Like most people, I entered COVID as a normal hobby geek with a Linux server I played around with and a healthy hardware habit with a side of home automation and DD-WRT. I emerged from COVID enrolled in college, now with two servers (one new build, one rebuilt from my first one), two Pi, multiple instances of Home Assistant (one dedicated) and putting sensors on everything a sensor could go on and rewiring switches for wifi control of overhead fans, flashing every compatible router I could find on Amazon Warehouse with DDWRT in my home for an ad hoc mesh network (no, it didn’t work, but I didn’t care) while cabling everything to switches and creating a really hilarious network deathtrap tripping hazard, a massive media library (discovered Handbrake and making multiple resolutions) and a Sonos home theatre system. And yes, played an unhealthy amount of Animal Crossing and got an NVIDIA Shield Pro for streaming and Plex, as you do. I’m sure everyone can relate.
SBC’s were the natural escalation; I had credit card bills to pay off and that’s going to take a while.
I gatewayed with Pi like ten years ago but it took off during Later COVID when I noticed my credit score and started testing it as a NAS, Media Server (later: Cassiope Media Server, my second end to end Linux build), then got into learning about the kernel itself. I already had an Odroid (Home Assistant Blue) so why not go on, so project-based SBCs seemed healthy; I had a reason for buying one. This led to more Pi’s–as I couldn’t use Kernel Pi (Eurydice) for it and Andromeda Pi was masking my personal network, then I needed one for a Pihole (Iphigenia, Hecuba), which is how I ended up with a BeagleBone Black (Medusa) for an Open Thread Border Router. Still pretending I wasn’t just collecting them like cats, I networked them together and just enjoyed looking at them and making them matching banners with figlet with the excuse I was learning how to do network-wide deployments over SSH (true) and learn Debian OS (technically, I am doing that) and started PoEing things (my credit card bills may not be getting lower, no).
The count stands at a total of 9: one (1) Pi Zero W, one (1) Pi Zero 2 W, one (1) Raspberry Pi 4B 4G, two (2) Raspberry PI 4B 8G, one (1) Odroid N2+, one (1) Beaglebone Black, one (1) PocketBeagle, and one (1) BeaglePlay. (Other: two Linux machines, Watson and Cassiope). Yes, they all have names and technically, each is associated with a project. The BeaglePlay’s (Circe) associated project is ‘create my own documentation on what it does because Beagles don’t document’.
So which ones do you use, why, origin story, feelings: go.
(I’m moving in a week and half my hardware is being packed. I’m about to have to take down my network and Home Assistant and may be freaking out. I’m not sure I know where any light switches are here, either.)
Oh… that’s a huge question. It’s been a long time now. I have used these in various projects for a lot of engineering, research, home networks, and embedded projects. I almost always run them headless over a serial console then SSH in for management.
- RPi 1 - my son used it recently for the RCA TV out
- RPi 2B
- RPi 3A+
- RPi 3B+
- RPi Zero
- RPi Zero W
- RPi 4B+
- Beagle Bone Black - I ran a pair of these as TOR relays for years. They were tanks.
- NanoPi NEO-LTS
- NanoPi NEO Air-LTS - The current one in service is an OctoPi server for my 3D printer
- Orange Pi 5 (I got one of the 32GB ones! - currently a Plex server with an external SSD and onboard M.2)
- Orange Pi Zero2
- C.H.I.P. Computer - this BTW was one of the best little hacking computers. It was phenomenal to setup and run over the OTG USB console
- Bannana Pi (original) - It was great because it had a SATA port so we used them to back network Linux installs for smart home kits.
I do a ton of other work with embedded microcontrollers too. Lots of ATMega and SAMD boards, plus a bunch of ESP 8266/32 variants.
My dude, that is beautiful I now need to google C.H.I.P to see what’s going on. And yeah, my Black is seriously solid.
Chip is gone iirc. You can still find a few used I think. Colin over on This Does Not Compute recently did a small video covering using mini v-mac with it and a bit of the history.
I owned several of them from the Kickstarter and second round. I wish I would have gotten the handheld version.
Unfortunately Next thing co went out of business during their second Kickstarter for an in car voice assistant box. I can’t remember the name of that project, but I lost $50 on it. They got sued over the name they chose, my guess is that is what caused them to go out of business.
Yeah, it was sad that Next Thing Co. went under. Aside from running really hot, their boards were impressive designs.
I didn’t know about the second kickstarter. Ah, well.
I did snag the installer and ISO package they released for the C.H.I.P boards. I can still reinstall a barebones Debian variant on the boards if I ever felt like it, though it’s so very very out of date now.
My C.H.I.P is still rocking in a special project sitting on my desk.
For those that don’t know, it is like a RPi but smaller, cheaper (originally $9), more I/O, and had WiFi & Bluetooth (whereas the RPi2 of the time didn’t). DIPs (aka hats) were available giving HDMI, VGA, and other capabilities including the PocketCHIP which turned it into a handheld computer by providing a display, button-keyboard, and battery.
While the project is now defunct, kept alive only by the community, there was an attempt to resurrect it in concept and form-factor as the Popcorn Computer on Kickstarter. But that one didn’t fund so, alas, it is now an endangered species.
“There he goes. One of God’s own prototypes. A high-powered mutant of some kind never even considered for mass production. Too weird to live, and too rare to die.” -HST
I started with an RPi 1b to read out my weatherstation (WH1080 clone) and post it online with weewx. Then a Bananapi R1 entered to replace my intel system as firewall/core router (savings on power usage, a lot). The RP 1 got replaced by a RPi 2, and tne 1 moved to the smartmeeter for readout. The main server (huge AMD tower) got replaced by a RPi 3 (again, power savings), Bpi R2 replaced the R1 when bananian development stopped. RPi 3 died on me (sd slot failed) and I got a replacement. As the 1st RPi3 was dead anyway, I tried to repair it (only use of the solderings at the side proved to be to keep the slot in place) and used it to replace the Bpi R2 as support got problematic.
The main server got upgraded to a RPi 4 8GB, with the RPi3 replacing the RPi2 that was handeling my weatherstation. I got an rflink, so I added domoticz and that now powers my kaku (dutch power switching system) in a mixed old/new setup. The RPi3 that was my main router (internet router via fiber) got replaced hh an RPi4 witn 4 GB mem, as the 2 GB mem version wasn’t available. (Not a bad move, with the on-board non-usb 1GB interface and a tad over 2 GB mem use)
The freed RPi3 is now for the smartmeter, so all RPi are 64 bit. (All running aarm64 Debian) Both Bpi’s and RPi 1 and 2 are collecting dust, as I haven’t found a use for them… yet. Looking for projects to use them. As media server they’re to light. (Although, Bpi R2 could be useful for that)
Oh, this is a nice collection!! If you want to experiment, either RPi will support Open Thread Board Router if you’re into that, or a NAS; I ran one off Pi 4 with OpenMediaVault and it did not even dent its resources.
I am now wondering if I should start looking into my own firewalls.
I’ve been using a Zima Board for my home network. I have the mid-range, 4Gb memory, 32GB onboard. It’s got two SATA ports, dual gigabit Ethernet, an Intel processor and PCI express port that I’m eventually going to use to run an old wifi card so i can isolate my IOT devices on a dedicated wifi network.
The only problem i have with it is RAM and transcoding. I have 22 containers running things from the “arr” suite (Prowlarr, Radarr, Readarr, ect), pihole, Jellyfin, Home Assistant, etc. I stay around 80% memory usage, so i should have gotten the 8GB. And forget about trying to transcode Blu-ray rips, which most of my devices can’t stream natively, so transcode is the only option. The audio stutters and playback pauses every ten seconds or so. I don’t have a problem streaming the file through samba, it just doesn’t have the “omph” that it needs for hardware transcoding of Blu-ray.
All that being said, i would get another one over the Raspi. Case/heatsink built in, SATA, PCI-E, dual gigabit, everything i need for a basic server.
Friend, this reply is beautiful. And reading the Zima site, I may be sold. What do you use to run the network? OpenWRT, DDWRT, Tomato?
And forget about trying to transcode Blu-ray rips, which most of my devices can’t stream natively, so transcode is the only option.
Ninety-nine percent of the time, I am unqualified to advise on anything; thanks to COVID, I got deathly into making a media server and ran into the transcoding problem followed by making a spreadsheet and experimenting and documenting my results.
My results (other can disagree): all my transcoding problems came down to audio streams and subtitles. None of this may apply to you, but just in case.
I approached it from three points: a.) I got the NVIDIA Pro to run Plex as NVIDIA can handle anything; b.) I made a server just for my media processing and storage (it also runs Plex as a secondary instance when my Shield is in use). I use MakeMKV for the raw rip into an mkv container with all audio streams. The rip I process through Handbrake so I can get as close to a clone as I can (4K to 4K, 1080p to 1080p, etc) with full original audio then make a copy of each and every audio stream into the equivalent container that was compatible with the sound limitations of whatever I was planning to stream it on. Example: my Sonos speakers wanted Dolby: DTS 7.1 to TrueHD. I also did a third copy of each stream into the equivalent AAC containers: TrueHD to AAC 7.1 to future proof. I also added a fourth copy that’s a basic AAC 2.0 that rolls with anything; and c.) Subtitles: turn them off and use open subtitles files so no one has to deal with bitmaps. I tested through Plex to make sure, and watched for the switch from direct play to transcode, then reverified on my Windows machine, etc.
Yes, it will eat hard drive space like whoa–uncompressed audio streams do that–but with surprisingly few exceptions, I can get direct play for 4K on pretty much anything now, not just Plex. I also create multiple resolutions using either original rip 4K or original rip 1080p as source but with the same audio mapping (that’s a me-thing and also, Covid). I know this sounds like a ridic amount of work, but once I set all the profiles, it’s basically a batch job. My total movie library sits at 400 movies with about 1200 files; last year I re-audited my Handbrake profiles, deleted everything but my source rips (and actually did a mass re-rip on the older ones that I did before I started compiling the latest ffmpeg to use when compiling MakeMKV), and re-encoded everything using those profiles. Total time was about two weeks end to end; I did them in batches of fifty and checked in every six hours to move completed files back into my media drives and also restart.
The only ones now that need me to personally go in and make corrections are the remastered releases like Apocalypse Now and Scarface (my files were twice the size of the original, it was unreal). Every one of them rips huge and needs slightly different profile tweaks, so those I oversee personally.
I don’t know if any of this is relevant to your setup, but I reverified running Plex on one of my Pis and it could direct play at least 90% of the 4K and anything lower, and the 4K problems seem to all be with those remasters.
Glad i could help! My autism is finally helping someone at least.
I’m using a Netgear r7800 with ddwrt, with hopes to eventually move dhcp handling over to the Zima Board.
You’ve got me thinking about media streaming though, Zima uses the Intel quick sync for transcoding, so that might also have something to do with it. I eventually want to move to dedicated hardware for streaming, with some stronger hardware/software like an NVIDIA based solution. I do have an old graphics card kicking around, but i haven’t played with the pcie slot yet, so I’m not sure if that even a non starter?
I’m going to look into it more, since i don’t need 4k, but would be nice to have.
ADHD here: I live for finding people who know how to enjoy their hobby correctly: like you’re invading a country and taking no prisoners.
I’m using a Netgear r7800 with ddwrt, with hopes to eventually move dhcp handling over to the Zima Board.
I am seriously feeling the Zima, but I just went over to Orbi Pro 6–yes, I gave in for Wifi 6 and no regrets, the coverage with just one satellite and the router is unreal. I’m trying to decide if I’ll have time, but I really desperately want to learn OpenWRT; my first try was–well, there hasn’t been a second one. But there will be. I picked up some (read; too many) USB Wifi dongles via rmorrow’s list of linux compatible ones, so I could try and test drive a diy wifi router with it. God, that sounds fun.
The transcoding problem is one that keeps popping up. Depending on your price point, the NVIDIA SHIELD Pro (latest) can handle anything–and it is a genuinely amazing streamer and really spoils you for most of the rest–but that means it would only work when watching using that over Plex or whatever media server software you can put on it. And I think the X-Box? When I was researching during COVID, the only other all-in-one option was a full dedicated server with either Threadripper or something in that family; I think when I did the math, just for the processor, my minimum investment for 4K and Atmos/7.1 was roughly $600-$800 if I was lucky, and that’s before the board and like, a sound system that does Atmos.
I know there were some other possible options with hardware, but it’s been a while. If I think of anything, I’ll bookmark this page to post here. Hopefully you’ll find something you like and will work for you. I know exactly how frustrating it is finding a solution.
I haven’t gotten one yet, but Orange pi 5 plus.
Why
“Can’t use if I can’t maintain” – low power usage > performance, pretty much. And I’m 100% down on ditching my desktop PC for a couple of those little guys.
My original Raspberry Pi model B I bought on release day, fighting the latency and downtime of the websites selling them. Never did much with it but was my introduction to SBCs.
What I actually use day to day are a Raspberry Pi 3 B+ which is attached to a 3d printer running Octoprint and a Pi 4 running as a small home server to host my NextCloud and IRC bouncer (amongst a couple of other things).
My favourite toy at the moment is actually my StarFive VisionFive 2 RISCV board, its been fun trying it out and getting applications to compile on it which don’t officially support RISC-V.
My favourite toy at the moment is actually my StarFive VisionFive 2 RISCV board, its been fun trying it out and getting applications to compile on it which don’t officially support RISC-V.
You are living the dream. And I need to google that more.
I have 2 Odroid C4 SBC’s that I use as desktop replacements and an Odroid C1 that is my pi hole and Quake 2 server.
All very capable for their intended purpose. Very happy with them. I chose them because they were more powerful than contemporary rpi devices.
I bought Home Assistant Blue from Ameridroid, which was Home Assistant’s first (and happily still continuing) jump into making Home Assistant more accessible and easy if you weren’t a hobbyist or tinkerer: Odroid N2+ preloaded with Home Assistant OS, a super adorable blue case, and power supply. That was my first experience with that board and with eMMC; 128 GB of it, talk about turning my head (also 4 GB RAM). Honestly, the only reason I didn’t get another is I didn’t have a project that required it; the reason I even found out the Beagles existed was the Open Source Border Router project I wanted to do had it as an option for the walk-through and gave me a reason to test drive.
But I have to agree: I’ve been running it straight for three years now and the Odroid does its job with zero issues. Home Assistant and its parts have given me problems, but Blue (yes, it’s name is Blue, it was just there) never does.
Have an old Pi3b that works as a little 1080p Plex server. Wish I could get a four but I’ll probably get a mini PC when I decide to upgrade.
I was lucky enough to get a 4 before the supply issues. I wish I could get any replacements.
Nowadays I just buy thin clients and pay the 40-50$ premium for projects. Better then than waiting for a pi.
I was looking at the same situation. I decided to give an Orange Pi 5 a chance as the new Plex server and so far it’s phenomenal. Once I got the OS onto the M.2 SSD everything started flying, which makes sense when comparing an M.2 against an SD card for R/W speeds!
I’m using an external USB SSD for the media and aside from a spinup time after the disk goes to sleep, it’s worked great. It’s even handling h265 encoded files, which my RPi couldn’t do due to the extra CPU overhead from the transcoding compression. The OPi 5 is doing very well.
I had a sheevaplug or something like that (I can’t remember the exact name, but it was around 2010). That thing was hot and it actually stopped too much times. Then the raspberry pi 1 (the original). Too slow. I’ve upgraded to a Raspberry Pi 3, that I used a couple of times as a desktop when my laptop broke. That wasn’t fun, it was slow too. During COVID I sold that and bought a Pi 4 from an authorized seller, so it was the official price. I bought an SSD and an Argon One case. The fan broke after a few month of usage, so I sold the whole thing. Finally I went to eBay and bought a Dell Optiplex Micro. That thing is the best. Used as a desktop, also as a server. It’s fast, smallish (not that small as a RPi, but it’s close. It can go to a backpack), and upgradable. It can have two monitors, two ram sticks, an SSD Nvme and also an SSD SATA. It’s a little beast.
I’ve had an Odroid running for many years, just as a Linux server to play with and automate some stuff on my home LAN. I was looking to upgrade to something with more RAM and found that the SBCs with more RAM get expensive pretty quick. Plus, there is the limitation of depending on a custom Linux build from the manufacturer that runs on the device. So I ended up buying a mini PC for not much more than an SBC with lots of RAM. There’s this one, as an example for $150
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BYD8SFBW
I ended going higher in price with this one
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0B74GGMBG
But for just playing with Linux, these are much more useful because you can run any normal Linux distro.
I love how my post about SBCs is slowly but surely pushing me to test out a mini-PC sooner than later. Added to hardware wish list for future mulling after the move; I really do want to start learning the ins and outs of how to use a hypervisor and it’s really convenient to have recommended options to pick from for what to run it on.
I installed Arch on all my PIs just so I can reinstall every single one because they have abandoned new packages. But it also was unofficial. Now I just generally want to move to Star64 because Risc-V sounds interesting.
I had a few Raspberry Pis and some Libre Computer boards a while back, but I recently decided to just build a beefy small form factor PC and put Proxmox on it, and honestly couldn’t be happier with the results. The ability to allocate resources for services and containers on the fly is a game changer. I can spin up a fresh container running whatever service I want in a matter of minutes without the hassle of flashing to a device and setting up networking, etc.
At work we develop instrumentation used in outdoor surveys, and I am writing a new version of the software which downloads the data logger and so forth. This is done by connecting a little USB dongle to the instrument.
Lately, I’ve been thinking about the possibility of adding an SBC to the dongle itself. My new generation of the software has a low-level component written in C++ which handles the USB I/O and a GUI component written in Python. So the idea is the C++ tool would run on the SBC and the Python would be a client that could run on any machine with LAN access to it.
So I am wondering at this point what would be a good candidate for the SBC? It would not need to be particularly high performance I think? Low power requirements would be good. And it should support wifi and ethernet and be rugged enough for outdoor use. (It would be protected by the metal enclosure of the dongle but may still be subject to temperature swings and some rough handling.)
I am seriously regretting that I haven’t bought more SBCs so I could give you an informed opinion and I desperately hope someone answers this.
With my Pi and Beagle limitations: the Pi Zero 2 with an ethernet hat and battery hat or power block would probably do it; the hats aren’t hugely expensive and if there’s one thing the Pi ecosystem has in abundance, it has cases for eveyrthing (Argon has a jawdropping modular case design for the Pi Zero; it’s like art and that costs more than even the ridiculously inflated price of a Pi Zero 2, which is saying something). Right now, it’s also–for what it is–overpriced. I’m trying to decide if the BeaglePlay would be worth your time to look into; it has wifi, bluetooth, ethernet and single-pair ethernet and integrates with Freedom Connect but it’s very new, the documentation is bad to literally non-existent, you’d need to custom build the case, and it’s design seems geared toward IoT, automation, monitoring and controlling remote sensors with any existing network protocol, and existing as a vague super cool enigma I am still not sure what to do with as it has a lot of onboard functionality built in and no idea how to use most of it.
I am totally watching this thread for people’s suggestions.
Thanks! I was looking at the Pi Zero due to general familiarity with the Pi ecosystem, but BeaglePlay sounds interesting. I will definitely investigate.
One other thing I’m wondering about is what sort of linux distro would be best? It should boot fast and be robust in terms of not easily getting corrupted if it gets powered off without a proper shutdown. I have intentionally made the C++ software not manage any files locally for this reason, so it would only be the OS that could potentially bork itself.
Raspberry Pi OS is solid; that’s the first kernel I reconfigured and recompiled myself and the first OS I felt comfortable making more major changes and at this point, it’s basically fully designed for the abilities and limitations of a Pi. But there are many distros you can check that have made an effort to work specifically with the Pi. I concentrate now on with the Zeros and Beagles with low eMMC is getting a very solid and fast sd card to run off off and keep a clean copy.
Weirdly, I’ve really gotten into sdcards as drive; I finish my configuration and get it how I want, then make an image and either back it up or put it on a backup card; no downtime I mess anything up or need to reinstall, just switch cards (or move the card from one Pi to the other). I was thinking that might be convenient for you too; once you get a solid configuration done and your programs loaded and ready to run, you copy it and keep some backups on extra cards. Like yes, nvme and ssd and usb and eMMC are much faster but they are not convenient when it’s Thing That Has This Very Specific Job where all I have to do is whip out my backup card, switch it out, and keep going.
I am so weirdly curious about what you decide to go with and why. This is one of the uses of SBCs I always thought was the most obvious: field work, especially if it’s impractical to go over network or testing/data checks are intensive and need direct contact.
I initially got a Z80-MBC2, a Z80-based SBC that runs CP/M and other operating systems, as I had developed an Intel 8080 cross assembler and wanted to run on actual hardware the code assembled with it. It was so fun I got a V20-MBC, an SBC by the same maker that features a Nec V20 (8088 + 8080) and can run CP/M-86.
Both SBCs led me down a fascinating retrocomputing rabbit hole.
