Saturday 8 June 2019

Maybe I took the collecting a bit too far?


I decided to lay out the contents of the drawer of shame... I have a lot of toys....
No. in all seriousness they are there for a reason, I need to be sure my book projects work on as many SBC's as possible so that someone buying the book with a particular SBC can (or can't if thats the case I can let them know) run all the projects and get a good experience rather than  frustration of getting something to work that won't play nice.

58 of them here, theres a few others dotted around the house or office though, all mine except for the Nvidia Nano, top next to the pinebook, which is the schools, and I'm experimenting with its GPU.
Impressive and sad at the same time eh :D
I didn't buy ALL of them though, many were donated by the makers for review and test and I am very grateful to them for saving my wallet a little bit of damage. Even at an average of $30-50 its adds up when you buy too many of them.

Generally I love my Raspberry's they are reliable and dependable no matter what I do with them, even if not the fastest. The Odroids are beasts, the new RockPi4 is A. M. zing.. The Nano is out of this world and the Nano Pi's are generally really cool systems. Orange and Banana Pi's are a bit of a let down generally due to their shocking software, but for the most part they work..just.
The new range of Rockchip boards, Tinkerboard, Rock 64 and Nano Pi's are stunning and will be an interesting point of progression for the SBC concept.

Some of the more exotic (listen to me trying to make this sound interesting..exotic) ones like the VIM2 and Libre boards are all a bit dissapointing but can be made to work in emulation modes.
The Intel based Up!'s are by far the fastest but also among the most expensive, I only got them due to discounts on kickstarter, but even so only the base models. In practice they are not very mainstream. but certainly great to work on.

The Nvidia is very cool but needs careful coding to get the best out of it, got a 128core GPU, compered to the rest which average 4 (the Up's have 12-16) and can do incredible things when you are careful to really use the GPU.

Its all fun, the only downside is trying to work out what goes wrong with them sometimes when the software is crap and the makers have not put graphic drivers with them....fun fun fun.


Ahthankyew

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