I’ve been eyeing up several reasonably priced ARM/SBC systems for a bit now. Let me clarify that my definition of reasonably priced. I mean anything around $35-$65 USD. I know what you’re thinking cheap skate. Yeah, okay fine. I’m on a budget and yet you’re still reading this. I wanted something that could have multiple purposes. Something to do retro game emulation, install and play with FreeBSD or OpenBSD, maybe use as a router. None of these would be done at the same time. But just something to try out, learn on, and then maybe put it to good use.
I looked at the Raspberry Pi (RPi), but several things bugged me. First was that it was not an open sourced board and secondly, it is vastly under powered. Okay, I can go towards the Raspberry Pi 2, but then I still have to go back to the board not being open sourced and it could be a real PITA for getting non-blessed operating systems installed. Which all of this is a shame for all the different projects people have done for these boards including game emulation setups.
Beaglebone Black was next on the list. More powerful than the RPi, and only slightly more in price. It does have better support by other operating systems such as FreeBSD, OpenBSD, etc. Unfortunately though, it seems like fewer people are creating large projects with them. They aren’t as popular as the RPi’s, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
ODroid was another option. This board has impressed me. Almost 4 times as powerful as the RPi, but about the same price point as the Beaglebone Black’s. We now have the issue of operating systems. I have yet to see any FreeBSD or OpenBSD run on these. I did see NetBSD mentioned, but then I must go down another rabbit hole and learn that as well. Not as many projects have been pushed to this platform either. Except for Lakka.tv .
So great in the end, I still want one. The only purpose I have for one of these is to install a gaming emulation on two out of the three. But that’s it. I’d like to say router, but they all have single NIC’s, if I’m lucky. So at that point, I might as well save my money and pickup a PC Engine apu1d4 instead. I have a purpose for it, just need to save for it if I’m going that route. Then I hear about the EdgeRouter Lite. Whoa. I just now found a price for the ERLite‑3. I know that I’m able to install OpenBSD on the PC Engine for a router. Hooray, more research!
For now, I’ll just go back to looking into my options without breaking the bank.