this post was submitted on 11 Jun 2024
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N100 mini PCs are where it's at these days anyways. Unless you need the GPIO pins or are running some weird niche configuration, you're better off grabbing any N100, they're cheaper too.
I look for broken but working sff/tiny deals. Scored a sweet i5 7500 /16gb system for $100CAD. Just had a broken audio port I was never going to use.
The fool you will be revealed to be once I complete my Ethernet Over Audio implementation.
Isn't that just a telephone modem?
No, silly, that's Audio Over Ethernet! /j
It is I! USB-C-MAN! Begone with you foul villain!
Oh boy, you've got a lot of protocols you can borrow for your OSI layer 1. ribbitradio and the telephone modem spec.
I just want you to know this is one of my favorite comments of all time.
After some light searching, am I missing something? I don't see n100 cheaper than rpi 5
Yeah, they're nearly twice the price.
Far more capable though, and typically specced with 16GB RAM and a 500GB SSD.
You're forgetting to include the Pi heatsink, the Pi power supply and the Pi enclosure.
Yeah good point, adds $10-$30 on top of rpi
Cheapest I've seen was $105
PIs are kind of screwed from N* on the higher power end and ESP32 (or similar high power micro controllers) the lower end.
It's become an underpowered middle player no one needs.
It was good while it lasted. PI3's for $30 we're amazing.
GPIOs are the easy bit. You can get those no issue on x86. It's I2C and SPI that are the issue with x86. You can get the buses sure, but all the device drivers are Device Tree based. You can't just throw in Device Tree overlays on x86.
Idk, with I2C if it's not something that needs a kernel level driver, there usually isn't a problem with interacting with it from user space, for example basically all RAM RGB controllers are I2C and OpenRGB has no problem with them. I'm pretty sure I've only ever used an I2C device tree overlay for an RTC.
Also I2C/SMBus is present everywhere on x86, like some graphics cards expose it through their HDMI ports, even some server motherboards have a header for it; but for GPIO I'm unaware of any motherboards that expose it, so good luck researching the chipset and tracing out the pins.
Only a fraction of it is RTCs. What is in the Pi overlays folder is from everything. Not even all the DT I2C RTCs. There is loads of ADCs, DACs, IO extenders, all sorts.
It's really annoying you can't do DT on x86 Linux. It's a bit of a gap in the platform. It would make Linux ARM based developer's lives easier.
These should all work without kernel drivers. For example, here's a user space python library for ADS1*15 ADCs, or Nuvoton MS51 IO Expanders. Unless you need very specific timing or require the kernel to know about it, you shouldn't need a kernel driver.
You can of course write drivers for them, but then it's you own abstraction not the standard Linux abstraction. (You can hack something up with IIO for that stuff, but it's not pretty). There is CUSE (part of FUSE) you can do some character devices with.
Existing drivers in Python are messy to use if you our not developer in Python.
The nice thing about in kernel is:
The Linux kernel does hardware abstraction. It's not a microkernel. There is limited support for proper userspace drivers.
If you doing some application specific app, that will only work with those chips, use do it in userspace. But to make a normal system for normal use, you want things in kernel like normal.
Added benefit of most using low power intel CPUs
They're not actually lower powered, they just have a TDP limit set.
E.g. A 8500 and 8500T will idle at the same power consumption, but the 8500T has a TDP limit set.
I have a pi 4, how would the transfer work? Can you install pios on the n100 and just clone stuff over?
N100 is a standard Intel x86 family chip, so no. Plenty of power though, so you'd be able to install any Linux distro or even Windows if you wanted to disgust Lemmy.
Or get a used Thinkcentre tiny, way cheaper. Some have a serial out too.
Can you swap the hard drive between any generation and still have it boot and work 100%? To me that was the second biggest feature after all the gpio and i2c buses I used to hack all manner of stuff together. Heck I even have a cargo trailer powered by a pi!