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I recently have been playing around with a few boards in this area. Besides the RPi3/4/Zero, I've got the Beaglebone Blue/Black, Jetson Nano, and Odroid-C4, with an Odroid-N2+ shipped my way yesterday. The Raspberry Pi's have undoubtedly the widest community support, so can be great if you're a beginner. However, for a lot of projects, I've been frustrated by it. Things that should "just work" like i2c don't always, and it's limited for some tasks like hardware PWM (only two PWM outs vs. six for the Odroid). On the other hand, the Jetson Nano's ability to run CUDA is killer, especially for certain computer vision tasks, but it doesn't always seem to have great docs and the forum isn't always particularly helpful. The Beaglebones are fine, but tbh seem to be showing their age. The strength of availabile ARM SBCs has drastically scaled up even in the past few years, and I don't think they've kept up. The Odroid-C4 board is a great middle ground. It took a little while to figure out, but if you're comfortable reading docs and asking questions on community forums (I needed to add certain GPIO groups to a config file and reboot to see them in the device tree, but you don't need to be able to compile your own kernel or anything) and not on a deadline, the performance is both better than the Pi4 on paper and seems noticably smoother for certain tasks than any of the other boards, especially basic desktop use. Also, no onboard WiFi, but USB chips have been plug-and-play so far. The N2+ has even more cores and a built-in real-time clock + coin battery holder (maybe useful for hibernation modes?), so I'm looking forward to playing around with that soon. |