[Babel-users] Why we are discussing ARM [was: Cross-compiling to armhf]

[Harald Geyer]

Juliusz Chroboczek writes:

> Nothing we have found is as nice as the old WNDR3700/3800.  The CHIP is
> marvelously cheap (cheap enough to give out to students!) and has flexible
> power requirements, but it doesn't have wired Ethernet, and its wifi is
> connected over SDIO, with everything that entails.  The Turris Omnia is
> badly overspecced, with a price to match.  The Snickerdoodle is promising,
> but it's currently vapourware, its WiFi sucks, and when combined with the
> dual-Ethernet daughterboard it becomes fairly expensive.
> 
> Things that we haven't been considering, Dave's enthusiasm notwithstanding:
> 
>   Raspberry Pi: doesn't run armhf userspace, no wifi, eth connected by USB;
>   Raspberry Pi v2/v3: requires binary blobs, wifi and eth connected over USB;
>   Beagleboard variants: look nice, but no wifi;
>   MeshSR: they did almost everything wrong.
> 
> So, folks, if anyone has good experiences with cheap ARM boards that have
> wifi and Ethernet and work well with a stock Debian userspace, I'm interested.

I'd suggest to look into the Familiy of Olinuxino boards produced by
Olimex: https://www.olimex.com/Products/OLinuXino/open-source-hardware
or one of their system-on-module boards.

They are in the same price range as the Pis but much more useful hardware.
Also the company is very dedicated to free software and all boards are
open hardware, which is a very useful thing for a research project - or
actually most projects ... ;)

I don't know how good they do wifi though - only use them as ridiculously
powerful microcontrollers so far. Ethernet and SATA seem to perform well.

HTH,
Harald

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