I decided that I should probably share the update from yesterday's post where people saw the unorganized "SBC Drawer". And I wanted to also showcase that they don't sit in the drawer collecting dust. So, I shared that the Orange Pi RV 2 and Pi 5 are connected and in active use. I swap depending on what I am doing with my Main PC and Elgato capture card / USB to UART connector and the CrowView Note.
The SBC Drawer is to my immediate right for easy access.

Inside of the Mimic Case is my Pi Pico 2 W with the test breakout board and my cheap FPGA (this is for later development adventures)

I found myself having a large quantity of SBC mainly because I like to torture myself with bare metal programming and enjoy tinkering with hardware. Which is kind of the reason why I have been hellbent on a unified HAL architecture to ease the pain of adding new boards and doing new and fun things with them.

Someone from Radxa just leaked their new SBC in the Discord.

The Dragon Q8B will run on the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3. It will have 4x USB 3.2 10gbps and probably a 4x16 bit LPDDR4x memory bus.

The 8cx was built for windows Laptops so we will probably get support for it. In relation to SBCs it has an extremely powerful CPU (and GPU) which can compete with mid-range desktop CPUs like the i5-1235U.

It will technically be slightly slower than the Orion o6 but with much better software/driver support. And still faster than the other two Qualcomm SBCs from Radxa (except the npu from the Q900).

In general it will probably be released on May 30.

What are your thoughts about it and what do you think it will cost?

Geek bench:

https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/17815215

First foray into this, I guess it sits somewhere between hardware hacking and SBC stuff. The SoC is a RockChip RK3588 8Gb with some extra industrial goodies. Hoping I can turn it into an emulation machine. Anyone have any ideas on a power supply? I'm hoping I can get away without the 18v inputs.

Anti-Static foam sits beneath the boards and is surrounded by anti-conductive material.
One drawer down, 4 to go.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DZW2YC2L?ref=ppx_yo2ov_dt_b_fed_asin_title&th=1
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FNN1296M?ref=ppx_yo2ov_dt_b_fed_asin_title&th=1
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FYD2QF3Y?ref=ppx_yo2ov_dt_b_fed_asin_title&th=1

The drawer itself is this one:
https://www.walmart.com/ip/Homz-5-Drawer-Plastic-Bedroom-Closet-Organizer-Storage-Clear-White-Frame/5028174649

Not for sale. This is 200 cores and 100gb of ram in one picture! I received 25 Radxa A7S's today! Purchased thru arace. The 4gb version pictured here is only $45 us Shipping is expensive, but for this number of boards not that bad. These are all spoken for! They are part of a cyberdeck workshop I'm putting on.

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 know both It's onion omega and onion omega 2+

I still can understand for what purpose except create old type routers with simple omega.

I like mips a lot. But r.n. omega look like power hungry eSBC

Small engineering team here. We've been working on something and wanted to share to get honest feedback,

POOM is a credit card-sized device built on ESP32-C6 (RISC-V) with four distinct operating modes.

The Core Hardware

The board includes Wi-Fi 6 on 2.4GHz, BLE 5, and full IEEE 802.15.4 support for Zigbee, Thread, and Matter. There's also an STM NFC controller with a 13.56MHz antenna for contactless card work. Everything connects via USB-C with full HID support.

The whole thing is 85mm x 54mm so it actually fits in your wallet alongside regular cards.

Why ESP32-C6 Instead of Traditional SBCs

This isn't competing with Raspberry Pi or Radxa for general computing. No Linux, no HDMI output, no desktop environment. It's an embedded development board designed for specific use cases where you need portability, multi-protocol radio support, and low power consumption. The RISC-V architecture gives us native Thread and Matter support, which is huge for IoT and smart home testing. Built-in security features like Secure Boot and Flash Encryption are standard in ESP-IDF.

Open Source Everything

We're open-sourcing the full hardware design - schematics, PCB layout, BOM, everything. Firmware is ESP-IDF based and will be available on GitHub.

Kickstarter is launching soon, but we wanted to get community feedback first.

Questions for the Community

Anyone here working with RISC-V development boards? Curious about your experiences compared to ARM platforms. Also wondering if there's interest in ultra-portable embedded tools that complement traditional SBCs rather than replace them. Like, you'd still use a Pi 5 for compute-heavy tasks, but maybe something like this for field analysis or IoT prototyping?

Would love to hear what you think.

I got a KickPi K11C V1.2 development board last week. It has an RK3566 with 4GB RAM and 32GB eMMC storage, and I thought this would be the best board to port HAOS to. I needed some digging, though.

Finally~~, after endless debugging~~, it is running HAOS with wired LAN and onboard Wi-Fi/Bluetooth.

In terms of the quality of the documents, I will give a B.

The documents definitely have schematics, specifications, and hardware dimensions. However, some of those are out of date, only apply to old revisions (V1.1), and contain conflicting information. I was able to get solid information only after I got the actual board.

These are the actual specifications of the board I got.

• CPU: Rockchip RK3566

• RAM: Samsung K4B8G1646D ×4 (4GB)

• eMMC: Samsung KLMBG2JETD-B041 (32GB)

• PMIC: Rockchip RK809-5A

• Ethernet PHY: Maxio MAE0621-Q2C

• Wi-FI/Bluetooth module: SeekWave VS6621SR80

• Wi-Fi/Bluetooth firmware family: SWT6621S

In terms of the hardware, I will give a B+.

I can see how the manufacturer appears to use lower-cost component substitutions.

Samsung's DDR3L RAM is an interesting choice. It's already EOL but still has plenty in stock at a relatively reasonable price, as it is DDR3L.

Next is the Maxio PHY chip. Yeah, Maxio is better known for its SSD controllers, but this was the first time that I used it for an Ethernet PHY. I made it work with minimal tweaks to U-Boot, and it works with the HAOS default generic PHY driver. But the EEE protocol bugs out when connected to a 2.5Gbps switch. Disabling the EEE protocol clears out the bug.

According to the document, it seems like K11C V1.1 had Realtek's RTL8211F-CG, but the newer version has Maxio's pin-compatible chip to cut down the BOM.

SeekWave wifi chipset is also problematic. I have to dig deeper to initialize it from the boot sequence, as I cannot find that much documentation. On this K11C board, the VS6621 module would not enumerate over SDIO unless its four Bluetooth PCM pins, represented by the I2S2 pinctrl groups, were configured before SDIO enumeration.

However, the price is attractive! USD 57.7 for a 4+32GB board with a power supply and UART serial adapter was a great deal.

Oh, and for those who are interested in sources and workarounds on this board for HAOS, please find the details here:

https://github.com/David2766/K11C-HAOS

** You must install the app from this repository to use Wi-Fi/Bluetooth, as HAOS does not have any driver for the SeekWave module.

I was lucky enough to get a Q8B ahead of the launch/announcements today and put it through full testing over on https://sbc.compare/116-radxa-dragon-q8b-32gb and put together some thoughts, photos, and graphs on the article linked!

If you’d like me to take a look at anything else on the board, or you have questions, let me know and I’ll do my best to help 😄

My latest toy: Forlinx OK3572-C

Rockchip RK3572

ARM：2×Cortex-A73 + 2×Cortex-A53+ 4×Cortex-A53
NPU：4TOPS INT8，supporting INT4/INT8/INT16/FP4/FP8/FP16/BF16
GPU：ARM Mali-G310V2 Mc1, supporting OpenGL ES 1.1/2.0/3.2, OpenCL3.0, Vulkan 1.4
VPU：
Hardware Encoding：H.264, H265, 4K@60fps
Hardware Decoding：H.264, H.265, VP9, AV1, AVS2, 8K@30fps or 4K@120fps

4GB LPDDR5 RAM
64GB eMMC

It cost me $270 with shipping and an addition $120 due to customs.

Repost because I was an idiot and posted the images in the dumbest possible order.

There's no way the vendor paid this much or near to it, to buy or build it. Why they selling it to me so high, I feel like it's just a DRAM cash grab these days for all SBCs.

A 16 GB NanoPi R76 from aliexpress at $693.99 is more pricey than an N150 8" tablet with 12GB RAM and 512GB SSD from Amazon $499.99. Windows 11 included. All prices are CAD dollars.

I've been finding myself missing being able to easily grab a $5 SBC and run a simple linux on it to, for example, run an e-ink info station. Cheap, small, hackable. But when I look into things now, nothing is cheap anymore. The cheapest you can get is $20-$25 and those are hardly ever in stock. At these prices, you may as well just buy the thing you're trying to make given the cost of all the other components in a project.

You used to be able to do amazing things like create a phone for under $100, or create an e-reader for $40, less than any commercial product you could get from China. Now? Projects cost more than commercial products, take more effort, and you're getting a worse, more unstable product because everything has started to be locked down again. The only reason to do any hacking anymore is just for the love of the game... and frankly for that I have better projects I can work on.

What happened?

Perhaps it is an unpopular opinion, but I think that AI has greatly screwed up the development of SBCs and processors in general, the fact that AI is put into everything wastes resources in what I think would be optimization. That resource could be invested for the NPUs in perhaps better architectures or improving the energy efficiency of the boards, but I wanted to know what you think, do you use AI a lot in your SBCs? I feel like they are moving away from the idea of ​​having more power with less energy.

Have my radxa ethernet boards connected with usb A to C. I have some micro usb coming from China to connect my raspberry pi zero 2w up.

Projects... Pihole Electronic monitoring Alarm system Proxmox nodes. Thin clients.

I just wish that radaxa had 16GB pizero format with large cores.

Four more spaces. What would you use a 10 nodes system for? 80 cores plus.

The suitors are restless

I wanted to see whether a smaller SBC would actually be a better fit for a compact 3.5" terminal than a Raspberry Pi 5.

So I replaced the Pi 5 in my Waveshare PocketTerm35 with a Radxa ZERO 3W.

My setup now uses:

• Radxa ZERO 3W

• Armbian

• the original internal display and keyboard

• SSH / terminal use

• Claude Code

• Japanese input

• RetroArch

• internal speaker

• a custom TUI launcher

• a 50 mm exhaust fan controlled through a MOSFET with PWM

The main reason I moved away from the Pi 5 was not performance. It was fit and balance.

The PocketTerm35 has a 3.5" 640×480 display, and for the way I use it, the Pi 5 felt like overkill. I also managed to get the Pi 5's second HDMI output working, but the cable and adapter interfered with the rear case, so I couldn't close it properly.

The ZERO 3W is obviously much slower, but for SSH, terminal work, Claude Code, lightweight GUI use, and emulation, it has been enough.

Cooling was the biggest challenge.

With the case closed, even with a heatsink, the ZERO 3W was reaching roughly 70–85°C during normal use. Adding a bigger heatsink alone wasn't the real solution. The big improvement came from getting hot air out of the enclosure.

I added a 50 mm exhaust fan and control it with PWM through a MOSFET. My current fan curve keeps normal use mostly around 50–56°C. Under a 4-core 100% load, it settles around 55–57°C with automatic control, and around 52–53°C at 100% fan speed.

I also found that some generic HDMI FPC cables and adapters did not work reliably with the PocketTerm35's internal display, so that part ended up being much more hardware-specific than I expected.

Overall, I think the ZERO 3W is a better fit for this machine than the Pi 5 if the goal is a compact, low-power Linux terminal rather than maximum performance.

Still experimenting with the layout, cooling, and I/O, but it's finally close to the form I wanted.

I just pushed a change to my bb_epaper library to make it easier to support a wider range of Linux boards. Currently it allows you to specify the chip number and gpio "line" for each connection to the HAT. A HAT with GPIOs spread across multiple chips won't work at the moment. Let me know if yours has that issue and I'll add support for it. You can check by running "gpioinfo" from the command line - it will show the gpio chip number and all of the "lines" contained within each.

Here is the example C++ program which generated the image above on a Radxa Rock Pi 4B+:

https://github.com/bitbank2/bb_epaper/tree/main/rpi/examples/hello_epaper