Reviews

Arturia is an interesting company. Entering the scene back in 1999 and focusing on software instruments for the better part of a decade, the company branched out into hardware by late 2000s, announcing the Origin hardware synthesizer and the Analog Factory Experience software/controller combo.

Artificial intelligence is not just about flashy, cutting-edge generative models running on extremely powerful enterprise hardware, churning data and answering life’s big (and not-so-big) questions. Just as important is a concept called on-device AI. The name sums the idea up quite succinctly: it’s all about running AI models right on end-user or edge hardware instead of relying on cloud servers.

The LattePanda Mu is the company’s first foray into SoM territory, packing an affordable Intel Processor N100 CPU and seemingly attempting to give the swathes of ARM-based SoMs a run for their money. It’s a crowded and competitive field, with almost every major SBC manufacturer offering some sort of module-based option.

SunFounder’s newest Raspberry Pi-based gizmo is the do-it-yourself Pironman 5 “Mini PC” case, drawing inspiration from flashy high-end PCs — and taking your regular old Raspberry Pi 5 and turning it into a package which wouldn’t look too out of place in a gaming setup built for babies.

If you were to squint just right, Clockwork Pi’s DevTerm, with its retro-inspired ultra-wide display and characteristic two-tone body could pass for a TRS-80 Model 100. Fully inspired by the first generation of truly “pocketable” computers, the DevTerm feels like a love letter to these systems of days long gone.

Intel announced the affordable Jasper Lake-based Celeron N5105 quad-core processor in Q1 2021. Produced using a 10 nm process (do note that node names are somewhat of a complicated topic when it comes to Intel), it was designed to replace the older 14 nm Celeron J-series. With up to three times the performance at a similar TDP, the N5105 quickly became a favorite for entry-level laptops.

Radxa’s SBC offerings are well-regarded by the maker community. One of their earlier boards, the Raspberry Pi Zero-format Radxa Zero, left us with generally positive impressions. Naturally, this made us pretty excited about getting our hands on a newer board of theirs. With all the hype around Rockchip’s RK3588 series, we were rather curious about Radxa’s take on the popular SoC.

Elecfreaks’ first Wukong breakout board was designed for the BBC micro:bit, but a more recent version designed for the Raspberry Pi Pico is also available. This newer variant, dubbed the Wukong 2040, is exactly what we’ll be taking a look at today.

The Orange Pi Zero 2W is the newest and smallest member of the Orange Pi Zero lineup. All of these boards are small-format SBCs (and the board we’re taking a look at today directly follows the format of its namesake, the Raspberry Pi Zero 2W), making them perfect for projects where space is at a premium.

In retrospect, when we first had the original Orange Pi 5, our first RK3588S SBC, make it onto our review desk, we couldn’t even imagine that it’d be the beginning of an extensive series of reviews centered around this very SoC (and its more capable sibling, the RK3588).

The team over at Seeed Studio has seemingly jumped aboard the hype train surrounding Espressif’s ESP32 MCUs. Their first foray way rather shy, testing the waters with an ESP32-C3-based XIAO board. Skipping the ESP32-S2, the team went straight for the ESP32-S3 with their newest member of the XIAO family, putting ample power into a minuscule board.

Starting at $579, the LattePanda Sigma is really expensive. Not just for an SBC — at almost $600 (and more than that in some configurations), it’s a genuinely pricey bit of kit. But, with a 13th Gen Intel Core i5 CPU and up to 32 GB of LPDDR5 RAM, it’s much closer in specs to a fully-fledged desktop computer than its form-factor would initially suggest.

The Orange Pi team has introduced us to a new Rockchip SoC, the RK3566, by sending over an Orange Pi 3B board. The chip in question is a 64-bit ARM processor with four Cortex-A55 cores running at 1.8 GHz, and a two execution engine variant of the Mali-G52 MP1 GPU.

Foldables aren’t exactly known for being the most practical phones. The target audience for these isn’t, and likely never will be the average smartphone user, which is more than happy tapping messages and making phone calls on anything that’s durable and has decent battery life.

Today, we’re taking a look at quite a special board. When it comes to SBCs, or any computing hardware, in general, we’re used to seeing ARM and x86-based processors: the former mainly in mobile devices and the latter in desktop and server gear. Differing in many important aspects, these two architectures both have one thing in common: both are completely closed-source.

It’s finally happening. The successor to the popular, but aging Raspberry Pi 4 Model B is finally here – the aptly-named Raspberry Pi 5 will be available to purchase by the end of October. Spending an unusually long time at the helm – four years – and receiving a significant boost in 2020 with the release of the 8 GB model, the retiring legend truly had a good run.

Our first encounter with the FriendlyElec NanoPi R6S began with an unremarkable brown cardboard box without any prominent branding save for a single white sticker with the letters ’R6S’ printed on it. Flipping the top open reveals a foam protective bag surrounding a pleasantly hefty metal brick.

The Mixtile Blade 3 began its journey as a crowdfunded project, presenting to the world in its May 2022 Crowd Supply campaign. Showcasing this new board as a stackable, high-performance Pico-ITX SBC based around Rockchip’s RK3588, early marketing placed a lot of focus on the cluster features utilizing the U.2 edge connector, enabling the scalable ARM-based servers.

The LilyGO T-HMI has landed before us, packed in a tidy semi-transparent plastic box, surrounded by black cushioning foam. This tiny dev board is based around an ESP32-S3R8 MCU and a 2.8” resistive TFT touchscreen with a 240 x 320 resolution.

Today, we’re taking a look at Banana Pi’s first RK3588-based board. Not even a full month after its release, we managed to get our hands on a review copy of the BPi ARMSoM W3 board (short for ARM System-on-Module), provided to us directly by the company.

There is absolutely no doubt that teenage engineering’s OP-1 is one of, if not the most influential, synthesisers of the decade. However, as we’ve already seen multiple times with the Swedish brand’s products, trying to fit them into a single conventional category doesn’t do them justice.

It’s no secret that NVIDIA’s AI SBCs run toasty at times. The massive stock passive heatsink is generally good enough for the job, but due to the presence of an on-board fan header on many carrier boards, it’s simple enough to install an active solution.

Some sort of thermal solution, active or passive, has become a requirement for many modern SBCs. Ever more power-hungry SoCs with more and more technology packed in simply generate much more heat than convection alone can dissipate.

Two Banana Pi BPi-P2 models have recently landed on our review desk. The Banana Pi BPi-P2 Zero (based on the Allwinner H3 SoC) and Banana Pi BPi-P2 Maker (based on the Allwinner H2+ SoC) have been sent to us by the manufacturer to take a look at.

Intel’s NUC series of small-format PCs has been around for a while. Ever since 2012, Intel has been these in the now recognisable 4”-by-4” format. The lineup had had humble beginnings, usually sporting lower-end Celeron and Atom processors up until 2015, when the first NUC with a Core i7 hit the market.

Creating a functional device of your own isn’t exactly easy if you start with a blank piece of paper. Development systems are tools that make it easier to try out an idea, but they can hardly be stuffed into a functional product.

NVIDIA’s Jetson series of modules has always brought an exciting amount of processing power to mobile and edge AI applications—this being their intended use case. The Jetson lineup also includes several developer kits: modules on reference carrier boards in a format quite similar to single board computers.

The excitement around Raspberry Pi’s product releases is always massive – their products, shaped by years of community (and top-notch first-party) support are representative of the way a piece of development tech is meant to function.

When building a product aimed at the STEM market, you focus your attention on accessibility, ease-of-use, practicality and learning support. The goal of all STEM tools is to bring technology closer to the audience in the easiest and most pleasant way possible – often having to overcome general immaturity and lack of interest.

Banana Pi’s BPI-Pico-RP2040 is a cleverly designed iteration of Raspberry Pi’s Pico design. Experience gained over the course of two years allowed the Banana Pi team to present their own idea of a RP2040-based development kit. We’ve received our unit from the manufacturer for review purposes.

Yet another SBC landed on our review desk. This time around it’s the Orange Pi 5, a recently released RK3588S-based high-end model from Orange Pi – a company whose main products are ARM-based SBCs oriented towards makers.

Pickering 68 series of reed relays have an impressive data-sheet. Distinguished by their flying lead design and their impressive 50 W power rating (but not quite as impressive as the company’s own 67 series’ 200 W one).

We love SBCs. They are perfect platforms to start tinkering with. Offering good specs, low/level hardware access and little-to-no long term consequences if things go awfully awry (it’s reasonably simple to format the main boot drive and start all over), it’s easy to see why they became staples of the maker community.

Together with its smaller sibling, the Galaxy Z Flip 4, the Galaxy Z Fold 4 forms the latest generation of Samsung’s foldables. Both of them are devices with similar form and function, albeit targeted at vastly different markets.

Miniware makes tiny things. The company specialises in shrinking usually bulky and hefty equipment into tiny pocket-sized gadget while sacrificing the least amount of features. Naturally, this is a tricky feat which requires a good bit of engineering know-how.

As single board computers progress and become more and more powerful, so does their use as a desktop replacement become ever more viable. We’ve talked about this before – with several companies marketing their products as capable of such feats while accomplishing the task with varying levels of success.