At the ever increasing cost of the pi and how limiting it is, the n100 is a no brainer.
Depends on the use case I guess.I prefer to have an ARM based SBC to play with (rather than an Intel based box) to test different Linux distributions and BSD without GUI.
Pi power consumption is going up too. And x86 keeps coming down. Idle power draw the pi wins you'd get 2x longer idle. But under load if you compared the workoutput to wattage I bet it's pretty close.
It's closer than it once was. But a Pi 5 running at full pelt is still nowhere near an N100 running at full pelt. In the comments, the author says that the power consumption of the N100 during the benchmarks was 3x that of the Raspberry Pi 5.
N100s have their place for sure, but for simple home labbing, I think they're overkill. But if you're running an Arr stack, it's definitely worth considering.
But the N100 running at full pelt will be running way more intensive applications than Pi 5. In everyday scenario, that means you can run more applications comfortably without going "full pelt". AFAIK
I'm unsure. But I don't think the N100 runs at reduced capacity. The benchmark testing doesn't suggest so anyway. So it's either full power or nothing.
Perhaps you are thinking in best and better and what most people want. For me there is something like curiosity (Not very uncommon in the open source world) and learning new things.Besides that I am not very amused about Intel and their Spectre and Meltdown failures which is still not a closed book with new attacks being reported in the news.For hobby and work, computer security and privacy is something that I cannot neglect.
Yep, that's what 'generally' and 'niche' means. The n100 doesnt have hyper threading so isnt subject to that kind of attack - btw the same attack that AMD has been subject to to many times over and over. Not sure what's good on ARM curiosity - still interested to know.
I deeply regret my pi5 purchase. Here I was hoping to use it as a low power application server but I cannot get Ethernet working reliably after a hot reboot. Seems to be a distro agnostic issue, though I acknowledge this could be a part failure.
I’m guessing the power implications here are minimal as well?
That's an interesting point I didn't think about.I don't know and I have no gadget to test that.
Actually once I've left the USB Ethernet adapter in a smart phone and forgot to take it out (but I did take the Ethernet cable out). The next day I saw that the phone had used a lot of battery power.I guess the phone kept talking to the adapter and the build in small light.I have one adapter without a light so I can test how much battery that would roughly consume, just out of curiosity.
No problem at all. I can try to measure this with a socket wattmeter I have lying around.
The power implications aren't likely to he a deal breaker, but I do love the idea of operating an application server at approx 7W (that said, the same power envelope is also achievable on certain x86-64 home server platforms now).
No problem at all. I can try to measure this with a socket wattmeter I have lying around.
The power implications aren’t likely to he a deal breaker, but I do love the idea of operating an application server at approx 7W (that said, the same power envelope is also achievable on certain x86-64 home server platforms now).
Right.Meanwhile the on-board Ethernet port could become more reliable with newer software or some tweaks ?
I'm glad it's working for you. I'm wondering if my issues will be resolved in the future by firmware upgrades (also holding out for uboot updates anyway). Not giving up on it just yet.
I don’t know if you’ve already tried this, but I’ve had weird behavior with older Pi3s when the power supplies weren’t up to snuff.
A good 5V/10A (yeah I know they only need 5A) sorted out one of mine that had a heavy load of Neopixels running on it, even though the neopixels had their own 5V supply.
I haven’t needed to get a Pi5 for any of my projects and really use them as big arduinos in certain uses (better for camera detection and remote reprogramming).
At this point, I’m not sure why someone would buy a Pi. I used my Pi 3 for years and got it super cheap on release.
You mean why anyone would buy a new Pi that is not a Pi3 ?
Pi4 can boot from USB meaning that the usage of a SD card can be omitted completely. Not sure a Pi3 can do that or do that easily ?
Someone like me who heard how cool raspberry pi was and tried to get one for years and then finally got it this year, but turns out that there’s better stuff out there in the market now
They were awesome when they were $30. Nice support, do niche things, but now they're the same price as a decent Window micro PC without the Linux hastle.
Raspberry Pi has two CSI (camera serial interface) connectors on board, which is a considerable advantage over having to deal with USB webcams. This matters if your industrial robot must see the work area faster, your competition robot must run circles around opposing robots, or more sadly - if your drone must fly to war. :( On Raspberry Pi, in laboratory conditions (extreme lighting intensity), you can use the camera (with big ifs and buts) at 500+ frames per second, not fast enough to photograph a bullet, but fast enough to see a mouse trap gradually closing. That's impossible over USB and unheard of to most USB camera makers.
Optimized libraries
I know that Raspberry Pi has "WiringPi" (a fast C library for low level comms, helping abstract away difficult problems like hardware timing, DMA and interrupts) and Orange Pi recently got "WiringOP" (I haven't tried it, don't know if it works well). I don't know of anything similar on a PC platform, so I believe that on NUC, you'd have to roll your own (a massive pain) or be limited to kilohertz GPIO frequencies instead of megahertz (because you'd be wading through some fairly deep Linux API calls).
Antenna socket
Sadly, neither of them has a WiFi antenna socket. But the built-in WiFi cards are generally crappy too, so if you needed a considerable working area, you'd connect an external card with an external antenna anyway. Notably, some models of Orange Pi have an external antenna, and the Raspberry Pi Compute Module has one too.
Give me full ATX with 15 sata ports and I would bite. 10 HDD and 5 caching ssds. I would prefer full axt because with that many drives I would need a full case so might as well use a full board.
Few years ago I had a board with 10, can't find any boards with that many anymore. Ended up with one with 8 plus two expansion cards to get me to the 13 drives I have currently with 3 spare for future expansion. Replacing my old 4TB drives with 12TB drives as my media hoard expands. Upgrade feature of radarr has been a blight on my storage. 😀
I've used the RockPi-S for a project a while ago. The software to write to the on-board storage was in Chinese and didn't seem to have a way to use English. I had to hold my phone with Google Translate in front of the screen to navigate around it, although that might have been the least unintuitive part of the software. The alternative cli-software refused to compile at first and then refused to use the forwarded USB device. I ended up booting Fedora on my work laptop just to run it.
I recommend trying out Armbian if you still have problems with it. The images provided by them are significantly more reliable, I haven't had any issues, while some official images failed to boot. Also avoid the models with on-board storage, just use an SD card, it really isn't worth the hassle.
I run Armbian on my Radxa devices! A huge life saver.
I use a Rock 5B with an Android TV image for my TV box, but it is janky at best. I'd run an Armbian desktop release of I could, but HDMI is broken on all of them.
I've been putting off building a new NAS for (going on) 3 years now. Power draw was a concern since I've been trying to downsize and become more efficient with each refresh cycle. This looks really promising, and I love that it has two 2.5 Gb ethernet ports on board.
Edit: The press release says 3x 2.5 Gb ports but the Amazon listing only says 2 Povoq's right. The Realtek is the third. The way it's listed in the Amazon description just made it hard to find. Either way, that's plenty for my use case.
I'm still trying to decide if I want to build a pure NAS with a board like this or go for something more powerful that can also handle transcoding and run my media server. Currently, I'm about 60% in favor of a pure, lower power NAS and keeping my media server separate (like my current configuration).
I really do need to make a decision soon, lol, as I'm very close to capacity on my current storage.
if you need any questions about something basic about CWWK boards, i can probably answer some of them. I made my own media/NAS board out of a n100 based CWWK board about 2 months ago
outside of the few hiccups of starting to integrate various distros of linux into my life (had used ubuntu like back in 2017, but only recently used debian for this NAS, and loaded an arch-based distro onto my Framework 16) its doing pretty good. The whole purpose of my usecase was to make a tiny NAS so I needed an ITX board with at least 5 sata ports and the board fit my goal (ontop of the extra being power efficient).
I haven't tested the limits of how many users could be streaming content off my system simultaneously yet. Ive heard ~10 1080p streams if GPU encoding is enabled (in my usecase, had to use debian testing since the current kernel of debian 12 does not include hardware acceleration for the n100).
If I had a single thing I wished it had, I wish the chips had arc based media encoders for AV1 support, so if there was one key feature that would make future variants of that line of cpus desirable in the future, it would be that.
Yeah, the arc encoders would be nice to have. My current setup struggles when it has to transcode AV1 streams. At least it can use HW acceleration for the encode phase.
Someone mentioned driver support may be iffy. Sounds like you didn't hit any major issues there? I'd also likely be running Debian on it and using ZFS for my filesystem/LVM. Probably boot it from NVME and use all 6 SATA connectors for the pool drives.
yeah you just have to be aware that debian 12 might not by deefault, have the correct kernel needed for hardware acceleration, so youd have to go into debian testing to compile it yourself. If you attempt to cpu encode your way through things, you'd only get a couple of streams before it bogged itself down.
I'm not 100% sold on running my media server on the NAS. It's currently a separate box, and I'm still mostly leaning toward keeping it that way and letting the NAS just be a NAS.
This CPU has quick sync so should not be a problem. I doubt you will need more than 3-4 4k to 1080 transcodes if you are remotely considering this board so it should not be an issue.
My only concern with these one off mb manufacturers is driver support in your os of choice including Linux variants.
True. I wasn't factoring in Quck Sync. My current media server uses that for transcoding, so should be fine on that too. Good point. Yeah, 3-4 streams is the most it ever sees at once, usually 1-2.
My only concern with these one off mb manufacturers is driver support in your os of choice including Linux variants.
Also good point. Cursory checking shows the JMB585 SATA interface, i220-V intel NIC, and RTL8125B NIC should all have in-kernel driver support in recent Linux releases. Not sure about any other motherboard peripherals, but at least those seem to be supported. Definitely something to keep in mind. Thanks!
Most PCBs, even really cheap ones, are made from FR-4, which is a very robust fibreglass. It's would be a pretty decent choice for drone components in general.
Not drones, but Carl Bugeja on YouTube makes some fascinating machines almost entirely out of PCBs (although he uses a lot of flex PCBs, not just FR-4).
Wonder if it could build around laptop mobos... I threw together a design around my daughter's broken laptop (screen) with Tinkercad and cut it using a laser engraver, but it bugs me it has an open gap around the ports (I am not that talented with a caliper, and I'm a little lazy)
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