The Single Board Computer Database

https://www.board-db.org

by peter_d_sherman • 8 years ago

198 47 8 years ago

board-db.org

3rdAccount2• 8 years ago

If anybody could get past the HN hug of death (Slashdot effect), can they summarize this up? The title is intriguing.

tlarkworthy• 8 years ago

Its a queryable list of single board computers. Not a database tech for single board computers

3rdAccount2• 8 years ago

Awwww. Now I'm less interested.

sowbug2• 8 years ago

Works fine for me.

dpwm• 8 years ago

It is exactly what I hoped it is: a searchable database of single-board computers -- think raspberry pi and similar.

There's far more than I expected -- there are apparently 270 in the database.

sowbug2• 8 years ago

I'd like to see a field indicating whether the vendor has upstreamed its kernel modifications. I rarely build kernels from scratch, but others do, and being able to easily do it helps me gauge whether a community will grow.

krasin• 8 years ago

The owner of the website is fairly responsive. I am pretty sure, they would accept your contribution.

metildaa2• 8 years ago

This would take quite a bit of effort to maintain, as there are many discrete features on most boards.

Just the Allwinner chips supported by the sunxi community have a kernel upstream status matrix that could easily fill a good chunk of a page.

cunidev5• 8 years ago

This.

usermac• 8 years ago

How do I know if I can flash the OS on one of these into a custom one?

blihp• 8 years ago

I'd be very surprised if there was one you couldn't (and would be worth noting in the database.) Most of these boards expect you to be fairly literate both from a hardware and software standpoint.

ShakataGaNai• 8 years ago

Another feature request/suggestion for this site: Quantity of ethernet ports. Also minimum bluetooth version.

trengrj2• 8 years ago

Quantity of SATA ports would be great as well. It is far too difficult to find an small ARM board with 4 SATA ports.

mappu• 8 years ago

Quality of SATA ports, too. Not so great to find your 4 SATA ports are all hanging off a USB2 bus.

grizzles• 8 years ago

+1. Another way to solve this would be to put all the data in the coarse search results. That way the author wouldn't have to recode the site every time someone wants a new filter. You could still fit the buy button on the line item. :)

voltagex_• 8 years ago

I have an Espressobin and a 4 port MiniPCIe card, haven't tested it yet because PCIe was super unstable on the board for a while

scottlamb2• 8 years ago

Another feature request/suggestion for this site: Quantity of ethernet ports.

More than quantity, I'd like to see actual bandwidth, though I'm not sure how to boil it down to one field. I'd like if I could click something to weed out boards that have Gigabit Ethernet and hard drives on the same USB 2.0 bus, like the Raspberry Pi 2. [1] This info seems a little hard to track down, so it'd be handy if someone put it in a nice database like this, especially if there were citations to verify it.

It'd also be nice if I could search for a specific CPU/GPU/etc model or chipset (e.g. Cortex-A72 rockchip rk3399), GPU, etc. But I think there aren't so many matches that I can't do this myself on anything that's a possibility.

Oh, also DSPs. I think there are some SBCs that have the Hexagon 680, which I've considered as a way of doing some computer vision stuff. The only ones I found were really expensive, though (e.g. the InForce 6640). and/or ISPs (image signal processors). Really, any type of coprocessor or hardware accelerator is worth pointing out...

[1] http://www.mikronauts.com/raspberry-pi/raspberry-pi-2-nas-ex...

icanicant• 8 years ago

One thing to watch out for with the Hexagon on the Snapdragon 820: while there are a bunch of modules from the likes of Inforce that run Linux, not all of the 820 features are supported on Linux, including Hexagon last time I checked. Some features are only supported on Android at this time.

andrewstuart• 8 years ago

A database of retro and 8 bit computers would be cool too.

berti2• 8 years ago

Please add eMMC to the storage filters.

The database days the Odroid C2 has no eMMC slot, which doesn't seem to be correct.

bestham• 8 years ago

Is there a slot for /embedded/ MMCs?

berti2• 8 years ago

Yes, "eMMC5.0 HS400 Flash Storage slot" [1], and pre-loaded eMMCs for C2 [2].

-e- See "Technical Detail" tab on the first link for board picture showing the eMMC slot.

[1] https://www.hardkernel.com/main/products/prdt_info.php?g_cod... [2] https://www.hardkernel.com/main/products/prdt_info.php?g_cod...

loudouncodes• 8 years ago

This but for retrocomputer kits

FlyMoreRockets• 8 years ago

I had no idea retrocomputer kits were a thing. Can you provide any links? I'd love to learn more.

cynix• 8 years ago

Would be great if it could filter by PoE support.

toomanybeersies• 8 years ago

This is a great resource. It would be nice to be able to filter for boards with support for Camera Serial Interface though.

pmorici• 8 years ago

Seems pretty poor. It has the Minnowboard MAX but none of the recent versions of the minnow board there have been at least two updates since the MAX.

fsfguy• 8 years ago

Are any of these RYF approved?

GistNoesis• 8 years ago

It would be great if it also included SoC like esp32 which are "OS free" "single board computer".

logicallee• 8 years ago

For the people who are reading these comments and this story, I think a lot of you might be interested in this "discovery" I made (an off-hand HN reference) that I haven't understood in all the time since:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17902043

When you look at what was done, they got Firefox and x-window forwarding working on it. It's super fast. I don't understand why it isn't just fantastic for running all sorts of things on the embedded Linux level.

Why isn't something based on this just super popular?

I'm really missing something here. It's not 512 MB, but 32 MB RAM is (easily) enough to run Go programs. I don't understand why such a cheap and tiny computer doesn't make it super useful for everything. At that price and form factor, you could put it in a toothbrush.

I just can't believe there is no application for this or something like it.

I didn't get a clear answer the last time I asked - do any of you know? What's the big missing piece, what am I missing here? This is an SD card form factor! It's $30! It has 16 GB filesytem! And wifi, wifi, wifi. And weighs less than two pennies.

according to here: https://elinux.org/Wifi_SD it draws 50 mA idle. That means it would run for 2 days on an AA battery (idling).

I Googled the processor the above elinux.org page mentions, and got an exact match on the processor revision here: http://club.dx.com/forums/forums.dx/threadid.626327?page=3 implying it runs 175 Mhz. More than enough to do anything you want, really.

Running a Python script you develop on a desktop should be a breeze.

I don't understand why this isn't driving...anything. Nobody has this thing in anything. And the remarkable achievement of this device is 4 years old (all the links are 4 years old.) So....

.... can you all help me understand why this isn't being used and hacked into anything?

tomcam• 8 years ago

Ditto. I’ve been wondering what happened to this as well.

Tor3• 8 years ago

I bought one of those Transcend cards. In the end I didn't use it for anything - it's just so much easier to grab a Pi from my stack of Pi boards, plug in an SD card and connect it to do whatever needs doing. Printer, TV, whatever.

metildaa2• 8 years ago

For around the same price you can get an Orangepi PC+ with 8GB of fairly speedy eMMC. Need smaller? The ESP series and OrangePi Zero (if more grunt is needed) are popular.

bennofs• 8 years ago

What would you use this for? If it runs some service via wifi, the sd-card size isn't necessary and you can geht cheaper boards with more features.

Small size is needed if you want to embed this into something but for that use case it lacks easy access to io ports and other peripherals.

dvfjsdhgfv• 8 years ago

My guess is the price. $30 is a lot of money. ESP8266 costs 10 times less. And for $30 you can get a much more powerful machine.

walrus01• 8 years ago

For x86 this is ignoring a lot of the Intel NUC sized things you can buy and remove from their cases, some of which have soldered onboard cpu. Add your own RAM and m.2 format nvme storage.

majewsky• 8 years ago

Things that I find missing:

- filter not just by presence of SATA, but by number of SATA ports

- filter by availability of SATA power

I would really like to have a small (ARM or x86) board with multiple gigabit ethernet ports and also at least two SATA ports, to use as a homeserver (combined router and NAS with select web services exposed to the public internet). This role is currently filled by a small headless desktop PC, but I feel like I could go much lower in the power consumption dept.

maweki• 8 years ago

It's also important whether the SATA controller is passed through USB or properly connected. Some boards have abysmal SATA performance because of that.

cunidev5• 8 years ago

By rule SATA in Board-DB means "native SATA" as USB-SATA sucks. Some boards with USB3-SATA are listed with a notice that SATA isn't native, but USB2-SATA is definitely banned from being referred to as "SATA".

cunidev5• 8 years ago

CS student and owner here. Thanks for adding my project to HN! In fact I noticed this post by investigating on why my server has been continuously going offline in the last hours - apologies for that, it has never had such traffic peaks before and isn't on a high end hosting :(

The site is in a particular phase, as having little time for it anymore I'm (literallyL giving it away to the Linuxgizmos owner to be integrated in a larger site and possibly become more useful. Anyway, feel free to ask me anything here, I'll be glad to answer anything :)

Faaak• 8 years ago

Love it, thanks for it !

Really useful to have the "dual nic" option.

It would be nice to have a "price" field though

cunidev5• 8 years ago

What's wrong with the current "price range"?

lovelearning• 8 years ago

Great effort! The granularity of information is really good. Did you do this alone? How did you go about compiling so much information?

Have you considered monetizing it using affiliate links?

cunidev5• 8 years ago

Glad you like it! Yeah, I added almost all technical specs myself, which proved to be a quite time consuming... I looked for them on official pages, benchmarks, and product datasheets. There should be affiliate links (if the Skimlink integration works), but in fact most boards aren't on Amazon or "mainstream" sites as they're meant for industrial applications.

ashildr• 8 years ago

SBC with DisplayPort are hard to find, but some displays only provide DP for licensing reasons. So that would be a nice thing to add.

The Single Board Computer Database

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