Hi Guys,
I was just wandering, had anyone tried to run Zynthian on Raspberry PI alternatives. Mainly OrangePi 5 and ROCKY 5 B?
They are using the same architecture, but the difference in performance is significant. And they both support NVME without the hat (actually they have both M and B keys M2 slots) + DSI connector for the display, GPIO`s should be RPI compatible so DAC/ADC hats should be good to go.
Since I fuc**ed my RPI5 i am looking around for something that would suffice for next 2 - 3 years.
Search the forum. It has been discussed many times.
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While @riban already explained the importance of elaborated design and a solid support somewhere in the threads, and I would also welcome some more powerful and feature-rich SBC, I can unfortunately also add some of my own experience:
A few years ago I was attracted by the crowdfounding campaign for the Khadas Edge SBC. Even before delivering the final product, the authors actually came with a superior product. And they invested all their support into that one since, leaving the Edge on a second (if any at all?) track. From the very beginning. I tried to use the Edge for different purposes, but always failed on some bugs or lack of support. As a media centre it failed on strange issues while decoding or playing videos with multichannel sound. I even ordered an NVMe hat only to find out that the NVMe drive does not always get correctly detected on every boot, so that I could’t rely on the expectation that a reboot will just not fail and the whole thing won’t get stuck. While mounting the NVMe hat, I accidentally crushed a pair of resistors on the board by one of the screws because of its unfortunate location and length.
I could continue with the difficulties to find fitting kernel overlays and trying to use them to activate some peripheries in vain (or was it the Pine64?). I have almost panicked when @jofemodo recently reported that the Rpi5 serial port overlay does not support switching to the non-standard speed required for MIDI. However, the Rpi team just fixed that quickly. I cannot imagine Khadas would ever care for such a delicacy if they hardly can provide a working serial overlay at all.
After this experience, I am much more careful about what SBC I want to waste my time with. While on paper (and pictures) the things may look like absolutely glorious, the reality of actually using them may be a total disaster.
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I concur. The question should not be, “Can we use another SBC?” It should be, “What benefits (and challenges) are there in using another SBC”. For sure it is unlikely that many other users will follow and there won’t be official support so you will invariably be left with a massive personal support burden.
Even Jeff has talked about it.
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