Re: Grounded grid VHF front-end

Jan Panteltje <alien@comet.invalid> wrote:

 
What bothers me today (thought maybe use an extra Raspberry Pi) is that prices
are going up to insane lavels for a Raspi5 8 Gb + supply + housing + sdcard to above 120 USD:
 https://www.sossolutions.nl/raspberry-pi-5-8gb-starter-kit-compleet
 
For just a bit more you have a decent mini computer:
 https://www.aliexpress.com/w/wholesale-mini-pc-x86.html
 
Inflation?
Time to end raspi stuff and look for other solutions.

I bought Raspberry Pi 1B when they appeared, but after that used
Chinese alternatives.  Orange Pi used to be cheap, most is more
expensive now.  But Orange Pi Zero 3 is reasonably priced and
powerful enough for my purpose.  You apparently want PC class machine,
for this I want real PC.  For light use mini-PCs may be enough and
are quite cheap.  I got one for equvalent of $70, 6GB RAM, dual core
Celeron N3350, 64 GB solid state disc, 2 USB 3.0 slots (+ 2 USB 2.0),
LAN, Wifi, of course in case and with included power supply.  For
me important advantage is that there is no fan (passive cooling only).
Less powerful used mini-PCs can be as cheap as equivalent of $5.

Supposedly some "TV boxes" are cheap, resonably powerful and can
be programmed with Linux.  But I did not try one.

Pi-s are better for electronics/automation thanks to available
interfaces, but that needs much less compute power (camera is the
only high bandwidth interface that I use).  When you are satified
with lower compute power there are some cheap ones.  I am trying
now Milkv Duo.  Radxa ROCK also seem to be reasonably priced.
But once you want faster CPU, more RAM, EMMC, etc they are getting
more expensive.  I am not sure why, memory modules for PC seem
to be cheaper than price of adding memory to SBC-s (possibly this
is just pure marketing).

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                              Waldek Hebisch