I love looking back 10+ years for the cheapest Linux thing you could buy. People were buying devices that were for kids or a router or something and repurposing it because it was open enough to get a shell on / flash Linux to it and start doing projects with.
In the 2020s or somewhere before that we got a bunch of dedicated cheap MCUs that were good enough and I think stole the thunder from full Linux but there are still projects to run it on things like the ESP32 family.
Either way, hardware hacking is still my favorite hobby to watch.
For a while, and I think even still today, the cheapest linux thing you can buy that has USB ports, wifi, and a power adapter are those Rockchip CPU powered Android TV boxes that are super popular from aliexpress and the like. There were people getting pretty mainline Linux distros on them. They have all moved on to be more expensive now (with 8GB RAM and way more cores than needed), but if you look back at ones from a few years ago you can find ones that were 1GB or 2GB of ram with a bit of eMMC storage and a quad core arm CPU roughly equivalent to a Raspberry Pi 3 in performance. Unlike a lot of these linux microcontroller-sized boards, you got barrel jack power in, HDMI video out, wifi, usb ports, an audio out, and a nice case for it. What you lack is exposed GPIO usually. At one point you could find them for around $24. FOr people who don't need the GPIO and instead want to use a keyboard/mouse/monitor with one, I think those are often better options than the SBC market embedded-style dev boards. I think you still can if you look hard enough.
One of these days, I will do a project with linux on a cheap Rockchip handheld game console. Many already have builds of rocknix which is a retro game focused OS with mainline latest kernels. Many of these can be had for < $50 and boot from sdcard, and have wifi and bluetooth.
> They have all moved on to be more expensive now (with 8GB RAM and way more cores than needed)
even the exact same model that I use for, ahem, iptv purposes has ballooned in price by 50% over the past few years, despite no design upgrades/changes :(
Milk-V Duo has been a pretty popular RISC-V board, one of the more mainstream affordable RISC-V boards. We did a reading group on RISC-V machine code where we used this as the initial board. It even has it's own fcked up vector instructions that are based an RVV draft with some extensions. gcc has its own arch specifier for it (xtheadvector*, e.g. -march=rv64gc_xtheadvector).
Bought some RP2040-zero for less than a dollar last year including shipping. They can run Fuzix.
If you want Linux for very little money, there are still options. There's the MilkV Duo which is probably the cheapest at less than $10. Kind of like the Raspberry Pi Zero, but worse.
Hey, why not check your old conference badges, chances are one of them can run Linux!
When they were that cheap, I would grab my one on every trip to Microcenter, just because I'd probably find a use for it, and if I didn't, I knew someone else would want it. Fun times.
To be fair, you're comparing a Pi Zero which I can still walk into Micro Center and buy for $10 today to a 16GB Pi 5, where the insane 3× price hike is almost entirely due to the RAM: I can buy an 8GB Pi 5 for $175, less than half the price of the 16GB model, again quoting in stock prices at my nearest Micro Center.
For reference, the cheapest 16GB LPDDR4 (not 4X as used in the Pi 5) DIMM in stock is more than $150, which is about what I paid for the 64GB of DDR4 in my desktop a couple years ago.
Yup. I think I also bought an 8gb Pi 4 for $50+ or similar a while back.
The price of a pico is what the zero used to be, and the 4gb/8gb 5 is $110 to $185 depending on ram when the 4 used to be I think $55 to $75 at the same ram.
I shouldn't be surprised because it's similar to/worse than the transition from DDR3 to DDR4, but I still was caught off guard to some degree.
Sure, but unless you're integrating the devices into a product to sell, an increase from $4 to $10 hurts a lot less than an increase from $80 to $200. I wouldn't change my mind about buying one or a few Pi Zeroes for hobby projects over $6/unit, but I may well consider a different platform over $120/unit.
Fortunately for me, I already have a stack of criminally underutilized Pi 3, 4, and 5 units on a shelf from a past (non-hobby) project. No 16GB, but multiple 8GB units, and 8GB is enough for most anything I can imagine wanting to do on a Pi.
Zero at $5 was never profitable. I think it was reported that they consulted Eric Schmidt and followed his advice to sell the core hardware at loss and recoup from accessories and bundle sales, which didn't suit their business, but did it anyway. This was why it was limited to 1 per customer and also because Pi Zero and Pico models have a more overpriced/appropriately-priced "WH" variants with no purchase limits.
> RPi is horrible value now you can get so much more from a lot of other boards it's not even a comparison now.
They didn't really exist before. And software support is still best on RPi. But they did really lose the plot because you could buy a whole x86 mini PC (new) for less and they're much better (unless you need GPIO).
This is something that a lot of people seem to forget. I remember a friend showing me a low-performance Linux-based devboard shortly before the release of the Raspberry Pi. It cost hundreds of dollars. On top of that, support for the board was worse than the support for most of the Linux devboards released after the Raspberry Pi (which often has poor support compared to the Raspberry Pi).
> unless you need GPIO
I'm not even sure how that is relevant in most use cases if cost is a factor. Microcontroller development boards are inexpensive and will hook up to the x86 mini PC via USB. If you're willing to pay a bit more, many Wi-Fi based options are available.
I wouldn't say they lost the plot as they really don't have much choice with the current inflated component prices. It's either increase the prices or discontinue the products.
Actually, mini PCs were cheaper before the prices went through the roof! A ~$250 CAD mini PC comes with everything included vs. everything being a separate "accessory" purchase. Power supply, case, cooling, SD card (or M.2 HAT + SSD, because the mini PC comes with an SSD).
Personally I think the LicheeRV nano on SG2002 is worth the investment of 15-20 bucks.
This thing has USB OTG, multiple usable GPIO and can be flashed via microSD and has a display out with touch support.
I was in the process on building a little iPod Nano clone[1] with Rust / Slint but i was too busy for a while, yet I plan to get back to it in the future. Unfortunately the sg2002 image has no CPU governor yet.
Maybe I switch to the tinyembedded dual with a custom PCB to save power[2].
I recently bought a UZ801 USB Wifi 4G dongle for 10€ incl shipping from China and flashed linux onto it. It's a full-on router running OpenWRT in my workshop now. Can definitely recommend tinkering with such boards, I'm having a lot of fun, especially because of the limitations (384MB RAM, 2GB flash). A lot of tools I wanted on there I had to reimplement in Rust to be more resource-efficient.
It also has instructions for how to flash it(including picoprobe) on their site instead of a discord.
Finally - last time I looked - none of the peripherals were supported(including USB) on the chip and the last commit on their kernel repo was 2023. Also the wifi barely worked.
One could buy an old router or Android device for media playback on a TV for less. So the main attraction here is not that it's cheap, but that it's small and has convenient GPIO.
A credit-card sized system seems like it would require a very small screen, a very small battery, or both.
With that said, add NFC, maybe a USB-A connector made accessible by part of the card folding back, and some UI mechanism to select TKIP codes, and a device like that could make an nice universal hardware security token.
This article motivated me to buy three of these, it was fun, I had to get a pico to build the interface.
I still intend to go back, but time keeps on slipping...
I'm sure many have collected an impressive number of SBCs since the beaglebone, someday I want to build a display case that runs them all on some distributed process as a visual art piece
This is like desktop computers from 30-40 years ago I guess. There were quite a few types of applications those could run.
I'd guess that this board is inexpensive as a cheap entry-level board into the pine64 ecosystem, other boards by pine64 are more expensive. ($60-$80 range.)
> This is like desktop computers from 30-40 years ago I guess.
30 years ago was 1990; a typical desktop computer of that era would have a single CPU at 20ish MHz, and between 512 kB and 2 MB of RAM. The Ox64 easily outclasses anything that was available at the time.
Your overall point is valid, though I think you'll find that this particular calculation isn't correct. (The current year ends in a 6 so 30 years ago also ends in a 6.)
However, I just did a quick search for the Doom release date, which was 1993 and the original system requirements which is Memory (RAM): 4 MB and Processor (CPU): Intel 486DX (66 MHz).[1] So in terms of RAM this is 16x as much and in terms of MHz it's 6x faster on one of the cores. So it's definitely desktop-class for 1993. (33 years ago). As you state, it's much faster than desktop class in 1990.
66MHz probably wasn't an 80486DX; as far as I can recall, those only went up to 50MHz. It would have to be a 486DX2, with the RAM running at only 33MHz. https://netlib.org/performance/html/dhrystone.data.col0.html says that a 486DX2/66 was about 31 to 51 Dhrystone MIPS.
Whoops! Either way - 480 MHz and 64 MB of RAM would put this more on par with a 2001 iMac (400-600 MHz, 64 MB RAM on the base model). And that's not even counting the other CPU cores or the (probably much better) IPC of a modern CPU design.
I've been using the Milk-V Duo series of boards (original MSRP starting at $6) and earlier this year got Linux 7.0 working on them including WiFi USB and Bluetooth: https://github.com/queenkjuul/milkv-duo-ubuntu
If the intent is to play with RISC-V cheaply rather than getting the absolute cheapest computer, I'd look at something with C908 (a small cpu that is vector capable, RVV 1.0).
A particularly good deal is the Banana Pi BPI-RV2: It has 4xC908@1.25GHz, 512MB DDR3, M.2, miniPCIe, 1x 2.5GbE, 5xGbE.
There is a cheaper Banana Pi BPI-CanMV-K230D-Zero. 2xC908, 128MB LPDDR4, KPU, MIPI CSI/DSI, Wi-Fi, 40x GPIO.
If serious about RISC-V, then of course RVA23 is desirable. Unfortunately any SBC with that is currently expensive due to the RAM shortage situation.
The C906 core that runs Linux on the BL808 SoC on this device has roughly the same integer performance as a P3 on a per Mhz basis. The C906 is about 2.4 DMIPS / Mhz and the P3 is roughly 2.4 (Katmai core) - 2.8 (Tualatin core) DMPIS / Mhz depending on the version. You are looking at roughly P3 450 integer performance
Its an interesting comparison that Im not sure reflects positively on the RISC-V C906 core when you factor in core area and process nodes and core area, 22nm vs 250nm. Even if we choose the worst case scenario for the P3 cores to compare which would be the Katmai core. We are basically look at ~parity with a 30 year old core design
C906 core only @ 22nm = ~0.6 mm2
C906 core only @ 250nm = ~78 mm2 (geometric transform)
P3 core only @ 22nm = ~0.5 mm2 (geometric transform)
P3 core only @ 250nm = ~76 mm2
Apologies if this is messy and badly formatted. Im currently at a wedding, sat waiting between the ceremony and the after party and Ive quite a few beers. I responded because its something I looked at previously with RISC-V cores and I already had the answers in my head
This scaling computation is too naive and gives the wrong conclusion. If you look at the number of transistors it's about 4.3 million for the BL808 vs 9.5 million for the Katmai core. Counting the logic transistors looks even worse for the Pentium: 2.5M for the BL808 vs 7.5M for the Katmai.
So the Pentium 3 is 2x the transistor count of the C906 (even 3x if you ignore SRAM) and that's despite being 32-bit while the C906 is 64-bit and has a much more capable vector unit.
(As for new vs 30 year old design I don't really have an intuition how that's supposed to factor in the comparison... But if we consider that we should also consider how much engineering effort went into each of these cores, and we're probably talking a dozen engineers for a couple years for the C906 vs hundreds of engineers and more years for the Pentium.)
Damn, I just checked eBay prices - even second hand some people are asking close to this! I should dig mine out and cash in too.
Out of interest I just dug out my invoice for the pi500+ I brought almost exactly 12 months ago - looks I got it at around 40% of the price it goes for today.
I agree with the other poster though, ESP32 is a good alternative if you don't need linux - these things are great ...
For a buyer, eBay prices for used Raspberry Pis have never looked very attractive.
People don't sell enough of them[1], so the supply/demand curve favors demand and the price is only tempered by that of new hardware (if it is readily available).
That's good for sellers who pay attention. If you've got stuff that you aren't using and the price is high-enough to get your interest, then: Please sell it. :)
-
[1]: I have a theory for why it is this way:
Lots of folks buy Pi hardware. And by that, I mean: It's small compared to the market for iPhones, but it's enormous for a quirky SBC with DIY traits. But lots of those folks futz around with them and lose interest. Into the drawer they go.
People assume the value of computer-ish electronics drops dramatically over time. And for most of the history of personal computers, that's broadly been very true.
Plenty of folks do sell stuff on eBay, and those who have done so know that it can be a pain in the ass to deal with. Packaging, descriptions, printing, photos, getting the thing to the post office or whatever, dealing with the risk of getting ripped off: It sucks. It especially sucks for small quantities of unique (to the seller) low-value items.
So that Raspberry Pi (whether once $20, $40, $80, or whatever) sits in the drawer. They might sell for $200 today, but the uninterested owner doesn't know that. They assume that it's worth less than the cost of a pizza and just isn't worth fucking with at all.
So, even if they might be motivated to deal with eBay for a couple of hundred bucks, their lack of interest means that they never know that the price is high.
Accordingly, the devices stay in the drawer. The $200 remains unrealized. The devices will probably get binned after a few more years of taking up space, if they aren't binned in the next move.
I got a proxmox server hosting many stuff on a T530 thinkpad I got for less than $5, now beat that! Actually, I have a 2015 imac running archos that I got free from an old boomer, he even incl the magic mouse and keyboard.
In the 2020s or somewhere before that we got a bunch of dedicated cheap MCUs that were good enough and I think stole the thunder from full Linux but there are still projects to run it on things like the ESP32 family.
Either way, hardware hacking is still my favorite hobby to watch.
even the exact same model that I use for, ahem, iptv purposes has ballooned in price by 50% over the past few years, despite no design upgrades/changes :(
If you want Linux for very little money, there are still options. There's the MilkV Duo which is probably the cheapest at less than $10. Kind of like the Raspberry Pi Zero, but worse.
Hey, why not check your old conference badges, chances are one of them can run Linux!
These days we'd be lucky to see certain models discounted to $314.
For reference, the cheapest 16GB LPDDR4 (not 4X as used in the Pi 5) DIMM in stock is more than $150, which is about what I paid for the 64GB of DDR4 in my desktop a couple years ago.
The price of a pico is what the zero used to be, and the 4gb/8gb 5 is $110 to $185 depending on ram when the 4 used to be I think $55 to $75 at the same ram.
I shouldn't be surprised because it's similar to/worse than the transition from DDR3 to DDR4, but I still was caught off guard to some degree.
Fortunately for me, I already have a stack of criminally underutilized Pi 3, 4, and 5 units on a shelf from a past (non-hobby) project. No 16GB, but multiple 8GB units, and 8GB is enough for most anything I can imagine wanting to do on a Pi.
bit of an over-wrouught unit of time, ha
https://youtu.be/AEKbFMvkLIc
Personally the pricing changes are absurd even with inflation and memory prices in mind.
RPi is horrible value now you can get so much more from a lot of other boards it's not even a comparison now.
They didn't really exist before. And software support is still best on RPi. But they did really lose the plot because you could buy a whole x86 mini PC (new) for less and they're much better (unless you need GPIO).
This is something that a lot of people seem to forget. I remember a friend showing me a low-performance Linux-based devboard shortly before the release of the Raspberry Pi. It cost hundreds of dollars. On top of that, support for the board was worse than the support for most of the Linux devboards released after the Raspberry Pi (which often has poor support compared to the Raspberry Pi).
> unless you need GPIO
I'm not even sure how that is relevant in most use cases if cost is a factor. Microcontroller development boards are inexpensive and will hook up to the x86 mini PC via USB. If you're willing to pay a bit more, many Wi-Fi based options are available.
Totally agreed. Microcontrollers do GPIO better than a RPi ever did. An ESP32 or Raspberry Pi Pico can handle so much on their own.
This thing has USB OTG, multiple usable GPIO and can be flashed via microSD and has a display out with touch support.
I was in the process on building a little iPod Nano clone[1] with Rust / Slint but i was too busy for a while, yet I plan to get back to it in the future. Unfortunately the sg2002 image has no CPU governor yet.
Maybe I switch to the tinyembedded dual with a custom PCB to save power[2].
1: https://github.com/nanowave-player/nanowave-ui
2: https://github.com/yuansco/TinyEmbedded-Dual/
It also has instructions for how to flash it(including picoprobe) on their site instead of a discord.
Finally - last time I looked - none of the peripherals were supported(including USB) on the chip and the last commit on their kernel repo was 2023. Also the wifi barely worked.
1: https://esp32s.com/wiki/cyd-28-esp32/
With that said, add NFC, maybe a USB-A connector made accessible by part of the card folding back, and some UI mechanism to select TKIP codes, and a device like that could make an nice universal hardware security token.
https://kiisu.io/
They’re awful to use but they are very cheap.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casio_Film_Card_calculators
I don't think it's too wild to expect Linux to run in this form factor, 40 years later.
I still intend to go back, but time keeps on slipping...
I'm sure many have collected an impressive number of SBCs since the beaglebone, someday I want to build a display case that runs them all on some distributed process as a visual art piece
https://pine64.com/product/128mb-ox64-sbc-available-on-decem...
It has 64 MB of internal psram and these cores:
- 64-bit 480MHz RV64 C906
- 32-bit 320MHz RV32 E907
- 32-bit 150MHz RV32 E902
This is like desktop computers from 30-40 years ago I guess. There were quite a few types of applications those could run.
I'd guess that this board is inexpensive as a cheap entry-level board into the pine64 ecosystem, other boards by pine64 are more expensive. ($60-$80 range.)
30 years ago was 1990; a typical desktop computer of that era would have a single CPU at 20ish MHz, and between 512 kB and 2 MB of RAM. The Ox64 easily outclasses anything that was available at the time.
Your overall point is valid, though I think you'll find that this particular calculation isn't correct. (The current year ends in a 6 so 30 years ago also ends in a 6.)
However, I just did a quick search for the Doom release date, which was 1993 and the original system requirements which is Memory (RAM): 4 MB and Processor (CPU): Intel 486DX (66 MHz).[1] So in terms of RAM this is 16x as much and in terms of MHz it's 6x faster on one of the cores. So it's definitely desktop-class for 1993. (33 years ago). As you state, it's much faster than desktop class in 1990.
[1] I only just looked at Google's AI summary, maybe it's wrong: https://imgur.com/a/LbhAmGp
66MHz probably wasn't an 80486DX; as far as I can recall, those only went up to 50MHz. It would have to be a 486DX2, with the RAM running at only 33MHz. https://netlib.org/performance/html/dhrystone.data.col0.html says that a 486DX2/66 was about 31 to 51 Dhrystone MIPS.
https://www.riscvschool.com/2023/03/09/t-head-xuantie-c906-r... says the T-Head (Honey Badger) C906 RV64 core is about 2.3 Dhrystone MIPS ("DMIPS") per MHz, so we should expect the 480MHz C906 to be about 1100 DMIPS.
So the clock speed is only ≈8× higher, but the actual speed gap is probably closer to 32×.
And, for vectorizable workloads, we should expect the V extension to give us another 4–8× boost, so 128×–256× the DX2/66.
A particularly good deal is the Banana Pi BPI-RV2: It has 4xC908@1.25GHz, 512MB DDR3, M.2, miniPCIe, 1x 2.5GbE, 5xGbE.
There is a cheaper Banana Pi BPI-CanMV-K230D-Zero. 2xC908, 128MB LPDDR4, KPU, MIPI CSI/DSI, Wi-Fi, 40x GPIO.
If serious about RISC-V, then of course RVA23 is desirable. Unfortunately any SBC with that is currently expensive due to the RAM shortage situation.
https://thelittleengineerthatcould.blogspot.com/2019/10/horr...
Sam Altman is just catching on ;)
This might be the most Linux sentence ever!
Probably a little faster than a Pentium 3
Its an interesting comparison that Im not sure reflects positively on the RISC-V C906 core when you factor in core area and process nodes and core area, 22nm vs 250nm. Even if we choose the worst case scenario for the P3 cores to compare which would be the Katmai core. We are basically look at ~parity with a 30 year old core design
C906 core only @ 22nm = ~0.6 mm2
C906 core only @ 250nm = ~78 mm2 (geometric transform)
P3 core only @ 22nm = ~0.5 mm2 (geometric transform)
P3 core only @ 250nm = ~76 mm2
Apologies if this is messy and badly formatted. Im currently at a wedding, sat waiting between the ceremony and the after party and Ive quite a few beers. I responded because its something I looked at previously with RISC-V cores and I already had the answers in my head
So the Pentium 3 is 2x the transistor count of the C906 (even 3x if you ignore SRAM) and that's despite being 32-bit while the C906 is 64-bit and has a much more capable vector unit.
(As for new vs 30 year old design I don't really have an intuition how that's supposed to factor in the comparison... But if we consider that we should also consider how much engineering effort went into each of these cores, and we're probably talking a dozen engineers for a couple years for the C906 vs hundreds of engineers and more years for the Pentium.)
https://www.canakit.com/raspberry-pi-zero-2-w.html?cid=usd&s...
Out of interest I just dug out my invoice for the pi500+ I brought almost exactly 12 months ago - looks I got it at around 40% of the price it goes for today.
I agree with the other poster though, ESP32 is a good alternative if you don't need linux - these things are great ...
https://shop.m5stack.com/products/atom-lite-esp32-developmen...
People don't sell enough of them[1], so the supply/demand curve favors demand and the price is only tempered by that of new hardware (if it is readily available).
That's good for sellers who pay attention. If you've got stuff that you aren't using and the price is high-enough to get your interest, then: Please sell it. :)
-
[1]: I have a theory for why it is this way:
Lots of folks buy Pi hardware. And by that, I mean: It's small compared to the market for iPhones, but it's enormous for a quirky SBC with DIY traits. But lots of those folks futz around with them and lose interest. Into the drawer they go.
People assume the value of computer-ish electronics drops dramatically over time. And for most of the history of personal computers, that's broadly been very true.
Plenty of folks do sell stuff on eBay, and those who have done so know that it can be a pain in the ass to deal with. Packaging, descriptions, printing, photos, getting the thing to the post office or whatever, dealing with the risk of getting ripped off: It sucks. It especially sucks for small quantities of unique (to the seller) low-value items.
So that Raspberry Pi (whether once $20, $40, $80, or whatever) sits in the drawer. They might sell for $200 today, but the uninterested owner doesn't know that. They assume that it's worth less than the cost of a pizza and just isn't worth fucking with at all.
So, even if they might be motivated to deal with eBay for a couple of hundred bucks, their lack of interest means that they never know that the price is high.
Accordingly, the devices stay in the drawer. The $200 remains unrealized. The devices will probably get binned after a few more years of taking up space, if they aren't binned in the next move.
This includes all of that
But online it's very hard to find