The $8 Linux Computer (2022)

znpy

The chip computer used to be much more capable and feature rich at just 9$

winrid

Quick someone upload a passmark score Probably a little faster than a Pentium 3

internet2000

The Raspberry Pi Zero sold for $5 before the foundation sold out.

amelius

I want this but in credit-card form factor, with a screen built in.

hypercube33

I love looking back 10+ years for the cheapest Linux thing you could buy. People were buying devices that were for kids or a router or something and repurposing it because it was open enough to get a shell on / flash Linux to it and start doing projects with. In the 2020s or somewhere before that we got a bunch of dedicated cheap MCUs that were good enough and I think stole the thunder from full Linux but there are still projects to run it on things like the ESP32 family. Either way, hardware hacking is still my favorite hobby to watch.

nojs

Is the Pi Zero 2W globally unobtainable at this point? What are folks using instead?

pwndByDeath

This article motivated me to buy three of these, it was fun, I had to get a pico to build the interface. I still intend to go back, but time keeps on slipping... I'm sure many have collected an impressive number of SBCs since the beaglebone, someday I want to build a display case that runs them all on some distributed process as a visual art piece

dreamlayers

One could buy an old router or Android device for media playback on a TV for less. So the main attraction here is not that it's cheap, but that it's small and has convenient GPIO.

ajju

Also liked your “Nature abhors unused RAM” piece. https://thelittleengineerthatcould.blogspot.com/2019/10/horr... Sam Altman is just catching on ;)

sandreas

Personally I think the LicheeRV nano on SG2002 is worth the investment of 15-20 bucks. This thing has USB OTG, multiple usable GPIO and can be flashed via microSD and has a display out with touch support. I was in the process on building a little iPod Nano clone[1] with Rust / Slint but i was too busy for a while, yet I plan to get back to it in the future. Unfortunately the sg2002 image has no CPU governor yet. Maybe I switch to the tinyembedded dual with a custom PCB to save power[2]. 1: https://github.com/nanowave-player/nanowave-ui 2: https://github.com/yuansco/TinyEmbedded-Dual/

logicallee

This is very impressive. Here are the specs that they linked: https://pine64.com/product/128mb-ox64-sbc-available-on-decem... It has 64 MB of internal psram and these cores: - 64-bit 480MHz RV64 C906 - 32-bit 320MHz RV32 E907 - 32-bit 150MHz RV32 E902 This is like desktop computers from 30-40 years ago I guess. There were quite a few types of applications those could run. I'd guess that this board is inexpensive as a cheap entry-level board into the pine64 ecosystem, other boards by pine64 are more expensive. ($60-$80 range.)

andai

>At the time of writing, ethernet, wifi and SD-Card are not working. This might be the most Linux sentence ever!

snvzz

If the intent is to play with RISC-V cheaply rather than getting the absolute cheapest computer, I'd look at something with C908 (a small cpu that is vector capable, RVV 1.0). A particularly good deal is the Banana Pi BPI-RV2: It has 4xC908@1.25GHz, 512MB DDR3, M.2, miniPCIe, 1x 2.5GbE, 5xGbE. There is a cheaper Banana Pi BPI-CanMV-K230D-Zero. 2xC908, 128MB LPDDR4, KPU, MIPI CSI/DSI, Wi-Fi, 40x GPIO. If serious about RISC-V, then of course RVA23 is desirable. Unfortunately any SBC with that is currently expensive due to the RAM shortage situation.

tamimio

I got a proxmox server hosting many stuff on a T530 thinkpad I got for less than $5, now beat that! Actually, I have a 2015 imac running archos that I got free from an old boomer, he even incl the magic mouse and keyboard.

martinmeba

This part is awful. I bought this a while back: https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/Ox64 It also has instructions for how to flash it(including picoprobe) on their site instead of a discord. Finally - last time I looked - none of the peripherals were supported(including USB) on the chip and the last commit on their kernel repo was 2023. Also the wifi barely worked.

queenkjuul

I've been using the Milk-V Duo series of boards (original MSRP starting at $6) and earlier this year got Linux 7.0 working on them including WiFi USB and Bluetooth: https://github.com/queenkjuul/milkv-duo-ubuntu

dnlgrmm

I recently bought a UZ801 USB Wifi 4G dongle for 10€ incl shipping from China and flashed linux onto it. It's a full-on router running OpenWRT in my workshop now. Can definitely recommend tinkering with such boards, I'm having a lot of fun, especially because of the limitations (384MB RAM, 2GB flash). A lot of tools I wanted on there I had to reimplement in Rust to be more resource-efficient.

kamisori-daijin

I would like to do this with RP2350 too!