To all appearances it is a well done build.
It is easy to run the install process with only minor “what the?” moments. It’s small, seems very fast, and also looks like it “just works”. Having a very small Debian based OS available is a double win.įWIW, during the install process, it references both Debian and Armbian repositories, so it’s picking up some Armbian bits too. Now DietPi having all that info on those boards, especially the heat limitations, is a big win just there. It is also the same form factor as the Pi so fits the same dogbone case. So in a week or two I’ll be looking it over.īasically $42 for the Odroid-C2 with massive heat sink installed vs $35 list for the Pi-M3 without heatsink (variously $3 to $5 and much smaller) but Amazon tends to sell the Pi-M3 for $39 not list… So looks like about double performance for no real added cost, modulo shipping. Net, it’s about a 5% to 10% cost bump for about a double of computes. It promises to be about a 2x to 3x performance boost over the Pi Model 3 for about a $2 price uplift (due to Amazon pricing R.Pi higher than list, cost of added heatsink vs direct buy from distributor for the C2) and about an added $4 of shipping compared to ‘free’ from Amazon if you bundle a bunch.
Bottom line is I’ve ordered one with eMMC module (thanks again to donors!) for comparison testing against the others in the inventory. (It would have highlighted the heat issue with the Orange Pi One before the buy for me…)įWIW, after another site (again for a future posting…) said the Odroid-C2 was, in their opinion, the best bang for the buck, I checked the graph here, and it too was showing good goods. There are no scales, so I’m presuming they are all normalized to the same baseline in some way. On it is a bar chart, left to right, of CPU, File System (both SD card and eMMC), network, and heat performance. Down that path lies insanity and ruin.” -E.M.Smith) At that point a nice description of the board shows up at the top of the page. (WHY the 2 step process? “Why? Don’t ask why. Click one of them and it turns into a “+” sign. Then click on the “downloads” tab at the top and a bunch of board thumbnails show up. But NEON Lime Green on stark black background is, er, “abrupt” when you first go there… Personally, I’d likely do a lavender and grey theme, which would clearly cause some folks to puke… so “I get it”. So it is very nice to be able to just click on a board and see what works well and what’s crap.įirst off, though, a warning: You’d better like Neon Lime Green… (more on that in another post ‘someday’). As we’ve seen with the Orange Pi in particular (but also some other Pis) not having a heat sink limits your computes. Well, first off, they have done comparisons of different SBC (Single Board Computers) and have up nice simple bar graphs of relative performance for things like memory, computes, I/O, and even how much heat is an issue. Sadly, my HDMI problem remains (at this point most likely hardware), but I got to play with Yet Another Linux in the process.
They advertise themselves as a very small light weight distribution based on Debian, and have an Orange Pi One port, so I gave them a go. While looking for one, I ran into DietPi. I’d had “issues” with the HDMI port, so decided to try a completely different Linux (though still Debian based).
During my trial of the Orange Pi I installed a couple of variations on Debian as the operating system.