Best Single-Board Computers Under $200

The Graperain Samsung S5P6818 single board computer is almost one third of the G6818 development board size, but with better performance than the G6818 development board. It nearly covers all the peripheral function of the development board, as well as onboard VGA, USB WIFI/BT two in one module, etc. Software: G6818 arm linux sbc is completely compatible with G6818 development board, it’s unnecessary to make any modification. Hardware: G4418 SBC is completely compatible with G6818 SBC, it’s only needed to change the SoC to upgrade A9 Quad Core to A53 Octa Core, convenient for clients to upgrade their products. It only 79$.

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The Z-turn board from MYIR should be listed. Featuring with:

  • 667MHz Xilinx XC7Z010/020 Dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 Processor with Xilinx 7-series FPGA logic
  • 1GB DDR3 SDRAM (2 x 512MB, 32-bit), 16MB QSPI Flash
  • USB_UART, USB2.0 OTG, 1 x 10/100/1000Mbps Ethernet, CAN, HDMI, TF, …
  • Onboard Three-axis Acceleration Sensor and Temperature Sensor
  • Ready-to-Run Linux Single Board Computer
  • Optional Camera and WiFi Modules, IO Extension Cape
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I find it so amusing that while the blockchain world are all going crazy for more powerful and more power hungry miners, we are trying to find the less consuming and cheapest solution out there.
LOL

I really pity those who can’t see that the future of decentralization is MaidSafe haha

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Yes and lets add rugged and open or foss equivalent hardware and verifable hardwardware for the mesh. Id love it if this thread started talking cases and batteries and solar cells and the whole bill of materials for: Autonomous SAFE Wireless Mesh Node- some nodes some fast point to point repreaters or both. At some point these things might be printable. When Onlive did their little magic box for boring through the net at great distance for real time game streaming their unit costs $10 to make and more than half of it was the cost of the plastic case. That was the magic of a custom ASIC on cost and performance, so maybe its custom FPGA stuff like what MS and Google have gone to for their server chips but hardware architecture is itself is flashable software and reconfigurable on the fly (advantage for hardware verifiability?) but so simple and cheap you could print it. MAID Safe’s parnters in Malaysia may be up to this task.

Keep in mind that if it has a PCI slot, as some of them do, then you can use a pci-SSD … which can be even faster than SATA.

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For a few years I have maintained this wiki page - chasing not sub-200-dollar but sub-150-dollar boards, optimal for running Debian as a server (FreedomBox, specifically): https://wiki.debian.org/CheapServerBoxHardware

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This looks promising

http://www.orangepi.org/Orange%20Pi%20Lite%202/

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Orange-Pi-Lite2-H6-1GB-USB3-0-Bluetooth4-1-Quad-core-64bit-Development-Board-Sup/222922684046?hash=item33e73a368e:g:CMsAAOSwxAxa0OdL

Once bugs are ironed out

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I’m shooting for something that does POE + SATA, not shure anything exists at the cheaper end with those.

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Really helpful list, thanks for pointing it out. Too bad they dont have RSS for those wiki pages.

Yeah, Debian wiki seems to have trouble with its RSS feed for several years - issue is tracked at https://bugs.debian.org/787583

For POE + SATA needs (and no other requirements, so I apply my own preferences of OSHW compliance, industrial level components, etc.), I recommend A20-OLinuXino-LIME2 - Open Source Hardware Board + MOD-POE-V2

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This board would run 32bit Debian?

Thoughts on 32 or 64 bit hardware/OS for the sole purpose of single vault/ single HDD use? (i.e A64-OLinuXino looks good)

Looks like POE is always external with these boards?

Yes, its best to aim for 64 bit now. 32 bit is not going to be in the prime supported place any more it seems. So 32 bit systems will be supported “when there is time” basis and so I feel its time to only look at 64 bit hardware for anything new. That goes for OSs and SAFE.

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What Im wondering is what kind of case do you buy for these tiny computers? I mean ok you buy the wee board, external hard drive, whatever other goodies it needs, but like any other computer you need a box to put it all in. So what kind of case do you use for a computer so small and where do you get it?

Raspberry Pi for example had lots of plastic cases you can buy

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Usually there is a third party case for them. Different ones for the different boards

I don’t doubt it. The question is how do you know which one and where to get it?

The focus of the list at https://wiki.debian.org/CheapServerBoxHardware is consumer-ready boards - all boards listed are sold together with a case, and boards recommended works as-is with Debian (i.e. not requiring a custom-compiled kernel or e.g. an Ubuntu-shipped non-free binary blob).

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Correct, Olimex LIME2 boards are built around a 32-bit ARMv7 SoC.

If you want a cheap board that works stable today and will be supported by the upcoming Debian stable release (i.e. for at least 3 more years) then I recommend the Olimex LIME2.

If you want a cheap board that requires either bleeding edge OS or “cheating” e.g. using custom non-mainlined Linux kernel and/or non-free binary blobs and/or non-distro-maintained bootloader, but is likely to become stable within the next year - and you are prepared to make a casing for it yourself, then I recommend the Olimex A64.

ARMv5 devices - most boards in first wave of “desktop-capable” cheap ARM boards - are 32-bit, and will not be supported in upcoming stable Debian release.

ARMv6 devices - mostly only RPi 1 - are 32-bit, and is not (optimally) supported in Debian at all.

ARMv7 devices are 32-bit, will be supported in upcoming stable Debian release.

ARMv8 devices are 64-bit, will be supported in upcoming stable Debian release, but is unsupported in current stable Debian and barely supported in bleeding edge Debian.

I disagree that 32-bit is problematic in general. Depending on use case, any board available is problmatic, so to sensible discuss further please share more details of the concrete use case.

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Does anyone know if these specs for above hardware will be a good fit for like one board with 4 Hard drives, with a headless setup. In my head I’am thinking of specs like 1,6-2,0 GHz cpu, USB3 (with USB3 to SATA-adapter), x2 + USB hub or x4 USB ports for connecting 4 HDD, 4GB of ram, gigabit ethernet, overkill?

Specs above maybe a little towards next gen single board computers.

Low latency seems something to strive for when it comes to future network hardware optimisation. Love this discussion, remember discussing hardware with @happybeing in 2014. When we now have this discussion it gives me so much motivation to be thinking of hardware for hopefully much soon alpha 3. Does anyone have a general idea on how many harddrives one board can support with low latency and good throughput for about 50-100$?

That Olimex A64 looks quite good but the raspberry pi model 3b seems almost as good except from ram and ethernet but with better connectivy, 4x USB.

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