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
@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!
@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)
Andrew Tergis
Evan Kahn
