Hacker News Reader

Comment by mschuster91 | Hacker News Reader

Given that many people use RPi as base for home entertainment systems... I'd prefer GigE and one or two SATA ports.

Me too. However, the board is cheap and properly supported and conforms to a lot of standards. If you stick to branded stuff then for less than £100 you get a thin client capable of 1080p in a decent case that can be bungeed to the back of a monitor with a power supply that wont blow up and a decent HDMI cable. The wifi and ethernet are good enough for 1080p streaming and good enough for good quality RDP. Modern low cost SD cards are pretty quick as well.

I have rather a lot of them, at home and work. For me, quality and standards count.

Nowadays Pis are made in Wales (by Sony). They are designed by a British foundation. To all intents and purposes they are a British computer that fulfils a particular niche rather well. No, the Pi3 does not have GBE or SATA but it is (in my opinion) a piece of kit that you can trust to not set fire to your cat.

There are boards with all that.

The fastest low-cost networking board right now (that I can find) is the espressobin, built around the Marvell Armada chipset. It's got three full-duplex GigE ports that can actually run as such as well as pci-E and SATA. Unfortunately it's oriented toward routers and stuff so it lacks HDMI, so no good for home entertainment.

Never knew about this board. Might make for a pretty nice home router.

Soekris[0] and RouterBoard[1] are specifically for Routers too but at least Soekris is a more general purpose SBC.

Also Pine64[2] is supposed to be suitable for HTPC (Kodi) usage but I haven’t tried it and YMMV.

I <3 RouterBoards + MikroTik.

[0]: http://www.soekris.dk

[1]: https://mikrotik.com/products/group/routerboard

[2]: https://www.pine64.org

I tried to get a Pinebook from those Pine64 guys but never heard back from them. Not sure I'd recommend them since they didn't even send a confirmation email or anything of the sort.

Sokris effectively went out of business about 9 months ago [0]. The danish company you linked to doesn't seem to sell any of their SBCs.

[0] http://www.soekris.com/

> There are boards with all that.

Problem with these: I can never be sure what level of acceleration for video playback is supported - and in what quality. The Pi is pretty rock solid in that department. Also, the Pi has by far the biggest community and extensive documentation, and I can rely on there still being Pis available in years, compared to the Chinese outfits where no one knows how long they'll stay in market.

Concur. I've played with the ODroid C2, Beaglebone Black, and the three "full flavor" Raspberry Pi models. The RasPis have, far and away, the best supportability. The ODroids are great when they work - love that GigE, but they aren't maintaining an OS distribution with the same care and man-power that Raspbian is getting.

I agree, though maybe as a “Raspberry Pi Pro” or “Plus” model.

(Aside from that, I’d really like if all models had a serial console over USB, and perhaps a small amount of built-in flash memory to avoid the need for a MicroSD card in some cases)

I want two 25 Gb interfaces. =)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com