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I decided the same, plus I only have about 10-12 other boards sitting around here that are just as good (well, barring USB 3.0, but that hasn't been a big issues for me). Also, if I were going to buy one I would get the 4GB one and I think they made a horrible decision announcing it before they actually got stock to all their re-sellers, it was a huge turn off not being able to buy it outright and seeing 'coming soon' everywhere. I only found one place with it in stock and it was a 1GB version and they want something like $43.00 + shipping just for the board, not inclusive of power supply or anything else. About that point I just closed the browser window and moved on. Would be a fun toy to play with but I just can't justify the cost of it for what you get right now.
my 2 cents.
Cheers!
Pi 4 is so yesterday 😂
Adafruit had the 2gb in stock this morning but it sold out fast. The 2gb and 4gb are both marked "out of stock" while the 1gb is "coming soon". I.e. the 2gb and 4gb are the only ones that have actually shipped.
I'll consider the Odroid N2 in preference to the 4gb pi4. It is $22 more expensive but is faster and has more features including a realtime clock and hi-fi analog audio out.
I wish they made the pi4 memory expandable. Otherwise there's an upgrade loop: I was going to order a pi0-W at $10 but ethernet would be nice, ok, pi4=$35, but that's the 1GB one! If I'm going to buy a pi4 at all, I might as well get the 4gb, but the Odroid is even better. But $77 for a dumb tcp proxy? Go back to pi0-W at $10, repeat endlessly.
How about a pi0-E with ethernet instead of wireless, also at $10 like the wireless one? Or a pi0-WE with both in the $15-20 range?
Question: how are you powering it? A friend got one for me as a gift, and then I realized I had no way to turn it on... Looks like the baby breakout board with the barrel jack is probably my easiest option?
Why would I when I have you? Thanks, mate.
I went with the baby breakout board. I really think they dropped the ball by not including the barrel connector on the board itself.
Same for Ebay, was indexed they sell the RPi 4 but they did not.
I would even say, at some point, it looks like they manipulate the search engines by ASN/Subnet to make it look like to pull people on the page.
Just leads to a bloody error page.
maybe more into the $20-30 range (more or less, and up) but I like nanopi products quite a bit - I have their Neo Plus2 among others - useful as a small wireless gateway to communicate with microcontrollers (stm32 etc) via USB-to-serial adapter
OrangePi also has some interesting models sometimes at a lower price point (and I've got a few of those too, some pretty decent) but I think you generally get what you pay for with all of these. Unless I'm looking to buy 100s of them, not worried about a few $ more here and there.
The built-in wireless is not always great (though usually good enough) so I'm usually inclined to look for something with gigabit ethernet and a seperate usb wifi dongle (usb3 is nice for that too)
The comments section of the cnx-software blog are an essential resource for details re compatibility with armbian / drivers / thermal management concerns
All that said ... I'll probably be ordering a 4GB pi 4 at some point - no hurry at the moment. Raspberry Pi is often hard to beat for pricing (since they're a non-profit) and definitely a good bet for community support / software compatibility / accessory ecosystem etc
EDIT2:
For $10, the nanopi neo is still a nice option if you can live with 100 mbit ethernet and 256 mb ram (plenty enough often enough, but can add $2 to get 512 mb ram)
Again, the AtomicPi board wasn't actually manufactured to be used as a computer, it was manufactured to go into a robot and it interfaced with the robot through that GPIO connector most likely. The baby breakout board seems like it was something they actually had created them selves independently, while I think the larger breakout was originally produced for use with the robot for debug in small amounts, as it would power all the devices and I think they also likely had to produce those independently as well. So, I don't think they were even originally available when they sent them to Amazon to be sold.
All I am saying is I don't think it was a choice they made as they didn't manufacture the boards, they only purchased the lots from the robotics company and then sold them on. I think they were still in the process of producing the breakout boards when they started selling the first batch of boards, which is why they were only being sold directly and not on Amazon until more recently with the 'developer' kit being made available there.
my 2 cents.
Cheers!
thanks for the link, order 2
Nice. I like the $13.95 version with the little metal box:
https://www.friendlyarm.com/index.php?route=product/product&product_id=260
For some reason they only charge $1 for the 512mb upgrade in that setup. Hard to beat. On the other hand it's shipped from China ($5 shipping by China Post).
Do you (or anyone here) actually use one of these? Any issues?
Thanks
None. But you wanna take a look at NEO2.
I have the nanopi neo2 (1GB version) and quite like it. Only issues have been with armbian and the temp sensors and cpu states.. it reads the CPU temp wrong and I don't think it can utilize the full CPU speed.
Keep in mind, I'm not using the manufacturer-supplied OS images. Will probably reinstall it in the next little while with one of the FriendlyElec images or do some more research to see if others are more compatible.
It's not that much faster than a pi IMO, but was cheap and the gigabit nic is actually gigabit.
Thanks. 100mbit is fine for what I was thinking of, and I like the low cost of the Neo LTS. The Neo2 heads up towards Pi territory in pricing, at which point I'd rather have access to the pi software universe.
Separately, any idea about this board? Slower and smaller than pi0 (580 mhz mips cpu, 128MB ram), but has wifi and an AVR coprocessor on board for real time stuff, at $18:
https://www.seeedstudio.com/LinkIt-Smart-7688-Duo.html
It also says it has ethernet pins which I guess requires adding a magjack(?) to it. No idea what that involes.
Added: it looks like there's some way to control rpi0 gpio pin timing through dma hacks of some sort, decreasing the need for that AVR coprocessor for low frequency realtime stuff. library. I haven't looked at the code yet but will try to do so sometime.
2 more Atomic Pis ordered, I don't think I'll be getting the RPi4 after all.
Nice spot on the package deal with case - that's a quality low-end box right there.
"I see you are a man of culture as well" ... am tempted to get one myself even though I've been looking past the (relatively ancient) Allwinner H3 critters for a while now. The case really makes it though. (As for the $5 shipping - I usually just think of that as equivalent to a subway ride to go pick one up in person - except I'd need to take a subway to Shenzhen in this case...)
I got a nanopi neo and neo air about a year ago and had them on my desk for quite a few months. (Then I cleaned off my desk to make room for some new gear and they've been on the shelf since then - idling, as it were).
Experience with the nanopi neo was solid, smooth sailing with lightweight use as a gateway to talk to (and flash) various microcontrollers. I also put FORTH (gforth) on it to play around with. No problems.
As for the neo air - I noticed the wireless connection on the would sometimes drop after it had been running for a few weeks, not sure exactly why.
Running Armbian headless on both. Experimented with using the neo air as a personal wiki (running perl/git-based ikiwiki behind nginx) and that worked fine but was just a little slower when creating/updating pages then I was used to on a remote VPS (something like 7 seconds instead of 2 or 3).
Armbian support for H3 is pretty dialed in, both in terms of drivers and thermal management. See: https://www.armbian.com/nanopi-neo/ - also search the armbian forums if you need to go deeper - just pay attention to the dates on posts, since active development was still a work in progress about 3 years ago. https://forum.armbian.com/topic/1580-nanopi-neo-air/
Here is a decent review of the nanopi neo from 2016 https://tech.scargill.net/the-friendlyarm-nanopi-neo/
Search the cnx-software blog and you'll find a few articles such as https://www.cnx-software.com/2017/01/19/how-to-install-domoticz-home-automation-system-in-nanopi-neo-and-other-arm-linux-boards/ - I usually pay more attention to discussion in the comments section - particularly suggestions from a guy by the name of "tkaiser" who is an Armbian developer.
For example, I learned that I can use the USB port in "g_ethernet" mode as if it had an ethernet adapter (dongle) attached - so can do away with using a separate ethernet cable and reduce power use as well - even while enjoying slightly better transfer speeds.
As for the mediaTek linkit 7688 smart duo - most salient point beyond the embedded AVR: the hardware format is well suited for sticking onto a breadboard. Comes with header pins already soldered onto the board.
Have not done much with the one I got - just was looking around to see what small devices could run Linux (in this case, OpenWRT).
(Lichee pi is the smallest I've found so far - haven't even booted that one yet though.)
One concern about the 7688 I remember reading somewhere was that one might be stuck using the old OpenWRT version 15 supplied by mediaTek, without easy options for updates unless provided by mediaTek (who - like many manufacturers - do not have a particularly great reputation for updates after a product is released).
I did find an article on http://protological.com/ describing building OpenWRT 18 for the device.
Another option to consider if looking at devices based on mediaTek 7688 is the Onion Omega (or Omega 2, last time I checked). See https://www.cnx-software.com/2017/01/16/getting-started-with-onion-omega2-lede-wifi-iot-board-and-expansion-dock/
That's one I haven't tried - probably because pricing for more complete packages that I saw didn't seem very compelling compared to other options. It does look like a nice design though.
I would totally buy one to make it a router with an added USB WiFi while also connecting to a VPN from an idling server. I really love that metal box, problem is the $8 shipping to EU.
Had a couple of the NanoPi NEO 2 Plus' with the eMMC memory, it's pretty nice and had no problems in the long-term.
Just ordered myself one of the 4GB variants of the Pi 4 though, will see what it's like tomorrow when it arrives.
check out https://dietpi.com - I've had a good experience with it and Neo boards
Uptime, thanks for the detailed post about the nanopis and Linkit, etc.
Bdl, wow, dietpi looks pretty cool, might also be useful as a vps installer.
I've had dietpi running on a pi for a couple of years and it has been rock solid
alpine is another nice option on a pi - can run entirely in RAM after booting
MuntsOS (ram resident, runs on lots of different boards) can also be of interest for embedded stuff: https://github.com/pmunts/muntsos
Hi @KuJoe I'm interested in buying a Raspberry Pi 4 to run Ubiquiti UniFi Controller and if possible also the Ubiquiti UNMS panel on the same Raspberry Pi. From what I read on your comment all is working fine with your setup. Are you running it 24/7?
Also since you are already using Ubiquiti Controller with Raspberry, do you have any useful advice for the setup? I see you are using Ubuntu 18.04 and I was thinking on using Debian (pure OS) or the Raspbian OS.
Any info, advice or useful information will be great since is the first time I will use a Raspberry. Thanks
I'm not using a Raspberry Pi, I had a lot of issues running the UniFi Controller app on ARM CPUs. In addition to the app crashing regularly due to mongodb errors, the Raspberry Pi would stop responding randomly. I haven't tried the Raspberry Pi 4 yet, but I recommend running the UniFi on an x86 CPU because it's a much smoother experience and so far not a single crash or network hiccup.
afaik UniFi Controller runs on 512MB of RAM? There would be a lot of host offering that for something like 1/3 per year of the price of the rpi. I'd recommend you go that way, unless you have a specific need to run one locally
Ubiquiti recommends at least 2GB (https://help.ubnt.com/hc/en-us/articles/360012282453#2) but I have tried to run in a 1GB VPS and it worked out fine. But sometimes it needs more power so at the moment I have my Unifi hosted on a Hetzner 2GB Cloud VPS. Seems the cheaper option for now.
I've got about 700MB of RAM left out of my 2GB in my Atomic Pi, but we know databases take as much RAM as they can so it might be able to run on less (although all of my mongodb errors were OOM related on 1GB of RAM). For stuff that manages my house I keep it 100% local for security/privacy reasons.
1gb pi4 now seemingly plentiful at adafruit, and they have some of the accessories too now. 2gb and 4gb are out of stock. I got the in-stock notification for the 1gb about a day ago and it's been in since then, rather than selling out fast as most stuff like that does. It's still 1 per customer. I'm meh about buying one though. More tempted by that neo and the zero etc.
Actually, since I saw the reduction in in price on the Nano Pi M4 to $50.00 and the availability of a SATA hat for $25.00 with real SATA, I have decided it will probably be my next purchase instead of an RPi 4.
It is more powerful (CPU), offers 2GB ram, they offer reasonably priced eMMc and the ability to add SATA through the SATA hat using real SATA via PCI-e and not USB, pretty much makes it hard to pass up when considering forking out for the RPi4 2GB version. Sure, you lose one video output and there is about $15.00 shipping to the US from China but I think the trade-off is reasonable for what you get.
Cheers!