Pages with tag Linux Single Board Computers

Build a multi-drive NAS with Raspberry Pi 4 and several USB drives In the back of my mind is the question of replacing my Drobo NAS with something more modern. I've had it for about 10 years and surely it's time to replace it. An idea that bounced around recently is a Raspberry Pi 4 with a cluster of USB drives. For example 4 terabyte external portable drives are less than $100 apiece, and would be a small low power disk storage solution. The question is whether a Raspberry Pi is the best file server choice, and whether to leave the drives connected and spinning all day long.
DIY Build your own laptop for under $100

Tired of paying thousands of dollars for laptops you can't customize? We used to be able to take apart laptops, fix anything, upgrade them any way we want. Increasingly we're facing laptop choices where the need-for-thin and lightweighting means laptops are glued together, with components soldered to logic boards, and the whole thing is unfixable and unupgradeable. One response is what I've done - this is being typed on a 2012 MacBook Pro that's upgraded to the max in the hope it'll remain viable until sometime in the future when Apple wakes up to what we want. The mindset currently running Apple is missing something big.

Another choice is what's shown in this video -- find out a way to make your own laptop using cheap DIY methods. DIY computer hardware is growing more powerful every year. The exact build shown here is pretty ridiculous, so we should treat this as demonstration of a minimum-viable-product rather than a completed anything. Namely, the build shown here is a Raspberry Pi in a rough cardboard case, a pair of 18650 battery cells with a voltage regulator for power, various hacked up cables, a simple HDMI for display, and everything hot-glued together.

There are several ways to improve on this -- for example the Orange Pi and Banana Pi lines both include boards with 2GB of memory and support SATA drives -- hello large SSD for fast mass storage. And it should be possible to rig up a proper rigid case and a better keyboard/mouse. For a display it's possible to get a laptop display, remove the LCD portion, find an HDMI driver board, and rig it up in a bezel.

Helios4 ARM-based Linux SBC DIY NAS with 4 SATA ports The Helios4 is an open source NAS system based on a dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 CPU that includes 4 SATA3 ports. Because the board includes SATA ports, the hard drives run at full speed giving better NAS performance. The system runs operating system distributions based on either FreeBSD or Linux, which of course includes NAS systems like Open Media Vault. Finally, a single-board-computer with which to build a low cost low energy consumption do-it-yourself NAS system.
OpenMediaVault on Raspberry PI 3 - Plex Media Server Plugin A short video showing you how to setup openmediavault on raspberry pi 3. How to enable Plex Media Server plugin.
Raspberry Pi Zero W, inexpensive Zero goodness, now with WiFi for just $10 The original Raspberry Pi Zero was a game-changer for inexpensive computers, offering a full-fledged for just $5. The biggest problem was the lack of WiFi. The Raspberry Pi foundation have now fixed that, unveiling the new Zero W with both WiFi and Bluetooth.
The Jetson Nano is a Linux SBC with AI hardware for DIY Artificial Intelligence projects The Jetson NANO board is a Linux Single Board computer, packaged with GPIO pins and other things meant to be attractive to DIY hardware hackers. While the main CPU is a Quad-core ARM A57 @ 1.43 GHz, what makes this interesting is the 128-core Maxwell GPU by Nvidia. Nvidia is the manufacturer of this board, and the GPU is there to support experimenters developing GPU-based artificial intelligence software.
The UDOO Advanced Plus - x86 based single board computer running regular Linux

The UDOO Advanced Plus is so much higher priced than most single-board-computers that it doesn't fit the Maker Project idea. At $160 or so per board it's not like taking a $35 Raspberry Pi to toss into a project. Where the UDOO shines, though, is as a desktop computer. Because it has an x86 CPU, it runs regular operating systems, and the board includes normal ports for connecting to SSD's and hard disks and whatnot. The peripherals include a pair of M.2 ports for WiFi and SSD support, a SATA to connect up a regular disk, 3x USB3 for high speed peripherals, an HDMI and 2x Mini Display-Port connectors allowing you to connect three large screen monitors, etc. In other words, while the UDOO is a smallish computer, it's got a lot of powerful capabilities.

The UDOO Advanced Plus versus Latte Panda - x86 SBC faceoff

For more information on the UDOO Advanced Plus. Both the UDOO and LattePanda are inexpensive single-board-computers that are useful for building custom computers. This video compares the two, and finds the UDOO is more powerful and more flexible. Both run Windows very well as long as your needs are somewhat modest. Both are more powerful and flexible than the Raspberry Pi, another favorite of building custom computers.

The UDOO Bolt - revolutionary single-board-computer w/ advanced AMD Ryzen CPU and GPU

UDOO single board computers are based on x86 CPU's, rather than the typical ARM CPU's used by other SBC's. Therefore UDOO boards have a significant performance advantage, at a cost. With the UDOO Bolt, they've outdone themselves thanks to the capabilities of the Ryzen V1000 family. The UDOO Bolt is the first Single Board Computer using an AMD processor, and the V1000 family gives it phenomenal performance thanks to a 4 core CPU design coupled with a high end GPU and direct support for ethernet, 2x SATA ports, eMMC and more.

Top 5 Single Board Computers 2017

What are the best linux-single-board-computer's? There are many of these things, and running linux on a tiny computer is awesome, but the wide variety makes it difficult to choose. Do you go with the Raspberry Pi just because it's the most popular? Or because your buddy down the street got one? Some of these computers have significantly important features giving a clear advantage for certain purposes.