If anyone asks why I prefer to work with Raspberry Pis when I want to tinker on a random project, consider:
I just spent the past hour with a brand new ArmSoM Sige7 board (see my debugging notes in my sbc-reviews repo). This SBC has been on the market for months, with glowing reviews all the way back in May...
It took about 30 minutes before I could get it to boot (20 minutes to find an image that would flash and at least start booting). Then 20 to try getting boot to go all the way through and get logged in. And the last 10 trying to set up an account on ArmSoM's forum to ask what the default user/pass for Ubuntu is (since all the other defaults I could scrounge up in their docs and forum posts didn't work).
It was especially fun having to dig through their official Google Drive folder of OS images, last updated in July, to find one that would both flash to a microSD card with Etcher, and boot the device. (/s)
This is not an isolated incident. So many times I hop on a new SBC board train, and end up spending more time just getting to the point I can start doing a project... than actually doing a project 🤦♂️
The hardware looks cool, though. Hopefully I can get logged in next week!
Comments
And before you ask; the title's a silly play on my username from GitHub / elsewhere ('geerlingguy').
Had a similar experiance a few years back during the pi shortage, wanted a low power device for some docker containers and an SMB share. Thought I'd leave the Pi's for beginners.
Unstable power delivery killed off the storage, and random crashes with no reboots or logs made the containers useless.
We live, we learn!
Totally agree, there are plenty awesome looking SBCs on the paper, but then when it comes to usability and productivity they turn to be nightmare.
Having dealt with the Milk V Duo S the last few months, I can confirm that non pi SBCs are still abysmal software wise (and MilkV's team is actually *extremely* active in terms of development). The Pi Team is safe as long as that stays true regardless of how wacky and wild other boards get with their hardware.
I have a similar experience with Orange Pi 5 Pro. Spent 45 minutes looking through traces of OS that works well just to arrive at Armbian. Also it just shuts off when overheating so that's rough.
This seems like a decent spot to ask since it's on the topic of Pi's vs other SBCs, do you have any major thoughts on the Libre Computer Le Potato? I've checked your repo and it's not mentioned there, but I know you used a bunch of them for that MrBeast project a while back.
I'm looking for something to tinker with but my budget is limited so the price of the Potato and their bundles have caught my eye, but there's not a huge wealth of coverage for these online.
I do have an issue for it on sbc-reviews, but I don't know if I ever finished the full testing. It should certainly be in the README though, oops! Can you comment on that issue and bump it so I remember to add it in?
Ah my bad, I didn't think to check the issues tab after not seeing it in the README list! And sure!
If you mount the SD card, you should be able to find the default user in /etc/shadow and change the password too.
It’s people like me who depend so much on people like you to break the trail for us. Only recently have I begun to understand how rarely trailblazers get thanked for it. I’ve watching your work for years and years and thank you for it.
Hi, Jeff!
I agree that the start with the ArmSom Sige 7 is not as smooth as it is with a Raspberry Pi, however, I realized that a lot of the problems were because of my quick read/overview of their docs. Once I gave them a good read I could solve all problems including the one with the default username/password :D
I flashed Ubuntu on the eMMC and installed a 1TB m2 nvme. Everything works great and I am very happy with it. It's been running for about 4 weeks now (mostly for Docker containers like Plex, Postgres etc).
But yeah, for a novice it is pretty hard to start. When I used their tool for flashing to the eMMC I had to first figure out how to change the language to English because the default was Chinese :D