ARM based board offerings?

[Airbozo]

Hi I am looking for help on any of the ARM based boards out there. THis is for a couple of projects I am working on for customers.

One is for a single device to collect data in an industrial based setting that has to be enclosed in a weather tight enclosure (Stainless Steel to resist the elements and clean easily), and the other is for a dense cluster application similar to this:

http://www.zdnet.com/article/build-your-own-supercomputer-out-of-raspberry-pi-boards/

Right now both projects are in the Proof Of Concept stage and the stand alone project needs to be shippable in August. (have to register with the NSA to actually purchase the GPS and Radio modules that will be integrated in the stand alone model).

Now I must admit that I know next to nothing about the ARM based systems. I have looked at the Rasberry Pi and Orange Pi and both have the base systems I need, but lots of stuff I don't I don't need HDMI (vga would suffice), I need 2gb of base memory. Dual 1G NICs would be great. 10G would be better. I can live with a single 1G NIC if I have to. A 64-128GB MicroSD would be great.

Suggestions and thoughts?

School me on the technology guys!

[Konrad]

I used to love my little Raspberry Pi boards. I see that they're now a little cheaper than before.

Once sir x88x enlightened me about Olimex (https://www.olimex.com/) boards, I never turned back. Better specs, comparable or lower cost, more or less compatible with all RPi accessories, fully open source, actively developed and supported by a healthy community. Wikipedia has a reasonably comprehensive ARM product spec/comparison list (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_single-board_computers).

If you have a local electronics store (the real kind, not the cellphone-and-toys kind), a hackerspace/makerspace, ham radio club, or similar hobby-engineer outlet then check out whatever they happen to have on their shelves. Possibly a more limited inventory, at possibly slightly higher prices, but often worth it anyways when convenience (and access to local smart people) is taken into account.

[x88x]

I need 2gb of base memory.
This is possible, but severely limits your options. OOC, what is driving this requirement? Depending on what you're planning on doing, your RAM needs may not be as high as you are expecting. The Linux builds running on these boards tend to be pretty light.


Dual 1G NICs would be great. 10G would be better.

Those will be...difficult.

Most new boards that have launched within the last year or so tend to have a single "1Gbps" NIC. I put that in quotes because while it is a 1Gbps PHY/MAC, I have yet to run across an ARM5/7 chip (the two most common 32-bit ARM cores) that can actually talk to the PHY at a full 1Gbps. Most tend to top out at around 400Mbps. Some SoCs have the NIC connected over a USB2.0 bus, which would explain the limitation, but others have the NIC either integrated into the SoC. For the later, I suspect that the ARM5/7 bus is the limiting factor.

If you must have full gigabit or multiple gigabit NICs, you will need to look into Intel-based boards like the MinnowBoard MAX (http://www.minnowboard.org/meet-minnowboard-max/) or some of the smaller NUC boards.

The only SoCs I know of that support 10Gbps NICs are some of the new 64-bit ARM chips like the AMD Opteron A1100 (http://www.amd.com/en-us/products/server/opteron-a-series/a1100) or perhaps one of the x86_64 Intel chips, if you can connect it over PCIe.


If you can live with the handicapped gigabit NICs, the only options I know of with 2GB of RAM are the HardKernel ODROID-U3 ($75) (http://ameridroid.com/products/odroid-u3) and ODROID-XU3 ($180) (http://ameridroid.com/products/odroid-xu3) and the Merrii A31 Hummingbird ($70) (http://www.aliexpress.com/store/product/Allwinner-A31-board-ARM-Cortex-A7-Quad-Core-Hummingbird-development-board-1GB-8GB-ANDROID-support-3G/518183_1793373875.html) (haven't actually seen much about this one).


Incidentally, if you want to try the ODROID-XU3 and want to pick one up for testing, let me know; I have one that I picked up and ended up not doing anything with.


If you can drop down to 1GB RAM, there are a variety of options. What kind of CPU requirements do you have? Most SoCs tend to have 2-4 cores running at between 1GHz and 1.5GHz.



Side note, since you mentioned the NSA, do you have any restrictions on source country? A lot of these boards come out of China/Korea.