[sthlmb]

I do have a ko-fi available in the footer of the website, and if someone wants their donation to go towards a specific piece of hardware then I'll most certainly do what I can to honour that, or return it if I can't.

On the samples from vendors front, yeah, that's definitely a concern, though in the years I've been working with manufacturers and had samples from them, I'm fairly confident that no "golden sample" binning is going on as I've had quite a few shockers, hah! Not to say that it couldn't/wouldn't happen, I wouldn't want to introduce that doubt. Perhaps, like my review website, I should add a quick note/indicator of whether a board was obtained directly from a vendor, or if it was purchased.

[aspenmayer]

> I do have a ko-fi available in the footer of the website, and if someone wants their donation to go towards a specific piece of hardware then I'll most certainly do what I can to honour that, or return it if I can't.

That’s pretty good of you to mention, as I didn’t notice the footer when I visited to see if you already had tested the OpenWRT One before posting my suggestion to test it. Perhaps you could mention that you would make a best effort to test hardware suggested by donors, if you haven’t already done so on the site? I approve of you asking for donations openly, as your time and efforts are worth something to you and to visitors, and if you communicate that it’s a two-way street, with some incentives to donors in that they can help suggest what you spend their donations on, I think that your transparency and good faith are more likely to be rewarded with more and larger donations that a simple “buy me a coffee” pitch might otherwise attract.

> Perhaps, like my review website, I should add a quick note/indicator of whether a board was obtained directly from a vendor, or if it was purchased.

I think such a disclaimer/disclosure would assuage (m)any concerns most folks would have on that front!

You seem to have a good grasp on what you’re doing here. Do you share/open source your testing methodology and/or code run to derive your data?

Edit: I see now that you have some of your testing methodology posted. I would suggest gathering as much room temp data during testing as possible, and maybe even re-running the test suite at variable temperatures as much as possible if you can, so you can plot performance over time with different cooling setups in different ambient temperature conditions, as many folks use SBCs in (semi) permanent indoor and outdoor installs in less-than-ideal environments and enclosures, usually with little to no cooling.

If you were to share your complete test scripts, temp probe/jig setup, etc., other users could reality-test their own hardware against other devices in an apples-to-apples way.

[sthlmb]

I'm discussing some other bits with Banana Pi so maybe I can ask about that, I'd need to look into the device to see how viable it is, let's see! I can definitely add the "How did you get this board" disclaimer there somewhere

I don't know if I'd release everything as is, there's a lot of hard coded nonsense that I'd need to filter out and after testing 80 boards, I have a bunch of improvements I want to make. Opening up the test scripts to others isn't/wasn't a high priority item, as I didn't even plan on making this site initially :D

Room temperature data is also nice, but I'll need to draw a line somewhere, on average these tests take around 3-4 hours to run, and with 80 boards right now, best case scenario is 10 straight days of testing (in reality, more with setup and.. life). I could use data on the most popular boards and only do a handful, but I probably have to limit the scope at this point and clearly state the testing conditions and how it may differ in your real world setup.

I can definitely do more to expand on the testing process though, and I can look at sharing the exact commands that are run with my automation so that users can at least mimic the benchmark runs if not the full automation. I really appreciate the responses and feedback, though, so thank you!