On Jan 12, 2017, at 11:46 AM, Dan Roganti via vcf-midatlantic <vcf-midatlantic@lists.vintagecomputerfederation.org> wrote:
On Thu, Jan 12, 2017 at 7:04 AM, Jeffrey Jonas via vcf-midatlantic < vcf-midatlantic@lists.vintagecomputerfederation.org> wrote:
there are many many Raspberry Pi clones. Here are 5 slick commercial-videos for them. Daniel Kottke starts with a pitch for the Pine A64
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R1l4I2UIw1Q 5 Raspberry-pi alternatives
oh yea, I bought one of these too during their Kickstarter campaign. It packs a lot of hardware per buck just on one board, and it's very price competitive to the RPi3 still. I'm still tinkering around with mine and looking for a homebrew project. This even supports the same physical form factor for the RPi Hats using the same 40pin I/O Plus on top this includes an additional I/O port for their dedicated interfaces and a few others. All the while with minimal additional pcb space. I was very glad to see they were able to expand into a store once they satisfied all of their rewards. I really hope the stick around for the long haul. Because many of these Kickstarter campaigns wind up being a dead-end or one-hit wonders.
Well, Allwinner (who makes the CPU/SoC along with a bunch of other cheap ARM SoCs) isn't going away any time soon, but their support isn't stellar (and their Linux SDKs are full of GPL violations). However, there's EXCELLENT community support amongst the Armbian distribution, which pays close attention to the Pine64. Really neat stuff; check out all the really cool super-cheap ARM SBCs based on Allwinner chips out there! A lot of them are Raspberry Pi I/O compatible, but a lot of them go in completely different directions (like the aforementioned CHIP from NextThingCo). - Dave