Cheap and Powerful Single Board Computer

[Ian]

I've built a CNC machine which uses a Raspberry Pi to power the motion planning part of the machine, but it's a little underpowered for some of the tasks I'm using it for (as I'm also using a full-screen Chrome browser to act as a touch-screen interface).

I'm thinking about swapping it out for something much more powerful, more along the lines of an Intel NUC.

I've spotted the Asus Tinkerboard S which is footprint compatible with the Raspberry Pi (which makes things easy), but I don't know if that'll be enough power for what I'm after.

Has anyone seen something that would be under £80 that would be substantially more powerful that an RPi (and has at least the capability of running Windows 10). It would need to be a very small footprint (and if it runs direct from 24V, that's a nice bonus).

My thoughts so far are to pick up a cheap 2nd hand Intel NUC from eBay, but I'd be interested to know if anyone here knows of a better alternative.

 

[Abraham Andres Luna]

Is this one powerful enough for ya?

NVIDIA Jetson Nano für KI-Anwendungen in der Peripherie und Bildung

Lernen, entwickeln und stellen Sie KI für Millionen von kleinen, energieeffizienten Geräten bereit.

www.nvidia.com

 

[Ian]

That board has some great specs, but I'm not sure how fast it would be in non-AI applications. It'll run Ubuntu nicely and comes in at the right price, so I'll do some more reading up on this now. Thanks for the link!

 

[Ian]

I did some more reading up and spoke to a friend that has one of these NVIDIA Jetson Nano boards, and apparently it's lighting fast in Ubuntu - so this is probably just what I'm after . Thanks for the recommendation @Abraham Andres Luna!

 

[Abraham Andres Luna]

Oh I'm so happy for you, I wish I could afford one right now, but I have to wait.

 

[Abraham Andres Luna]

I found another AI board for ya: https://coral.withgoogle.com/
I think I would go with the NVIDIA board but it's nice to have options.

 

[Ian]

Check out what arrived on Monday @Abraham Andres Luna . It's the NVIDIA Jetson Nano!

I'm so pleased you recommended this, it's up and running in my CNC machine and so far it's working great. It's significantly more powerful than the RPi and it is able to power the USB devices fully, without requiring a hub (which was a struggle for the RPi).

Thanks again for the recommendation.

 

[Abraham Andres Luna]

I'm so jelly of you

 

[Ian]

I'll post more of an update on it once I've pushed it a little more .

 

[Abraham Andres Luna]

You plan on running benchmarks?

 

[Ian]

You plan on running benchmarks?

Yep, I'll get some testing done on it in a couple of weeks and post the results here .

 

[Abraham Andres Luna]

I found another board, this time it's a RISC-V chip

New Part Day: A 64-Bit RISC-V CPU In Raspberry Pi Hat Form

Over the last few years the open-source RISC-V microprocessor has moved from existing only on FPGAs into real silicon, and right now you can buy a RISC-V microcontroller with all the bells and whis…

hackaday.com