back on my nerd crap: there have been lots of little reasons nudging me towards a different hardware platform than the fruit-pie.
But I'm concerned about future artwork maintenance; I want to build around off-the-shelf platforms, in case something breaks in 20 years.
one road I'm venturing down a bit is MFF PCs--in theory if it's x86-64 and has usb ports, it oughta run ok if replaced by a different model down the road?
but this'd mean wrapping all i/o in some usb-attached layer. hmm...
and I've tried out a good number of other SBCs. Nothing really seems to have long-term support and reliability...?
OrangePi hardware has nice form factor and functionality, paired with hazardous reliability and community-only OS support.
against my better judgment I built something around a Pine64 Rock64 recently--and it turns out that it's just a well-known and accepted defect that when it's hitting RAM hard, the HDMI output glitches? reminds me of racing the beam. https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/ROCK64#Video_output_is_glitchy_during_activity
to spell out my criteria as an artist who is SBC shopping--I need:
- A SBC with some standard I/O interfaces (eg i2c, usb, spi).
- Part of a standardized model line
- A future person trying to resurrect my dead artwork can google the things written on it and download a working OS image
- No yocto or buildroot
- Mainline kernel
- Lots of visual tutorials that refer to it by name
- Can boot (temporarily?) from a "normal person" storage device (SD, USB)
- No fine-pitch connectors required
@combs Have you taken a look at any of the offerings from @olimex? Your biggest advantage there is that they're open hardware: if at some point in the future a particular model gets discontinued, there's nothing (bar the expense) from stopping someone doing another production run so long as the core components remain available.
Doesn't tick all of the boxes (not many visual tutorials around), but could be worth a look.
One example: https://www.olimex.com/Products/OLinuXino/iMX233/iMX233-OLinuXino-MINI/open-source-hardware
@GrayDanceOutfit this kind of workload 😅 https://chriscombs.net/2021/09/03/one-to-many/ so lots of cpu and i/o over i2c and spi usually
I bought a bunch of BeagleBone Blacks during the depths of the fruit-pie shortage and was disappointed at how TI had maintained the docs and software. So many 404s just trying to get it up and running.
Do you use BBs? what OS do you recommend?
@combs One avenue / filter to consider - the whole NXP i.MX series of processors are very well supported and have a long history of use in consumer and industrial products. I've worked on products built around i.MX 23 and i.MX6UL lines that have remained in market for at least 5 years.
There are lots of SOM modules and SBCs built around I.MX6/7/8 these days, could be a place to start!
@theterg Thanks!! How is the mainline linux kernel support for its peripherals?
(Since these are artworks, I'd love to avoid using buildroot, custom kernels, yocto, etc.... have to consider future non-me maintainers...)
@wormyrocks @combs Yeah I guess the point is if you choose a product *built on top of* a 6ULZ for example (or really any I.MX6/7/8) at the very least you know you have good support from NXP, hopefully in addition to the folks that sold you the SOM / SBC it's built around
For example, I know these guys make great modules, Anders is very sharp and has helped me out:
https://www.embeddedartists.com/
@wormyrocks @combs Yes, love Jay Carlson's work! Even more information here: https://jaycarlson.net/embedded-linux/
That's going into the weeds but a great resource. Not something you can buy off the shelf, but justification for what engineers will look for in picking a core!
Chris Combs (he/him)
Gareth Halfacree
Florian 'floe' Echtler
smokeysea
GrayDanceOutfit
Andrew Tergis
Evan Kahn
