these cheap linux hardware are everywhere. can these be repurposed for other use cases?
Posted by Little-Season-3433@reddit | linux | View on Reddit | 84 comments
BrokkelPiloot@reddit
Everything is a Steam Machine! But then it's actually true :P
popostee@reddit
you can do whatever you want with it. steer your submarine even
KnigtHawk@reddit
"hey Vsauce Micael here, your submarine is very controllabel or is it?"
Berenluth_@reddit
Why did i hear the music in my head after "or is it"?
alphabytes@reddit
i did as well...
Mantaraylurks@reddit
As long as the hardware can support your endeavors
masssy@reddit
I mean to be fair they arrived at the bottom of the sea which.. well kinda was the problem.
No-More-Lettuce@reddit
You might be on to something. Have you thought about starting a deep sea tour business?
stef-navarro@reddit
This is getting dark very fast
GarThor_TMK@reddit
People joke, but that Logitech controller was likely the most well tested and engineered piece of hardware on the boat...
I've had Logitech kit that's served me for decades, as long as the batteries were good, the controller is not the thing that would have failed.
SoItGoesdotdotdot@reddit
Yeah the comments about the controller are dumb. The problem was that they used carbon fiber as part of the hull... That they got from Boeing... that may have been beyond its shelf life. Carbon fiber has immense tensile strength. Not very good in the way of compressive strength.
canadajones68@reddit
Using cheap, commonly available parts for something where (momentary) failure is acceptable is no problem. It might look a little silly, but as you say, that Logitech controller was probably fine. The carbon fibre hull, however, is another story. It was sanded down between layers during construction (which cuts the long fibres and leaves it up to the epoxy to keep it together), and that's not even to mention how carbon fibre is great at stretching forces, not compressive (like what you'd find at the bottom of the sea?). They also put in a window that was rated for like half of the depth they used it at, and bragged about it being acrylic meant that they'd hear when it was about to burst (ignoring the magnitude of the forces at play).
There was a *lot* of things wrong, but the controller was the least of their worries.
w4drone@reddit
I wholeheartedly disagree, every control system element should be reliable and designed for use with that system. My robotics team stopped using those controllers because of how unreliable they were. It was completely unsuitable for use as a life safety critical system
lendarker@reddit
That's normal when diving deep. Bring lights.
TampaPowers@reddit
Careful, that market might implode...
mtfthrowaway39179@reddit
"go steer your submarine" sounds like "knock yourself out" but specific to compatibility and openness of technology. I can envision that being some sort of a catchphrase or marketing material for a libre oriented tech company
gyuszixr@reddit
The fuck is a Linux hardware. You mean EVERYTHING?
bobj33@reddit
There is an entire subreddit for these things and plenty of people running ArkOS on them.
/r/R36S
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ArkOS
ahfoo@reddit
Nice tip, thanks.
WillD2007@reddit
Keep that to the DMs, thanks.
DrunkOnKnight@reddit
Shoutout my boys at r/MiyooMini
OnionOS is a great emulation os built for it. Great community for any product help you need.
Merjia@reddit
Recent and very happy Miyoo Mini Plus user here; OnionOS rules.
Middle_Personality_3@reddit
Bought a Miyoo Mini (and installed OnionOS) to play old Pokémon games, ended up using it mainly as an ebook reader.
Big_Dog_8442@reddit
I'm immediately in love with this. So excited to try it out! Thank you!
Alaknar@reddit
Wait, isn't ArkOS dead?
ahfoo@reddit
I'm trying to follow this as well as I was out of the loop. It seems that ArkOS recently got a new maintainer.
I_love_Pyros@reddit
I think the wikipedia is another ArkOS, the one i am running is ubuntu based.
https://github.com/AeolusUX/ArkOS-R3XS
necrophcodr@reddit
That sure is a lot of very none source available repositories.
6gv5@reddit
I bought a R36S a while ago; it's fun and cheap but strangely comes without internal WiFi (can be added but mod isn't easy) which would be handy also for other non gaming uses leaving the USB port available. They likely cut all corners to sell it at such low price so no WiFi, no exposed GPIOs etc. Today I would probably spend a little more and choose something that could talk to the external world, provided it can run a full Linux flavor such as Armbian as the R36S does.
https://github.com/R36S-Stuff/R36S-Armbian/releases/tag/RC5
Look for example at the (now discontinued) Odroid GO.
https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/odroid-go/
Different hardware (ESP32), and way inferior capabilities, the point is its hackability out of the box, but it was conceived for tinkerers.
chiefhunnablunts@reddit
s/o to r36s armbian. terrible performance, but the absolute joy i got out of running vscode on a handheld emulator can't be replaced.
bullet1520@reddit
Aren't most of these Android, not Linux? And yes, you can split hairs and call Android a Linux offshoot, but that's not the point
chiefhunnablunts@reddit
yes and no. i'll update this with what i've tried and researched as soon as i can but tldr it's a pain in the ass.
mk7_luxion@reddit
most of these are extremely underpowered so I'd check on that first, and also about firmware support some random models can be hit or miss, I'd usually research the model you think looks best before purchasing it because some of these claim to be able to play upwards to PS1 and they can barely do it, and the PS1 isn't hard at all to emulate by any hardware standards.
fromwithin@reddit
The PS1 was hard to emulate by PS1 hardware standards.
deadlyrepost@reddit
The biggest problem isn't the power they have, it's that they often cannot run mainline Linux, which makes it hard to develop for them. Some custom firmwares are Rocknix, Knulli, and ArcOS. If it's a more mainstream device, Batocera might work. It's a good place to start.
With those, you have portmaster access, and there's things like a flipclock or Rockbox, a music player for embedded systems.
1that__guy1@reddit
Rocknix runs mainline Linux with some patches
deadlyrepost@reddit
Yes, the thing I was trying to say was that most devices can't run any of the custom firmwares because of how far it is from the mainline.
1that__guy1@reddit
Most of the devices in this post are R36S clones which work on mainline with some patches
CaptainObvious110@reddit
Yeah that makes sense
golden_monkey_and_oj@reddit
Does anyone know of a similar hardware but in a simple tablet form factor?
I've long been on the hunt for something to replace my bulky RaspberryPi and touchscreen display panel. Been hoping for an inexpensive tablet form factor like a 7-8in Amazon fire tablet that can run regular desktop Linux.
Not looking for gaming or content consumption iPad replacements, more for info displays, lightweight control panels and lightweight browsing.
Something that can be mounted flat on a wall or lay on a bedside table mostly plugged in. Short battery life and mediocre performance is fine.
Has anybody seen anything like this? Was hoping there'd be some thin raspi zero tablets out by now but haven't seen any
Jceggbert5@reddit
Can't wait until these little ARM boxes start getting SteamOS images
Standard-Potential-6@reddit
That’d be great, and a few will get ports, but remember ARM is not x86(_64). There is no ACPI, and most vendors don’t make an effort to upstream their device tree. Much more work may be required per SoC.
bubblegumpuma@reddit
I wouldn't buy these things without finding which SoC there is. Some of them are well supported, namely Rockchip, and those are actually generally pretty well supported on Linux for an ARM platform. Some of the handhelds even have device trees in mainline Linux, but yeah, support is extremely hit or miss.
gravgun@reddit
This is arguably a good thing, as for the vast majority el-cheapo devices the config held in ACPI DSDT is severely broken, and modifying/supplementing (with SSDTs) those is an order of magnitude more pain than with device trees. Not to mention broken/non-compliant firmwarre based on a very hacked up EDK2.
But extracting even a compiled one, decompiling it (
dtc -I dts) and diffing it with known trees (which we basically always have for a given SoC) is simple, and usually does not require that much modification to bring to support of whatever Linux version, mainline or otherwise, you're targetting.Standard-Potential-6@reddit
I have experience mucking with DSDT and not device trees as you do, so upvoted, hopefully that’s generally correct.
duck1123@reddit
I think the thought here is to use FEX to emulate x86 on ARM
necrophcodr@reddit
That's missing the point, there's probably no kernel source or kernel patches available for most of these. You'd have to use the existing kernel (if you can even extract it), or reverse engineer them.
Standard-Potential-6@reddit
Yes. FEX uses JIT and runs on ARM64 Linux.
Standard-Potential-6@reddit
Also, the GPUs are generally notorious for poor driver support.
1that__guy1@reddit
You will have a hard time running stuff on an in-order CPU with panfrost GPU drivers
Positive-Answer-99@reddit
Bitcoin farm
woutr1998@reddit
These devices often have active custom firmware communities for repurposing. Check the specific model's support before buying to ensure compatibility with your intended use case.
shuten_mind@reddit
this things with a qwerty keyboard would be epic
jader242@reddit
If you get one of the anbernic XX devices, the stock os is literally just the arm version of Ubuntu 20.04/22.04 (I forget which). It even comes with apt, sudo, and a whole bunch of other stuff out of the box. There’s even an app that someone made that will setup a whole xfce desktop on it, optimized for the device
I don’t recommend that is for playing retro games, but for tinkering on Linux it’s the best option out there due to the availability of packages. Most other CFWs run a very bare bones buildroot image
InSearchOfUpdog@reddit
Fill up all that annoying empty space in your landfill.
Financial_Article_95@reddit
Depends on how much time and money you have lmao. You can do whatever you want
Bonejob@reddit
You could, but why would you when you can buy a Radxa/Pi/Orange for virtually nothing?
gtd_rad@reddit
They run on Linux so they're very versatile devices. A good example would be controlling a robot using the gamepad with video streaming on the display.
ChineseCracker@reddit
don't buy thee off of amazon. you can get these (R36S) on aliexpress for like $15-20
Amazing_Shake_8043@reddit
This is the world or r/SBCGaming
jikt@reddit
Yes, you can connect a teensy 4.1 to a bunch of them and then run headless M8 from dirtywave (a pretty damn good tracker similar to lsdj and little piggy tracker).
gtd_rad@reddit
I broke my friend's cooking temperature probe trying to fix the power button. She has an Anbernic. So I thought of making a thermo probe that connects to the USB port and graphs and displays the temperature and pays some random gifs / sounds when it gets hot or something for her birthday lol
Significant_Pen3315@reddit
did u succeed
gtd_rad@reddit
I didn't get beyond research. But this tutorial is pretty well written and shows you how to create your own apps on the ArkOS
https://github.com/dov/r36s-programming
The r35/36 has a USB host port so you can plug in a USB serial emulator like an Arduino and hook up a sensor and transmit the data through serial
Then use SDL library to read from the /dev/tty USB serial emulator and draw out a graph or do whatever you want.
Acojonancio@reddit
If you want to buy it... Just don't buy it on Amazon, go to Aliexpress and they cost 20$ instead of 60.
Stilgar314@reddit
If you're resolved to buy one of those things look on AliExpress. They're so cheap that the extra risk may be worth it.
ivon852@reddit
Arm-based linux handhelds often lacks drivers for critical hardware. It seems like the manufacturer only care Android market.
1that__guy1@reddit
These devices do not run Android by default
Kleenex_Tissue@reddit
We can wait until someone puts an AMD BC 250 in a handheld. You can get those things for 100 bucks right now.
AppearanceAny8756@reddit
Linux hardware, you mean any computer ? With cpu ram and some storage and input output optional
IDatedSuccubi@reddit
Untill you find out a machine requires proprietary drivers and now half of the hardware doesn't work
GCU_Heresiarch@reddit
I think the only requirement is electrical energy and even then I'm not sure.
lukilukeskywalker@reddit
I mean.... We probably coukd boot into linux in a mechanical computer powered by a few horses and donkeys... But I don't see a easy way on how to store volatile memory in a mechanical treadmill
removedI@reddit
Some considerations:
The real R36 has a community around it and good support. The fakes all have custom solutions and most run some kind of Linux but no documenntation at all
jbar3640@reddit
short answer: yes, of course realistic answer: be prepared to fight with every single driver
Bino5150@reddit
I don’t know about “repurpose”, because my first mind in repurposing gear is turning it into a retro gaming system, which these already appear to be. I’d probably wipe it and start from scratch, and since it’s already its purpose, I would effectively be repurposing it.
5c044@reddit
They don't have BIOS/UEFI so you need a device tree for the kernel and that kernel may not be mainline but some hacked together hybrid Linux/Android kernel but beyond that you can probably load up whatever distro you want.
lendarker@reddit
...but will it run ~~Doom, I mean minecraft, I mean~~ Crysis?
Excellent_Picture378@reddit
Throw LSDj on one and make some jungle or chip tune
gplusplus314@reddit
A bit higher on the budget, but if you look for a low end first gen Valve Steam Deck, that’s pretty much the “ultimate” cheap Linux device. 🙂
Alan_Reddit_M@reddit
You could make a server out of it, maybe even a media-center if it's powerful enough and has appropriate video-out (or you're brave enough to macgyver it yourself)
MoonQube@reddit
Pewdiepie uses his steam deck as a server for selfhostting various things, like a password manager (bitwarden) and more. He made a video about it a few months ago
Malsententia@reddit
That's not what OP is talking about...the deck ain't exactly cheap.
AugustMKraft@reddit
There's actually a fairly large community of people making custom firmware and software for these things. Look up "portmaster" for a starting point (it's a collection of ports of pc software to these devices), they have a list on their website of all the supported devices and the custom firmware for those devices. You could also look at the r/SBCGaming subreddit.