[Wylug-discuss] Raspberry Pi

[Paul Brook]

> >> They are good, but I may have bought beaglebone for webserver if
> >> doing
> >> it again. If you have the money the udoo looks good, but at that
> >> price
> >> is it better to get a microserver?
> > 
> > "microserver" is a sufficiently generic term that it's hard to say.
> > But there
> > are definitely an increasing number of alternatives to a Pi. The
> > beaglebone
> > black, and cubieboard being the examples that spring to mind.  For a
> > bit more
> > money (say £100) then there are many much more capable alternatives,
> > both Arm
> > and x86 based.
> 
> Which ones do you recommend for the above price?

The Allwinner A10/A20 cpus have very impressive specs at low cost.  The 
cubieboard is the only one I'm vaguely familiar with, with prices starting at 
about the same as a Pi (£31), with the fully tricked out "cubietruck A20" 
still coming in at under £60.

The BeagleBone is pretty good if you want lots of low-level IO (for hooking up 
various kinds of electronics).  Though I still maintain that anyone interested 
in playing with electronics and computer interfacing is best off starting with 
an Arduino Uno/Leonardo.

You can get freescale imx6 SABE-Lite boards for about £100.  I've mostly 
worked with the more expensive imx6 boards, but the main difference is a few 
exotic A/V connectors that you almost certainly don't care about.

Some Marvell Arm based systems come into this price bracket (e.g. SheevaPlug). 
However I wouldn't recommend the older ARMv5 systems at this point.  The newer 
ARMv7 based chips may be worth considering, though I don't have any specific 
examples.

On the Intel side there's plenty of choice. This is definitely the lowest risk 
option as they're basically the same as any other PC.  In the past I've found 
mini-itx.com to be as good a starting point as any.  The main thing I'd be 
wary of is that many of the current Atom chipsets use the PowerVR (GMA500/600) 
graphics which are not linux friendly. If you want something a bit more 
powerful the AMD Fusion based boards might be worth a look.

That's what I can think of off the top of my head.  There are certainly 
others.

Paul