[fpc-other] Anyone using Orange PI

[Mark Morgan Lloyd]

On 01/03/17 11:30, Marco van de Voort wrote:
> In our previous episode, Mark Morgan Lloyd said:
>>
>> I agree. Most of our RPis are actually running Debian, but in extremis
>> it's always possible to roll back to Raspbian as a baseline configuration.
>>
>> There are of course other small boards: Olimex, Odroid and now Asus.
>> However RPi does offer a fairly flexible and cost-effective range, and
>> unless the OP is considering shipping hundreds rather than 10s of boards
>> I suggest that getting onto both the Linux learning curve and one for
>> minority hardware is quite simply not cost-effective.
>
> The problem is that rpi has no fast storage interface (like SATA), some of
> the more expensive orangepis have sata. (though I'm not entirely sure if it
> is not bridged via usb)

A colleague's just pointed me at ongoing discussion of the new Asus 
board, where somebody's observing that "OrangePI also offer a solution 
with integrated bootable eMMC"

I had an Odroid/Hardkernel eMMC module fail a few weeks ago, and my 
understanding is that I'm by no means the only person to have seen this. 
I also believe that the manufacturer is keenly aware of the problems... 
but at least it was a removable device and once pulled the board will 
boot from SD-Card.

Being able to plug an ordinary SD-Card into a Raspberry Pi is definitely 
one of its strong points. It's a bit unfortunate that it doesn't use one 
of the standard boot loaders (U-Boot, OpenFirmware or whatever) but it 
generally /just/ /works/, and it doesn't rely on having an onboard 
component which can only be fixed by JTAG when it breaks.

Now one might argue that as long as it works or at least can be fixed, 
the boot loader isn't relevant to something like FPC and/or Lazarus. But 
I'm currently playing with an Arduino-compatible board hooked onto the 
RPi's console port, and to get that working I had to change the kernel 
command line: for an RPi that meant editing a text file, while for many 
other boards it would mean updating Flash.

-- 
Mark Morgan Lloyd
markMLl .AT. telemetry.co .DOT. uk

[Opinions above are the author's, not those of his employers or colleagues]