The $8 Linux Computer (2022) | Hacker News Reader

The $8 Linux Computer (2022)

thelittleengineerthatcould.blogspot.com

174 pointszenincognito78 comments

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.

My friend has gotten full Linux on a number of weird RISC-V boards. https://github.com/queenkjuul/milkv-duo-ubuntu

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).

The Jupiter 2 has standard RVV, but also another set of cores that are designed for AI with non standard matrix instructions...

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.

> 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 :(

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.

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!

The Raspberry Pi Zero sold for $5 before the foundation sold out.

Sold out? Or catered towards market demands?

Tomato. Tomahto.

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.

> 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).

> They didn't really exist before.

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'm not even sure how that is relevant in most use cases if cost is a factor.

Totally agreed. Microcontrollers do GPIO better than a RPi ever did. An ESP32 or Raspberry Pi Pico can handle so much on their own.

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).

That's what selling out is...

For reference, for those of you who prefer to learn things via ska punk music from the 90s...

https://youtu.be/AEKbFMvkLIc

They changed from an education-focused non-profit to a for-profit entity and then IPO'd. They sold out in the most literal sense.

To be fair to them that was over ten years ago, and prices of everything have risen significantly in that time.

Yeah, the launch was nearly 15 years ago (Feb 2012) - more than 1/7th of a century. It’d be in 9th or 10th grade by now.

>more than a 1/7th of a century

bit of an over-wrouught unit of time, ha

In that time, the Earth has travelled about 14 billion kilometers, or for the Americans, 126.7 billion football fields.

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.

I miss them selling for $3.14 on Pi day.

These days we'd be lucky to see certain models discounted to $314.

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.

The Pi Zero 1.3 is $10, but it’s not in stock anywhere I can find.

same! it was like buying an extra roll of paper towels

I still do this of they have them in stock. A $15 Zero 2W will still be handy

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.

I wonder if he uses this model for his current killer drone business.

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].

1: https://github.com/nanowave-player/nanowave-ui

2: https://github.com/yuansco/TinyEmbedded-Dual/

It's taken many years but Sophgo has got a lot of their drivers into the mainline kernel and i do commend them for that.

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.

This part is awful. I bought this a while back: https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/Ox64

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.

I want this but in credit-card form factor, with a screen built in.

Like a Linux phone?

If you can name me a phone the size of a CC ...

Men can dream, can’t they?

We had these in the 80s:

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.

There are a bunch of tiny, no-name Android phones with 3” screens.

They’re awful to use but they are very cheap.

Like the CYD[1], or do you really mean a credit card in all three dimensions?

1: https://esp32s.com/wiki/cyd-28-esp32/

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.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50406512

Not Linux, but you mean something like the KIISU?

https://kiisu.io/

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 very impressive. Here are the specs that they linked:

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.)

> 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.

>30 years ago was 1990

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

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

Also liked your “Nature abhors unused RAM” piece.

https://thelittleengineerthatcould.blogspot.com/2019/10/horr...

Sam Altman is just catching on ;)

Linux has historically also done this. Unused RAM is wasted RAM. So in goes the cache.

>At the time of writing, ethernet, wifi and SD-Card are not working.

This might be the most Linux sentence ever!

Quick someone upload a passmark score

Probably a little faster than a Pentium 3

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

Interesting, thanks! Would be cool to have the same comparison for a modern Intel cpu

Haha thanks. I played games and browsed the web on a 450mhz P3 system as my daily box running Linux for a while.

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.)

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 chip computer used to be much more capable and feature rich at just 9$

Assuming you're referring to the one released in 2015, with inflation that's nearly 50% more expensive apparently.

I'm so sad that one didn't prosper, I still love the deck they sold

I still regret not buying the full package, including the deck

~$13 adjusted for inflation.

Is the Pi Zero 2W globally unobtainable at this point? What are folks using instead?

There seems to be a 3W coming. I guess availability will suck though.

Complete starter kit for $90 here

https://www.canakit.com/raspberry-pi-zero-2-w.html?cid=usd&s...

You’re not saying that this 8$ project costs 90$ today, are you?

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 ...

https://shop.m5stack.com/products/atom-lite-esp32-developmen...

It was always misleading to say it was just $5 because you need power supply, flash card, case etc

This includes all of that

You can get amazingly far with an ESP32, RP2350, or other modern microcontrollers if Linux isnt a hard requirement.

You can pick them up in the Cambridge store, if you're anywhere near it, I bought one last week and they had plenty in stock.

But online it's very hard to find

My local Microcenter has 20 in stock but the price has risen to $18

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.

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