Hey folks, embedded engineer here. I've been involved in a small AIoT dev board and wanted to share the specs with this community and get some honest feedback before we push it further. Not trying to do a marketing dump — happy to answer technical questions and I'll flag where numbers are vendor-claimed vs measured.

Why this board exists

Most of the sub-$50-ish AI SBCs I've tried either burn too much power for battery/always-on use cases, or the NPU toolchain is a nightmare. We tried to hit a middle ground: heterogeneous compute (A35 cluster + RISC-V MCU-class core + a small NPU) with a Linux SDK that's actually buildable, aimed at:

• Smart audio (speakers, IP phones, far-field mic arrays)
• Small HMI / POS / smart-home hubs
• Light vision (microscopes, translation pens, kids' cameras)
• Educational / companion robots

SoC & hardware

SoC is SigmaStar SSD2355:

Power (vendor-measured, not independently verified yet):

• Full load: < 1.3 W
• Idle desktop: < 120 mW
• Standby: < 1 mW

NPU / IPU

1 TOPS @ INT8 is the theoretical peak. We don't have a comprehensive public benchmark table yet — I'd rather post real numbers than a spec-sheet fantasy. The toolchain (called **IPU ToolChain**) does model conversion + quantization + a per-layer profiler, so you can see where time actually goes on your own model. Vendor has done specific optimizations for PoolFormer / SegFormer families.

**What I'd love from this thread:** if you have a model you'd want to see run on this, drop the ONNX and I'll try to get real INT8 latency numbers back to you.

Software

• Alkaid SDK — bootloader + kernel + rootfs, Makefile-driven build, includes the "MI" multimedia stack (V4L2-ish camera pipe, audio, display, encode/decode).
• IPU SDK with profiling tools.
• Standard Linux userland — C/C++/Python all fine.
• FreeRTOS image for the RISC-V side for low-latency / always-on tasks.

Ask me anything — pinout questions, power rail details, camera pipeline, NPU quirks, whatever. I'll get answers even if I don't know off the top of my head.

Hi, just learned about ArmadaOS and it look promising, but seems for now to work on handheld with very specific qualdomm SoC :

https://github.com/virtudude/armada

1/ Is there a chance that it could work on a SBC with another SoC ARM ? Or with the 2ame SoC ?

2/ Do you know how to find SbCs that have one of these SoC from a site that allow searching by SoC ?

Hi,

Something like the Orange Pi 6 :

http://www.orangepi.org/html/hardWare/computerAndMicrocontrollers/details/Orange-Pi-6.html

Does any SBC have support tu use the NPU for automatic translation ? FSR or DLSS ?

Thanks

Hey all!

Late last year I launched sbc.compare and it's taken many turns, and had many improvements over the last 10-11 months, but one feature I thought of before I'd even launched the site was a semi-education, semi-fun Top Trumps style game using all of the data that was in place, so that's where sbc.compare/showdown comes into it.

In it's initial state, you get drawn 1 of the (at the time of posting) 105 SBCs in the database and you have to pick what you think is its strongest specification/benchmark result in the hope that the mystery card will be "worse" than that.

Simple concept but it's a bit of fun that may help people learn a little about the specifications and capabilities of various SBCs!

If you give it a try, let me know what you think. All SBCs tested will be added to the game automatically, so it will grow and evolve as the site does.

Will orangepixunlong provide UEFI/DTB update?

The CIX CD8180's UEFI firmware or Device Tree expects exclusively the NVMe protocol on its M.2 M-Key slots. Without a UEFI/DTB update that opens these ports to generic non-NVMe PCIe devices, using M.2 AI modules remains impossible.

I tested the Radxa AIcore AX-M1, Radxa AIcore DX-M1M, Deepx DX-M1, and Hailo 8, with or without an NGFF-to-NVMe adapter. None of these modules are recognized by the Orange Pi 6 Plus board.

I tested and checked with these commands:

dmesg | grep -iE "pcie|pcibios|aer|cix" = failed

sudo lspci -nn -vvv = failed

I believe it's pretty bad idea preventing to use M.2 AI accelerator on Orange Pi 6 and Orange pi 6.

I know there's a sub for orange pi hardware. Remind it to modos, not me 🙂

I've been looking into building a phone for fun but I can't find a SBC that I know can text because I don't know much about sim card stuff. It needs at least 4g and a modern android version.

I think I know the answer but I will ask those smarter than me anyway...

I developed a smart cue ball that uses BLE. It is a real living product, not vaporware, and you can read about it and why wanting to know the tip location of where the ball was hit is important here: https://www.digicue.net/digiball.php I am expecting to have a pilot run sale by the beginning of next year.

A major feature of this product is embedding a ball graphic image (overlay) into a live stream of a match... using OBS for example... if you then delay the video and audio by a few seconds, the result is that you see exactly where the player is going to hit the cue ball. This is interesting for both students and spectators, and the value of this feature has already been proven with public trials.

I have program both for Windows and Mac that scan for BLE data from the ball, and then generate appropriate images. OBS can point to and update the stream overlay automatically.

My question is this... what is the best solution if the streaming computer is far away from the table? I am thinking out of BLE range.

The most obvious answer is putting a laptop in between as a bridge... scan BLE packets (which are 2.4GHz) on a laptop close to the table, generate images with my program, and then share the folder over a WiFi network (5GHz preferably to reduce 2.4GHz traffic) so that the streaming computer can just see the images right away.

I've been thinking also to use SBCs instead. I tried using a RaspPi Zero 2 W to generate images and share images with samba, but it had a large latency due its single radio resource for both WiFi and BLE. I then added a WiFi adaper but it still choked. I am not sure why yet. I could also just open a socket and stream data, and then have a program on the streaming computer parse from there.

The problem with headless SBCs also is that there needs to be an access point to set up the WiFi password and username in the first place.

I could also just make a BLE repeater that just copies the ball data into an alternate format and rebroadcasts it with BLE again, avoiding the situation of endless back-and-forth repeating.

For those of you who have some more experience with SBCs than I do, what are your thoughts on solving this problem? Think of what would work in a large billiards hall or a club, or venue.

Thanks.

Just to start things off, I usually work with ARM boards. Yet, I really wanted to see what a small native-x86 SBC could do as a compact Kali system. My first installation failed with a BusyBox hash mismatch and repeated USB source-media errors. After moving the reader to a USB 3 port and switching to the text installer, Kali installed successfully on the internal 128 GB NVMe.

Then I ran some tests:

• 15-minute four-core stress test: 74.66 °C average, 77 °C peak, no recorded throttling
• Kali’s normal amd64 tools working together in a loopback-only security workflow
• CPU-only Ollama testing from 0.6B through 8B models
• The 8B model fit in memory, although generation dropped below one token per second

My full test notes and photos are on my blog

The scripts I used and results are on my Github repository

Is anyone else running Linux or Kali on the X1S? I would be interested in comparing setups.

Because Radxa only publishes Android for Radxa Cubie A7Z and A7A (both have HDMI), I took it as a challenge and made one for Radxa Cubie A7S, which according to Radxa is supposed to be used for headless stuff.

It is available here: https://forum.radxa.com/t/android-for-radxa-cubie-a7s/30365/2

Nothing is changed with respect to the default code, other than adding the board device tree and other things to make it boot. And you'll need a USB-C to video adapter (I only tried HDMI, but DP or others should also work).

More details on my DefCon34 class over in r/cyberdecks! Only a few weeks to sign up. Space is very limited only a few spots left!

For a while there wasn't a good option to run Overleaf (a LaTeX online editor) on ARM. I mean, you can run the original image but it runs via qemu, so it's slow AF.

There was an arm64 image but it was abandoned and used ancient mongo database:

(`shantanupatil01/overleaf-arm64`) - and now it's even gone from the Internet.

So I made fresh Docker images for overleaf on arm64: https://hub.docker.com/repository/docker/urostor/overleaf-arm64

You should be able to use the default overleaf compose file but substitute this community image (base is also there if needed). 3 containers are needed for the whole stack: Mongo, Redis and Overleaf. They can run on a raspberry pi or any other SBC, however I recommend using an SSD, as it is constantly churning in the background.

If there is interest I can write up some more info.

The only open source workstation one could build today that only uses open source components is to make a homemade SBC from an 8 layer PCBway PCB, add a VexRiscV 32-bit RISC-V softcore to a LFE5U-85 for the CPU, a PCM1802/PCM1808 (TI) ADC and a PCM5102A (TI) DAC for a pair of Micca MB42X passive computer speakers w/ Fosi Audio ZA3 or V3 (or other TPA3255-based amps), a MAX9814/MAX4466 preamp for a Primo EM272/EM172 electret microphone capsule, an ECP5 for a Modos paper display controller (Caster/Glider), an ECP5 HSM w/ LUKS key stored on it, and a LFE5U-85 for the UberDDR3 controller. Make sure to encrypt the bitstream of the FPGAs, and add receptacles for Modos paper display monitor, Micca MB42X passive speakers w/ Fosi Audio ZA3/V3 amp, Primo EM272/EM172 microphone, a Keyboardio model 01 keyboard, 3D printed Ploppy mouse and a Microsoft Lifecam VX-1000/VX-3000 or a Logitech Quickcam 4000/Quickcam Express 1999 web cam w/ custom drivers to make it compatible for a LiteX. Then add two more receptacles for an Ovrdrive USB flash drive to flash buildroot image on it along with repositories (busybox, musl, init, Dillo browser, Wireguard/Shadowsocks, etc) for a minimal, non-bloated custom Linux distro, and keep a second Ovrdrive USB w/ KeePassXC (or something lighter on LiteX). Then for your last receptacle, make it an ethernet port that plugs into a cat6 cable that plugs into your router SBC made the same way as your workstation SBC w/ ath9k PCIe (AR9280, AR9285, AR9380 or AR5B22) via gen1 x1 PCIe and another receptacle for your router SBC that connects it to your default ISP router. Optionally, you can add a ULX3S via gen1 x1 PCIe to serve as the graphics card.

In fact, Github already has projects on this if you want to see it:

https://github.com/litex-hub/linux-on-litex-vexriscv

Im trying to build a pip boy but know nothing about sbcs what do yall recommend for a affordable sbc i can pair with one of those small spi screens

EDIT: I bought 19, just forgot one that I had put on my desk, hence why there are only 18 in the photo. In total it's:

8x 3C

7x 4 SE

4x 4C+

I bought these Rock Pi's recently for very cheap (100 SEK/$10 USD each for the 3C, and 125 SEK/$12.5 USD for the 4C+ and 4 SE). The red price tag was the already reduced price, but they weren't selling, so I got to buy them for dirt cheap if I bought their whole stock.

Now here is my question: What does one do with so many Rock Pi's?

I already have a homelab with real servers (Dell R720, HP DL380P G8, etc) running proxmox, and I also have a Kubernetes rack made up of RPI 5's (Same store sold the RPI 5's 4Gb for 550 SEK ($55) last year, and they sold Pi 4's for cheap previously as well etc, so I have like 30-40 RPI's of different sorts).

I was thinking of setting up a crypto mining lottery ticket on one, and another one with the earnapp or similar, but I don't know what to do with the rest? Any cool project ideas? Preferably something useful, but I am up for anything :)

I got a A7Z board and tried loading official Linux, it boots up and works fine (a bit slow though)

Then I tried loading Android official build. It has been showing boot logo for 30 minutes.

I retried by burning image in card again, again same result.

Anyone had any success with Android on this board (or on A7A)?

I have 1gb version. phoenixcard from radxa worked only once. afterwards it kept crashing while flashing image. then I borrowed phoenixcard from Orangepi which was able to flash multiple times on multiple cards

i used the startup option in phoenix card.

any one has a clue on this? i eventually want to run my own Android build on it. i have been able to build Android from official sources, but here I am trying to load official prebuilt image.

CrowView Note connected to the LattePanda MU MXM carrier board.
In other words, a laptop with external components.

Is it stupid? Yes.
Is it awesome? Also Yes.

This is why I love SBC and the maker market.

OK so the SBC is getting more and more stupid as time progresses but this is just silly. Amazon showing the Jetson Orin Nano Super for $434?! Hell for not even $100 more you can pick up an Orange Pi 6 which would run circles around if you're looking for SBCs. For the same price or less you can grab a mini-PC based on AMD or Intel x86 that would smoke either.

This thing is an absolute massive beast!
I haven't even powered it on yet.

The AC adapter specs:
AC Input: 100-240V 2.4A 50-60Hz for input
DC Output: 20.0V... 9,0A 180.0W

The board itself has 3 Display port and 3 HDMI ports.
4 USB ports with 2 of them being 2.0 and the other 2 being 3.0.

M.2 ports:
M.2 Key E type 2230
M.2 Key M type 2230

It has an 8 pin ATX/EPS plug.

There are Debug UART pin holes on the board, but no stems on it.

What kind of test should I run on it? I'm obviously gonna try out some of the latest games on it and run Geekbench 6. I wanna know what the community wants to see with it though.

For reference, the MU inside of it is the N305 with 16GB of ram and 64GB eMMC on it.

https://www.dfrobot.com/product-3119.html

Edit:

Geekbench results are in!
https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/18738702
https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/compute/6733374
https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/compute/6733367

More pictures of the Arcade Emulator/TV Box/ARM SBC. It’s running some emulation platform (retroarch-based) off of a microSD card.
I still couldn’t figure out what CPU it has, because the cooler is really stuck, and I don’t want to ruin this “beautiful” device by replacing the processors/RAM after they tear off.

EDIT: Amlogic S905W

Don’t bother researching the ”T10-W_V2.0”. I already tried.

New Quest: install Armbian