Pi Shortage - Are These Worthwhile Raspberry Pi Alternatives?

if you've tried to buy a raspberry pi in the past year then you've probably experienced some level of difficulty in getting one they're out of stock almost everywhere there are generally purchasing limits on any that are in stock and they're being sold at way over the recommended retail price a big part of what makes raspberry pi board so attractive is that they've got really good documentation and support and a large online community so you'll easily find projects tutorials and answers to any issues you run into along the way with that said there are a large number of single board computers available that offer similar features to raspberry pi so i thought it would be interesting to get a few and try them out the raspberry pi 4b is one of the most popular choices for current projects so i looked at some alternatives that offered similar specs to the 4b and were similarly priced as well i'm not looking for high-end hardware here this isn't meant to be a benchmarking exercise my intention is for these boards to be suitable raspberry pi alternatives for tinkering with electronics as well as basic web browsing and video playback so there might be more powerful or newer versions of these boards available for an increased price but i looked at the ones that i felt provided the best value for money for what they are going to be used for i also had a brief look at the documentation available for each before buying them to make sure that they had some basic guidelines to get started these are the three boards i settled on first up is the orange par 3 lts this board runs an all winner h6 arm cortex a53 quad-core processor running at 1.8 gigahertz it's got 2 gigs of ddr3 ram and 8 gigs of on-board emmc storage this was the cheapest of the three boards at 35 the second is a card s firm ii it's got an eight core amlogic a53 soc running at 1.5 gigahertz it's also got two gigs of ddr4 ram and 16 gigs of on-board emmc storage this was the mid-range of the three at eighty dollars the third and the most expensive of the three is the asus tinkerboard 2s this board runs a six core rockchip rk3399 soc it consists of a dual core arm cortex a72 processor running at 2 gigahertz and a quad core arm cortex a53 processor running at 1.5 gigahertz it's got 2 gigs of ddr4 ram and 16 gigs of on-board emmc storage this board costs the most at 120 which is a little bit more than the recommended retail price of even the 8 gig raspberry pi 4b but it looked like it had the most comprehensive documentation and looked like it was the most suited for electronics projects using the gpu opens rather than being used as a media player or home server like the other two this was just my first impression when looking through the documentation of the three boards so that's why we're going to try them out for each board we're going to take a closer look at the hardware features then have a quick look at the operating system that is shipped with it then try to get an led to blink with one of the gpio pins which may require a different operating system to be loaded and we'll finally look at the power consumption of each let's start out with the orange part 3. taking a look at the hardware around the board we've got onboard wi-fi and bluetooth an infrared receiver 26-pin gpio headers usb 2.0 and 3.0 ports a 3.5 millimeter audio jack microphone full-size hdmi port a power button usb-c power input and then a micro sd card slot on the bottom the gpr opens roughly mimic pins 1 to 26 on the raspberry pi so you may be able to use some shields and adapters that use only a few pins on the part but my experience is that these are few and far between it's more likely that you're just going to find it useful if you're already familiar with the pi's gpio layout the orange pi 3 ships out with an android operating system image pre-installed so let's take a look at that first this and the card dashboard look like they were intended to be primarily used as media player devices so this preloaded operating system is probably quite useful for that so as you can see the android operating system that it ships with is quite bad you'll need to install your own apps to get any meaningful use out of it over and above just playing content from a connected drive so we can't really do much more here without installing additional software but we want to use it for an electronics project that makes use of the gpu pins so we're going to need to install debian anyway they provided debian operating system image on their website so let's get that installed onto a microsd card and boot it up for all three boards i'm going to use 132 disk imager to flash the operating system image onto a 32gb sandis microsd card with debian boots it up let's try playing some video content to see how the hardware handles it i'm going to try to play big back bunny on youtube on each device to see how they perform with video streaming it seemed to handle this first pass reasonably well with only a few missed frames but it did look like it was running on a lower resolution and heading over to the settings confirmed this so i switched over to 1080p and then tried again [Music] this time the orange power really struggled with the playback you'll notice it's stuttering dropping frames and required some buffering during playback which is not a limitation caused by my network so you probably wouldn't want to use this power for media playback even at only 1080p as far as documentation goes the user manual covers a pretty broad range of tests this allows you to check the basic functionality of almost all the features of the orange power and it's reasonably well written they have a section on using the gpo pins with one in particular for control of digital pins so i'm going to work through that i ran an update then downloaded and compiled the wiring power library now let's connect our led to the gpr opens the led works when it's connected to ground and 5 volts so we know that the pins are powered now let's connect it to pin 7 to test using the gpio readal command we can see what gpio number corresponds to physical pin 7 in the table so that's gpio118 if we set it as an output pin we can now see that the mode has changed to out we can then try setting the pin high or low using a one or a zero and our led is now turning on or off there are also a few examples in the wiring power library to help you get started with coding your own projects that use the gpio pins so it was relatively easy to get an led to turn on and off using the gpu opens they also have a dedicated forum with a fairly active community most questions or issues raised get useful answers in a day or two and they cover a range of topics from questions for beginners troubleshooting assistants help with drivers and even topics on various distributions all of which seem to be quite active taking a look at the power consumption on orange power 3 it uses around 2.3 watts at idle and around 4.3 watts when the cpu is loaded so it's quite an efficient board at less than 1 amp draw at 5 volts even when loaded so for 35 dollars i'd be happy with the hardware in the community around the orange par 3. next up let's try the card as firm 2. taking a look at the hardware around the board we've got two usb 2.0 ports so no usb3 we've got gigabit ethernet and a usbc power input a pwm fan connector reset function and power buttons a real-time clock header a 40-pin gpio header infrared receiver and on-board dual band wi-fi and bluetooth on the underside we've also got a micro sd card slot and then a range of pads for power input mcu and gpio connections which are great if you plan to use this board on some sort of expansion module or pcb the vim2 has a 40 pin gpo header just like the raspberry pi but the pin out is quite different so you won't be able to use any raspberry pi shields or hats on the vim2 directly like the orange pi 3 the vim2 also ships out with an android operating system pre-installed this version of android has a few useful apps pre-installed so we can actually try streaming big buck bunny directly the vim2 is doing a much better job at streaming this than the orange power 3. this is probably also partially to do with the lighter weights operating system so we'll see how well it runs on the linux based operating system after this it's also running at 4k so that's a much better resolution than the orange part 3 could handle as well next let's take a look at how to use the gpio pins to turn on an orphan led for that we're going to need to install a linux image they provide a list of up-to-date operating system images in their product documentation so it's as easy as heading over to the page for your board and then downloading the image that you'd like to use to boot the vim2 from an sd card rather than the built-in emmc storage we need to enter keys mode using the side buttons now that we've got it booted let's try streaming on it before i play the video let's just check what resolution it's running at so this is running a 1080p lucked orange pi 3 was the vim2 also struggles a bit when streaming hd content on the linux based operating system with similar issues to the orange par 3 so if you're going to be using your board as a media player then you're probably better off running an operating system that's designed for media like android plex or kodi now let's try plug the led into the gpio pins and turn it on i'm plugging it into gpio pin 7. again the led works on the 5 volts and ground pins so the gpi pins have power at least they tell you that the amlogic chips include two gpio ranges and they then tell you to figure out the range base for your gpu pins first using this command you can also get the pin index listed for each gp open by entering another command they provide this for both gpio ranges but there's no information on which range is used for watts or how these are actually mapped to the gpu opens i found it easier to just get the information from the gpo read all function as i did previously on the orange par 3. if we look at the table physical pin 7 corresponds to gpio number 471 so now let's try run through the process to set that pin up as an output and turn on the led if we set it as an output and check its status in the table we've now actually got pin 6 set as an output if we cycle it on and off the led is not doing anything and from the table it looks like it's cycling pin 6 on and off so let's try and move the led to pin 6. now we can turn our led on and off this seems like a trivial issue but small issues like this can leave you wasting hours fault-finding if i hadn't used the read-all table i probably wouldn't have found this issue and i would have spent time going back through the setup and control steps trying to figure out what i'd done wrong i also found two annoying things when using the vim2 the first is that the usb-c power port is too close to the hdmi port so unless you're using a low profile cable you'll end up having to wedge the two in alongside each other the second was that the buttons on the side were really easy to push when trying to remove the cables when trying to plug or unplug a device or cable in i'd often press one of the buttons by mistake when holding the board and this caused that to turn off for reset which was obviously frustrating they have fairly good documentation and there is a lot to work with they also have a good spread of information on the hardware and software side but there are some obvious omissions they have an online community and forum which has open topics but the community doesn't seem to be as active as the orange park community taking a look at the power consumption on the vim2 it uses around 1.5 to 2 watts at idle and about 3.5 watts when loaded so it's a bit more efficient than the orange pi 3 and i thought this was already quite good for 80 i'd say this is probably a bit better than the orange par for a media sensor but it looks like it's got a smaller online community and a bit less support lastly we've got the tinkerboard 2s this board although the most expensive of the three is probably the closest to the raspberry pi it's got the same footprint and general layout as the pi 3b with a couple of standout differences it's got three usb 3.2 gen1 type a ports and a single usb 3.2 gen1 type-c port with the ability to drive an external display hooked up to the usb type-c port so you can run dual displays although it's only got a single hdmi port it's also got dual band wifi and bluetooth a dsi and csr connector the 5.5 mil dc barrel jack for power 2 pin fan connector a real-time clock battery connector 40 pin gpio headers and on the back is a micro sd card slot another appealing feature is that the gpi layout is exactly the same as the raspberry pi and with the same footprint you should be able to use some of the same shields and hats on the tinkerboard i couldn't find any information on whether the tinkerboard's onboard emmc storage was preloaded with a particular operating system so let's just plug it in and see whether it boots after a few minutes nothing had come up so i guess it isn't preloaded with any operating system which is a bit strange for a device with on-board storage there are two options to boot the tinkerboard from the first is to load an operating system image onto a microsd card and the second is to load the image onto the built-in emmc storage i'm going to load it onto a microsd card as that's what i've done for the others from their website you can download a prepared operating system image called tinker os which is based on debian now that we got syncos installed and booted up let's check the monitor resolution and then try streaming big buck bunny of the three boards this one has done the best buffer at playing video content on linux there were a couple of starters but the image quality is great and the stream is actually quite usable unfortunately the good start was short-lived it was at this stage that i realized that the documentation was quite in-depth on the hardware side it was almost non-existent for the software after about an hour of reading through forums and pages online i found a github repository which was linked to by a few sources as being the best way to start using the gpio pins i tried this out a bunch of times in different ways and even on different versions of tinkerers and i just ran into the same errors i eventually found an answer to another person's question on a semi-unrelated topic saying that you don't need to do the install that i've been trying to do as the libraries were already integrated into the later versions of tinker os this led me to the next issue all of the examples use gpo pin numbers like 0 10 or 12 but they don't ever say what physical pins these correspond to and this isn't mapped out on any diagram or table that i could find i eventually figured out that pin 12 referred to in the script mapped to cpu pin 146 which corresponds to physical pin 32 which was labeled gpio pin for c2 so after a few more hours than i'd like to admit i've actually got a basic python script like this to turn the led on pin 32 on and off in the documentation they claim that the tinkerboard uses 3.65 watts at idle and 8.18 watts under load my testing produced a result of about 3.3 watts at idle and 8.5 watts under load so this lined up with their documentation fairly well the tanker board can also handle substantially more than this through power delivery to the connected usb devices and that's why they've opted for the 12 to 18 volt barrel jack rather than a usb-c power input like the other two ports so from trying these three boards out would i recommend any of them i'd say that the orange par 3 is a worthwhile option for tinkering with basic electronics projects using gpio pins at 35 dollars it's fairly cheap and you get a good set of features for your money with a reasonable online community to help you out the card s vim2 is probably the best option for a media server or tv box but you'll likely run into issues if you try to use it for electronics projects and there isn't a whole lot of online support for it the tanker board looked like a great option on paper and the hardware is quite impressive as well but the documentation relating to the software leaves a lot to be desired i wasted numerous hours going down wrong pods on the basics at 120 dollars i just couldn't justify buying this over even an overpriced pie through your par4 through using these three boards i was reminded why raspberry pars are so sought after the documentation software supports an online community extends far beyond the actual hardware anyone can copy the hardware but it's much more difficult to build an online community around a product like they've done with the raspberry pi i've literally spent about 18 hours working on these three boards to get basic functions i've shown in this video working and nothing i've shown is anything remotely complex it wouldn't have taken me more than 10 minutes to get a brand new raspberry pi running on a new operating system installation and blinking an led so if you value your time and expect expectable projects that require more complex electronics or software to function then i definitely still recommend spending the extra money on buying an older raspberry pi you're not just buying the hardware you're buying into a community and you'll save yourself a lot of frustration in doing so thanks for watching please remember to like this video if you enjoyed it and subscribe for more tech and electronics projects tutorials and reviews you

Channel: Michael Klements

Views: 175,829

Keywords: Raspberry Pi, Pi 4B, Raspberry Pi 4B, Orange Pi 3 LTS, Orange Pi, Khadas, Khadas VIM2, Tinker Board, Tinker OS, Tinker Board 2S, Android, Linux, Debian, Ubuntu, LED, GPIO, Media, Big Buck Bunny

Id: q_FWsuQwSMk

Length: 20min 50sec (1250 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 27 2022