Have you at least tried visiting their webpage?
They departed from the mission of "building all-in-one mini computer device for hacking and learning" to "promote social justice warrior values in computing / electronics" - leaving the self taught skills on the background if at all.
Their devices might seem still overall good from the technical point of view, but is compromised, bloated, not cheap, filled with "bugs" like the shy camera, and the device is being ruined with every delivery to appeal to their main fanbase which is illiterate soyboys (for example: addition of inbuilt wifi and bluetooth which is difficult to disable and even then i suspect it just cannot be fully deactivated - i wonder ((( why ))) - or the removal of amply available micro USB in favor of USB C for power input, removal of normal HDMI socket so now you should buy yet another mini hdmi adapter, or from the economic point of view it has betrayed it's 35$ mantra by being more costly with this new release).
Too long and too many errors to list at the moment, but you get the point. It all went downhill from RPI 2 in my opinion, with the removal of video composite. What's next? removal of jack 3.5"?
It was supposed to be a useful device for learning to interface with electronics, for programming, not a fucking "desktop computer device". I won't be surprised if they remove the GPIO ports next. They are at that level of retardedness.
Raspberry Pi 4 has been announced. It looks like it's using VC5 because there's actually 1GB 2GB and 4GB versions
Has anyone got any x86 single board alternatives?
Preferably a quad core with at least 4 Gigs of RAM.
😂
I guess you can look at the VIA Eden X4.
The best thing is that the embedded RTOS the Pis all have also has a TCP/IP stack. The average /r/linux or "hacker""news" soyboys lose their mind over that shit in x86 but with the Pi it's a-ok because there's a black woman in the advertisements/nobody told them to be outraged about it.
I can get the desktop thing though, many people want a small (as in space and power saving) desktop arm system. I know I do. Sadly it doesn't happen, not because the hardware doesn't exist (it did already long before the Pi 4) but because all the licensing bullshit and general unwillingness of the corporations to cooperate makes it impossible for good drivers to exist that aren't either terribly written binary blobs or weren't hacked into some 3.x kernel by some random chinese engineer. (hacks that are impossible to port to newer kernel versions because they're bad and all over the place) I think the i.MX processors from freescale are the only ones that are properly supported (including graphics stack) but they're a mess and buggy (as in: buggy in hardware) and they also eat a lot of power.
They were dishonest about everything from the get go through. They advertised the first Pi as this generations C64 and it would've been if the C64 would've been an incredibly locked down black box where nobody knew how the graphics even worked. Some of the young ones might not know this but the C64 was incredibly open hardware. Commodore made no secret about how anything worked. The user manual included full board schematics and clear descriptions how the custom ICs worked, registers and everything. Same with the Amiga later on. The Handbook of my Amiga 500 that came with the machine included enough information for a programmer to write programs using their custom chipset and doing fancy graphics shit. It also included enough information for you to build a memory expansion by yourself if you were an electrical engineer. None of the ARM boards, either the Pis nor any other ones, were ever anything like that. You're lucky if get a description of the GPIO pins. Broadcom eventually, after much humming and hawing, released some detail about the videocore but it was still pretty incomplete last time I checked. The Pi is even more locked down than some of the chinese ones in that regard. You can get a User Manual for the A20 for example at least. Besides the specs, there's also zero information about the Pi 4s SoC. I doubt there ever will be.
It's really sad that we won't ever see a well supported and truly open ARM SoC because the hardware of some is really nice on paper. It's all corporate bullshit basically.
One point I do agree with them on is the USB-C port though. micro usb was not made to supply that amount of power ARM SoCs need (without battery buffer tablets and smartphones have) and the USB-C connector is a clear step up. Seeing how the Pi 4 is more power hungry than every other one before it, it probably would not have worked with micro-usb to begin with, things were already iffy with the Pi 3 in that regard. Still, the only SBC I've seen that does this actually right is the Cubietruck with a barrel connector.
No, it's a deliberate attempt to prevent people from building their own cheap clusters. You'll have to buy the expensive ones, goy!
Building Pi Zero clusters is retarded.
Does anyone actually have an i.MX6 based ARM SBC? They're kinda expensive but pretty much the only ones the fsf fully approves of and also the only ones who seem to be fully supported by mature mainline drivers.
The Olimex boards also have good power supplies. Actually I prefer the way the A20-OLinuXino-MICRO can accept an input voltage range, instead of only 5V. That makes it easier to find power supplies that can support a SATA disk. For my Cubietruck, I had to special order a 5V/3A power supply, but having the option to use e.g. 12V would have made things easier. That also means you can also directly connect it inside a vehicle without losing power at the inverter. The other nice thing about those Olimex boards is they have option for industrial temperature range, which again is good for use in vehicles that are explosed to cold and heat (or for other applications that are exposed to the elements).
But I use my Cubietruck indoors as as "desktop" and it works fine for me this way because I totally ignored the modern expectations of what a "desktop computer" is. I don't care at all about using the GPU, and I don't care about modern web or video games, and even download the youtube videos with "youtube-dl -f worst". I have my display resolution set to 800x600, and I do almost everything in a terminal, and preferably in the framebuffer console. That's pretty much how it worked when I had a 486 with 4 (and later 8) MB RAM, and I don't get any benefit from GUI bloat (and crap like systemd). Frankly most of the "progress" that happened since is a lot of bullshit. Like Terry Davis would say, everyone has been jedi mind-tricked into a cianigger prison. And you'll never get anywhere good this way, until you take a step back and restart again without making the same mistakes that led to this mess we're in. In the meantime, don't forget to set your grunt path, my dudes.
youtube-dl -f worst lKXe3HUG2l4
OP was master baiting by starting an SBC/SoC thread with RPi, but all the sperging out over ARM is embarrassing.
This is a HUGE problem. Looking through lists of SBCs, I see dozens of models with supposed MSRPs of $5-$15 that retail for >$40 and aren't even available on eBay for under $20.
Even completely ignoring the far higher efficiency of LED, incandescents burn out >60x faster than LEDs, so you're still going to spend more on lights
Note that if you're stuck with a fluorescent fixture, there are LED bars designed to fit those, too.
THIS
I can't believe that, not just ARM SBCs, but ARM Android phones, STILL don't have something like UEFI, Open Firmware, ARCS, or whatever to define a common interface between hardware and the OS.
It is fucking impossible to install different OSs on ARM hardware, even different versions of the same OS, without a bespoke binary blob by the device manufacturer, or a handcoded jury rigged hack buried under 9000 layers of machine translated Russian forum posts.
This. There is literally nothing wrong with USB-C, the old USB connectors (retard olympics gold for having separate A & B connectors) were absolute garbage, just like everything else Intel has ever made.
Barrel connectors are terrible because they have often have mystery meat voltage/wattage/polarity, and come in a bazillion ever so slightly different sizes.