Mainly the lack of audio output and power management. The whole Pi range is also the least "open" of any of the major SBCs as it requires proprietary code to run for it to even boot. For many use-cases and to many people that may not be a deal-breaker but it does kind of irk me personally. Pi 0 is a great board to work with still because it's so popular. You can't beat the Pi's in OS and compatible software choices.

The CHIP from now defunct “Next Thing Co.” was a really great alternative to a Pi 0 with some big advantages and a couple of disadvantages. CHIP, when it was available, was officially $9—though you would spend more than that with shipping. They always had a hard time producing enough of them and were never very easy to get your hands on. The CHIP's biggest advantages and why I still find plenty of uses for them to this day are the headphone jack audio out, Wi-Fi/BT, and built-in lithium battery charging and power management. For such an inexpensive board these are amazing features to have and open up a lot of different uses. It is also only a smidge larger than a Pi 0 and has a set of 2 female GPIO pin headers which could be seen as a positive or a negative compared to the Pi 0 depending on what you plan to do with it. NTC really packed a ton of useful features into a very small and cheap board. Oh, and a full-size USB 2.0 port too! The CHIP also had onboard flash storage included which is nice but made working with OS images a bit finicky, especially now that there is no more support. NTC had to do some magic with a custom kernel to make the NAND flash work and there is also no possibility of a MicroSD slot to bypass the onboard storage. It’s nice that you've got storage included but a pain in the neck to deal with. That's why your only option really is the aging custom kernel and the stock Debian. Luckily the stock OS is almost stock Debian and it can be upgraded to the current version.

One SBC company that I see get very little attention is Libre Computer. I'm not sure why they get so overlooked other than they just don't seem to put much at all into marketing or getting the word out. A shame too, because their boards are pretty solid and they are more committed to fully open hardware and software than most. In the sub $20 category they have one board, the La Frite, that comes in at $15 or $20 for 512MB or 1GB of RAM. I have one of these boards and it is pretty nice. No Wi-fi, BT, or micro SD slot included but it does have 2 full-size USB ports, full-size HDMI, Ethernet, and an eMMC socket. That eMMC socket is the only storage option other than the USB ports, so in order to do anything with it, you need to pick up an eMMC module. That takes it over $20 but it's close and still interesting for some use cases.

There are some other boards in this category such as a number of different NanoPi boards made by Friendly Elec. From what I've been able to tell these boards are OK but maybe a little half-baked. With shipping, they become a little more expensive and I have not yet tested any of these. PINE64's A64 board has a $15 model. The A64 is a very large board compared to most SBCs though so maybe not a great all around board. On the plus side all PINE64 boards have great openness and software options.

My Point

All of this is to say that none of them quite have the sweet spot of features that the CHIP had. The CHIP wasn't perfect and there are plenty of uses that the Pi 0 and some other alternatives work great for but I'm still waiting for a board to come along that hits that CHIP sweet spot and maybe even fixes the couple downsides it had.

In this segment of the SBC market, I don't care much about CPU speed or RAM. Give me somewhere in the ballpark of 256MB-1GB RAM, whatever CPU, Wifi/BT, battery power management, MicroSD slot, 3.5mm audio jack, at least one USB, and make it CHEAP and SMALL and OPEN and I'll buy a dozen!

P.S. Honorable mention goes to the PINE64 Rock64 boards inside the Recon Sentinel devices that have been getting liquidated for anywhere between $8 and $20. I picked a few of these up for $16 and both this Gemini capsule and my music server run on one of them. :) This is not a sub $20 option that will stick around, unfortunately.

P.P.S. PINE64 has a RISC-V-powered SBC in the works and is targeting a $15 price when it's released. This could be a cool option in the future.

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