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Comment by leoedin | Hacker News Reader

The big ecosystem of SBCs confuses me a bit. Who is buying these?

The work required to build an actual secure, maintainable product on top of an SBC is so big that you'd surely never use one of these. The hard work is all in software. You need a supplier with product lifetime guarantees and a known SoC manufacturer.

If you're a hobbyist, unless you really don't value your time you'd be much better served buying an x86 PC or a Raspberry Pi for whatever project you've got. Any money saved buying one of these would be completely negated by the extra time taken to maintain it.

So who's the target market? Are there products out there built on these? Or are they mostly just shipped straight into desk drawers? How many of these do they actually ship?

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> The hard work is all in software. You need a supplier with product lifetime guarantees and a known SoC manufacturer.

We need easily accessible documentation on the hardware so anyone can maintain the software. The problem I see is most SoC makers either have poor or no publicly available documentation. Their poor excuse for "open source" are undocumented Linux drivers for their black box hardware and a near obsolete kernel that they may or may not update.

These chips are made by big companies for big companies and not hobby people. They expect that you're going to buy in volume, sign NDAs and possibly license IP from them. The chip goes into a product that is likely never going to be updated and thrown out in 5 years.

> Who is buying these?

All people who want to optimize software for the RISC-V Vector extension, as this is the most afordable SBC which supports it.

You don’t need that many customers to design and ship an SBC. The hobbyist market is enough to sustain these companies. They can sell accessories to increase their margins. Their contract manufacturer can incrementally build batches of the boards.

Many of these boards serve as development boards for the parts they include. If you want a dev board to try this part or you need a cheap RISC-V system to test RISC-V things on, buying one of these is an easy choice.

> You don’t need that many customers to design and ship an SBC.

Right. An SoC takes five years and tens of millions of dollars.

An SBC using that SoC can be designed and made in three months for the cost of a small team's salary -- possibly even just one person e.g. see Paul Stoffregen of Teensy fame, or Jonathan Oxer at Freetronics. I'll bet the teams at Sipeed, Banana Pi, Orange Pi etc are pretty small too.

There are many products that are only expected to sell in low volumes and high margins. Also, prototyping, proof of concepts, one-offs, etc. Those are all areas that I've seen them used.

The thing cost as much as two cocktails at my local bar.

I might just buy one to play with it for two or three hours and then throw it in a closet. Cheaper than going to a movie and more entertaining!

Most of the SBCs are supported by fairly standard Linux distributions: Debian/Armbian or Fedora; you just boot from the approriate image on an SD card. Some SBCs have eMMC storage and/or a M2 connector, so you can either keep running off the SD card or transfer the image to that storage.

The value proposition of using SBCs is in their embedded connectivity; in addition to standard USB/network/HDMI ports they tend to have built-in connectors for:

* MIPI input, for video cameras

* MIPI output for LCD panels

* i2c and SPI for weird peripherals (accelerometers, temp sensors, etc)

* i2s for sound

* GPIO and timers/PWM for custom peripherals like motors/servos, contacts, programmable LEDs etc.

Maybe for hobbyists it's more of practicing how to play around with embedded systems? Over a decade ago I sorta got burned by Odroid dropping support for one of their early units despite being much faster than the 2Bs that were selling at the time (plus the annoying cost of emmcs or whatever), so I absolutely agree with your point.

> So who's the target market? Are there products out there built on these? Or are they mostly just shipped straight into desk drawers? How many of these do they actually ship?

Hobbyists, mainly.

I could see this being a hit with people who want to work with RISC-V, which still needs a lot of low-level stuff built out for its ecosystem. You don't need it to be a screamer, just for it to run predictably.

Remember, the Raspberry Pi was mainly a hobbyist curiosity when it came out. There's definitely a market.

I mostly use them for things specifically designed to not need software maintenance. I use them in test fixtures and other embedded systems. Anything that is connected to a network isn't connected to the internet, and regardless of a network connection, I always set the filesystem as immutable and create backups of the SD card, so if anything goes modified, restarting usually fixes it, but if not re-imaging the SD card for sure will.

>Who is buying these?

If only you knew the ecosystem in China and Taiwan. Even a fraction of the Chinese domestic market alone is enough.

> The big ecosystem of SBCs confuses me a bit. Who is buying these?

They make decent home servers, unless you need fast storage.

So actually one of the thing that attracted me to the RV2 is the PCI Express slots. I was able to add a SATA controller and an NVMe drive to the same unit.

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