zaval wrote:
Quote:
Let's face it, RPi is the suckiest SBC ever existed.
Here, the fresh analysis confirming this statement on their latest offering from dudes that do with it more than just babbling.
I would hardly consider them to be an unbiased source of information on their
competitors. Taking what the manufacturers of the Libre says about the RPi 3 B+ at face value is like accepting something which Intel says about an AMD processor (or vice versa), or which AMD says about an Nvidia GPU (ditto).
Or, to stay on topic, something which the Raspberry Pi Foundation says about the
LeMaker Guitar, the
ODROID XU4, or the
Banana Pi M2.
I agree that the
Libre Le Potato and
Renegade are superior boards to the RPi in some respects, especially in terms of having open documentation for pretty much the whole system (though I have no idea whether the
quality of said documentation is comparable). If you exclude the open-source aspect (WRT to some of the subsystems), the same also is true about the
Imagination Creator boards (especially if you want a MIPS CPU, as I do), and it is a shame that those don't appear to be made any more (it is possible that Tallwood, the
new owners of the MIPS IP, will make a new reference SBC line for the MIPS architecture, but I haven't see any sign of it so far). The Tinker board was technically superior to the RPis of two years ago as well, and still a match for the 3 B+ (though a lot more locked down, IIUC). There are several others which one could say the same about.
However, most of them are more expensive (only slightly more for the Le Potato and Renegade, considerably more for the Tinker and the Creator), none have the massive user community the RPi does, and frankly, none are as useful for the primary purpose of the RPi: education.
Large swathes of the maker community may be in love with the RPi (often in a dysfunctional, co-dependent way), but the main purpose of the RPi was, and remains, to be something that was cheap enough for schools to buy in volume, and simple enough to set up that primary school students wouldn't get scared off by them. They are intended for kids who are have already mastered
LEGO Mindstorms and
LittleBits, but aren't quite ready for Arduinos.
Yes, the Zero and the CM are clearly meant for maker and industrial applications, and the Raspberry Pi Foundation fall all over themselves to assist people using the main-line RPis for those things as well (I've been led to understand that their documentation is fantastic, at least for the things that aren't under an IP lockdown), but the real focus is still on teaching kids electronics.
Besides, if you want to talk disappointments, take a look at the
Onion Omega 2+, an
inexpensive MIPS-based IoT setup often matched against the RPi Zero. I
looked into using one as an OS-dev target, but the people on their forum basically said, "don't bother", and for good reason, it turns out. The documentation is terrible, and the wifi subsystem - which is the primary communication channel to the device, though since you would need to connect the core device to an expansion dock even just to power the thing, you could get around that - on the
MediaTek MT7688 SoC they are using is a locked-down proprietary system, which basically means that bare-metal programming isn't a realistic option at all. Mind you, it really is meant to compete more with Arduinos and Seeeds, anyway, but still, that didn't leave me feeling very good about it.
(Using DiscWhores for their forum software didn't win any points with me, either, but that's my negative experiences with Jeff Atwood and Co. on the Daily WTF forums talking.)