Who else is a SBC (Single Board Computer) Enthusiast or Hobbyist?

[urbanman2004]

Yeah, Kodi is nice. I have a Shield TV so it's just easier & quicker than turning on my PC and browsing for the right file.

I basically downloaded my entire IMDB watchlist, including around 200 shows, over half of it is taken up by shows. So I can watch anything any time I want. And also cancelled my Netflix
4K stuff is big. A single season in 4K is like 150 gigs, sometimes over 200.
I admit, I don't have any of this backed up. I backed up some important personal files to gdrive (that weren't on the server), don't think I can be arsed to back up 50 TB though even if I do have unlimited gdrive.

Were any of the other Orange Pi devices that successful? I looked at them years ago, back then they were still more powerful than Raspberry Pi. But they didn't seem especially popular, besides a few people raving about them.
I'm afraid most people will be hesitant to buy anything other than Raspberry Pi because the names are not as well known.

Shield TV was good for what it could do at the time it initially released, but seriously, NVIDIA needs to update its specs b/c compared to other SBCs that contain the Rockchip RK3588S (like the OP5), it doesn't hold a candle. I actually have Android 10 installed on my 2GB Jetson Nano which essentially makes it akin to a Shield w/ a slight less I/O, however, I prefer to use that to watch YouTube, watch movies via VLC, and occasionally emulate some old school games. I still need to beat that GameBoy game Link's Awakening on it when I have time.

Wtf, lol... You literally download 4K videos?... Sh!t, I used to download 720p videos for ages until 2018/2019 when I started to pivot toward 1080p which I consider sufficient enough for my needs. 4K would be overkill for the amount of storage capacity I have available to make it sustainable.

I didn't even bother looking into the Orange Pi 5 until I saw one of ETA Prime's YouTube videos where's he's showing off its performance which had me impressed when comparing it to my Jetson Nano and being that there was a preorder pricing offer for the OP5 at that time, I immediately bought one and didn't flinch at the price since I knew it was going to eventually increase so it was better to get in early. The price I paid for it I feel was warranted for its performance and features I got out of it.

Even though it's not as popular as the RP4, there happens to be a decent size reddit community that's making some noise. I recently had some open dialog w/ a few of the members in the OP5 reddit subgroup whom I've been able to discuss questions I had related to getting it setup, troubleshooting and various OS support.

S/N: I sent you a friend request on Steam.

Post automatically merged: Jan 26, 2023

Lost interest here.

Don't know quite where to point at in all this

I liked getting my full computer onto a TV back when flatscreen was the new hotness as opposed to the slight curve of CRT, though my electronics skills there were limited to 555 timers and basic logic and application specific chips rather than anything too programmable. Similarly serial ports were still a thing so could have my computer take in signals and light LEDs, something that pleased rather younger me at a visceral level (school had some little light gates to do boring things like take before and after speeds/timings to use in a spreadsheet to calculate speeds when you vary the angle of the track a cart ran down and it was right up there with explosives, mercury, vaan der graaf generators, lasers, radioactive stuff, liquid nitrogen, thermite and everything else you do if you want to catch a young boy's attention as it applies to chemistry and physics). Then went to original xbox (which had wonderful homebrew) and sought ways to get them into cars and whatnot without just buying an inverter (which I did also get involved in on the periphery).
Throughout that I was looking on and following the pogoplug/sheevaplug thing quite intently and got into hacked routers and mp3 players as well. I was less involved in programmable chips than some but still did a bit and learned things up to and including fiddling with FPGAs.

Arduino came along and were delightful little things to play with to do all sorts of things that previously were tedious logic setups or having to coax a microcontroller (I missed the earlier PLC and PAL world beyond what I read in books) or maybe CPLD into doing something fun. Raspberry pis came along where I followed it from early talk on tech sites to making the plunge with the 512 meg model B (still have loads around and in service).
For better or worse the pi left its powered by USB design goal and instead became a more boring version of the cheap and cheerful laptops I could hide behind a TV or something and use there. They still had some nice means of plugging in external devices but most were embedded Linux to display things or act as local network devices of various classes. I was not necessarily tied to USB power at the time (though even then most things would give you an amp rather than 500mA) but most of those that went beyond that never quite managed to get it together or were needlessly restrictive (this was before the rasp pi cores got properly opened up as well).

Today I still watch people online having fun doing various data collection or camera traps with complicated processing and external triggers, and am waiting with bated breath to see where both mod chip, flash cart and even wholesale replacement of serious components of hardware (that amiga stuff a while back where they faked a load of things from the CPU on down... wonderful). That said so much of it has been replaced by grabbing an old laptop, being a basic linux distro to install where the mechanical mounting and wiring is more interesting or indeed an old cheap tablet that does it all far better.
Other than them acting as a poor man's FPGA replacement/thing programmable by mere mortals I am having so very little drive any enthusiasm in me for things here.

@FAST6191 you def showing your age there, lol. I'm in my late 30s so I get your drift. Seems like you knew enough to be dangerous in your heyday I see, lol

So w/ the stagnation of features being included on the Raspberry Pi, is that what made you decide to give up being a hobbyist? Lol...

Do you still use FPGAs? If so, does it involve video game emulation? I was actually really interested in purchasing all the boards necessary to build my own FPGA, but due to current prices being more than what I'm willing to pay, I took a backseat on that project.

 

[BigOnYa]

Were you born in the late 70s to 80s?... You could be purposing your RP4 for a whole lot of other things, but instead you're using it as a jukebox? Never knew that was possible, but if you are indeed an audiophile such as myself then I can't knock you for it.

Yep I was born in the late 70's, and Yup I love my music also. I compiled the "Fruitbox" on a RP3, but the video would pause/buffer alot, (it weirdly uses Vorbis Video) so I tried it on a RP4 and it so much better. I know is little overkill, but oh well, I had a extra RP4 from my old NAS setup. It will be going in my game room in the basement, near the bar. I will eventually wire it into my surround speakers I have around the room. I May even use a touch screen on the jukebox to make selections, then have the music video pipe out to a TV mounted on wall, since the RP4 has 2 video outputs, but not sure yet. I'm now looking into buying a old non-working jukebox off ebay or Craigslist, and repurpose it, to make it look authentic. Kinda like this:

 

[urbanman2004]

Yep I was born in the late 70's, and Yup I love my music also. I compiled the "Fruitbox" on a RP3, but the video would pause/buffer alot, (it weirdly uses Vorbis Video) so I tried it on a RP4 and it so much better. I know is little overkill, but oh well, I had a extra RP4 from my old NAS setup. It will be going in my game room in the basement, near the bar. I will eventually wire it into my surround speakers I have around the room. I May even use a touch screen on the jukebox to make selections, then have the music video pipe out to a TV mounted on wall, since the RP4 has 2 video outputs, but not sure yet. I'm now looking into buying a old non-working jukebox off ebay or Craigslist, and gutting it, to make it look authentic. Kinda like this:
View attachment 349421

I see you're quite the hobbyist when it comes to your improvisation of the use of your RP4, that's way beyond my imagination . You might want to consider using mkv files for video instead if it's compatible w/ the platform that's being used on your RP4.

 

[BigOnYa]

I see you're quite the hobbyist when it comes to your improvisation of the use of your RP4, that's way beyond my imagination . You might want to consider using mkv files for video instead if it's compatible w/ the platform that's being used on your RP4.

I wish I could use MKV, that's what all my video files are originally, and MP4, but have to convert them to OGV to work with "Fruitbox". Thanks for reading and commenting, Have A great day! Here's the Github if you or anyone else wants to check it out.
https://github.com/chundermike/rpi-fruitbox-v2

 

[FAST6191]

@FAST6191 you def showing your age there, lol. I'm in my late 30s so I get your drift. Seems like you knew enough to be dangerous in your heyday I see, lol

So w/ the stagnation of features being included on the Raspberry Pi, is that what made you decide to give up being a hobbyist? Lol...

Do you still use FPGAs? If so, does it involve video game emulation? I was actually really interested in purchasing all the boards necessary to build my own FPGA, but due to current prices being more than what I'm willing to pay, I took a backseat on that project.

I don't know that it was stagnation of features. Just was nowhere near as exciting as the earlier days of arduino and such which saw me drop off that side of things. Still love electronics, fixing things and such like, watch endless videos, rarely go a week without fiddling with such things, even less without pulling something apart to see how it works/harvesting components.

Have a few low rent FPGA kits somewhere but mostly been about programmable chips in recent years. With the rise of FPGA and other things into faking being rare and hard to come by chips*, acting as standalone mod chips and whatnot then I have been thinking about skilling back up there (was never amazing but it all makes enough sense for me for whatever reason that I can do it and have a a good time, indeed in some ways I prefer it to C and such).

* choice video here for those new to it all


If you are already invested in this electronics lark there are a fair few devices you can harvest them from things in the wild

 

[Tom Bombadildo]

I've been interested in SBCs since the first Pi started off. I used to have a Pi in nearly every room in my house for various things, but these days I "only" have the following active:

1x Pi 4 2GB, using that as a media server for the rest of my house, currently has 2 8TB HDDs connected to this one.
3x Pi 4 4GBs, one currently for my Arcade1up build, one as just a standalone retro game system, and the other is being used in a PiBky DMG (although TBH I never use this one these days)
2x Pi 3 b's that I use for managing my 3D printers


I still have like 9 or 10 other Pi 1/2s, and a Zero sitting around in storage, used to use them for retro games or as media centers or for small servers and the like, but these days I have no real use for them, and the hardware is outdated enough that they're just not useful for any new projects I'm working on so they're just stuck in a box.

I do have a small Windows SBC that I was supposed to write a review for, but it showed up basically DOA (some sort of weird power issue under load, but no idea why ) so I haven't had a chance to play with something more capable like that

 

[BigOnYa]

I still have like 9 or 10 other Pi 1/2s, and a Zero sitting around in storage,

I have a friend who is a Electronics/ Programming/ Math teacher here at a high school in my town. I donated most my old boards like those, to his school last year. They sent me a Thank You Christmas card this year, with some pictures of they're projects. I admit it did make me feel a little warm inside to help, and maybe help the kids learn something fun too.

 

[urbanman2004]

I've been interested in SBCs since the first Pi started off. I used to have a Pi in nearly every room in my house for various things, but these days I "only" have the following active:

1x Pi 4 2GB, using that as a media server for the rest of my house, currently has 2 8TB HDDs connected to this one.
3x Pi 4 4GBs, one currently for my Arcade1up build, one as just a standalone retro game system, and the other is being used in a PiBky DMG (although TBH I never use this one these days)
2x Pi 3 b's that I use for managing my 3D printers


I still have like 9 or 10 other Pi 1/2s, and a Zero sitting around in storage, used to use them for retro games or as media centers or for small servers and the like, but these days I have no real use for them, and the hardware is outdated enough that they're just not useful for any new projects I'm working on so they're just stuck in a box.

I do have a small Windows SBC that I was supposed to write a review for, but it showed up basically DOA (some sort of weird power issue under load, but no idea why ) so I haven't had a chance to play with something more capable like that

Oh sh!t, I see you went ham splurging on all those Pis, lol. I wanted to get into Raspberry Pis as early as 2016, but based on my impressions from what I saw at the time, they felt underpowered w/o a versatile feature set for me to have gone all in, and after seeing some YT videos from Spawn Wave and ETA Prime regarding the performance of the RP4 back in 2020 that's when I knew I was ready buy one. Now, I have enough discipline to know when I've done enough spending and at the rate that I'm going, I'm def not going to be able to catch up w/ you, lol.

 

[FAST6191]

As above I am still about as excited about single board computers as I am about screwdrivers (can be some interest but ultimately another tool, one I select to do a job rather than ponder for fun), however saw


Interest rising somewhat there.

The channel in general does a bit of interesting stuff there if you did want something to follow that is not either turbo nerd, turbo nerd drama but still not lowest common denominator.

 

[urbanman2004]

As above I am still about as excited about single board computers as I am about screwdrivers (can be some interest but ultimately another tool, one I select to do a job rather than ponder for fun), however saw


Interest rising somewhat there.

The channel in general does a bit of interesting stuff there if you did want something to follow that is not either turbo nerd, turbo nerd drama but still not lowest common denominator.

I actually never heard of that guy's channel until I saw his review/take on the Orange Pi 5 back in Jan after receiving mine. Although you're entitled to your opinion, the market, however, disagrees w/ your sentiment especially since Raspberry Pi's are at all-time high adoption rate due to its popularity, and consumers still can't even purchase a RP4 at MSRP since there's still a shortage as a result so scalpers/resellers are taking advantage of the opportunity as a byproduct of that.