Raspberry Pi alternatives?

DentFuse

Disciple
Sep 17, 2022
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Hello all,

I know this question has probably been beaten to death but I wanted to get everyone's opinion on which one would the best for my use case and if there were difference between them.

I basically needed a Raspberry Pi for running a personal VPN server and for a couple of personal project. Basic requirements are 1gb RAM. I looked on the official Raspberry Pi website but a were outta stock. Which alternative would be good for my use case?
 

SirVer

Disciple
Aug 14, 2022
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From what I've seen most alternatives like the Orange Pi have seen price increases/stock depletion as well, so the only real options I can think of are the x86 ones like the LattePanda, ASUS Tinker Board and Nvidia Jetson, all of which have much higher price tags. Honestly, if space and power aren't a concern for you, you're probably better off buying one of those second hand office computers with really old CPUs in them - as long as you don't need a large core/thread count or hardware decode/encode, they'll probably do what you need them to.
 

DentFuse

Disciple
Sep 17, 2022
63
53
32
That's probably do good for the vpn server how ever I needed a portable device for my project since it's related to IOT and needs to be in a compact form factor. Hence my original choice was a pi.
 

6pack

ex-Mod
Sep 19, 2005
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Amazon has pi3 b+ model at around 9.6k
Plus there's this
Friendly ELEC NanoPi R1 SBC Dual Network Port IoT Router with 1GB RAM & 8G EMMC Supporting Open Source Ubuntu and OpenWrt https://amzn.eu/d/dHA2qpf
 

Navier

Disciple
Jan 25, 2023
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That's probably do good for the vpn server how ever I needed a portable device for my project since it's related to IOT and needs to be in a compact form factor. Hence my original choice was a pi.
How much is your budget?
 

ibose

Skilled
Jun 20, 2009
1,655
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Amazon has pi3 b+ model at around 9.6k
Plus there's this
Friendly ELEC NanoPi R1 SBC Dual Network Port IoT Router with 1GB RAM & 8G EMMC Supporting Open Source Ubuntu and OpenWrt https://amzn.eu/d/dHA2qpf
Unfortunately those are really unreasonable prices and risky as they are not even official sellers. Better to wait for official resellers to re-stock them. I wish they would add India to rpilocator.
 

SirVer

Disciple
Aug 14, 2022
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42
If you're willing to spend around 5k, you could get an old Android phone with a SD820 class processor, flash custom firmware, and use that - provided you can make it work, that should be enough horsepower for most single user projects.
 

enthusiast29

Skilled
Jan 15, 2021
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Delhi
If you're willing to spend around 5k, you could get an old Android phone with a SD820 class processor, flash custom firmware, and use that - provided you can make it work, that should be enough horsepower for most single user projects.
I second this.

Use an old android phone, root it and run Linux using an app "Linux Deploy".

...unless you need GPIO.
 
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