Last Updated on January 13, 2024 by pg@petergamma.org
We continue the discussion we started here:
This discussion was a bit philosophical. If the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich is looking for a single board computer for student projects in the first semester
- we suggest for computer scientists and electronics engineers to choose the Orange Pi 5 over the Rasbperry Pi 5, and eventually a Mango Pi instead of a Raspberry Pi zero.
- For physiologists we suggest to buy used Raspberry Pi 4’s on eBay.
The “golden rule” we suggest for physiologists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich in the first semester not to use the latest Rasbperry Pi model but an older one.
If we compare once more the communities of these single board computers, we can see that.
The largest community we know for the the Raspberry is the English Raspberry Pi forum:
https://forums.raspberrypi.com
Which is alive and kicking.
To the largest community for the Orange Pi 5 we know is the armbian community:
https://forum.armbian.com/forum/206-orange-pi-5-5b-5-plus/
Where posts of Peter Gamma have been deteted after he asked for new developments.
The Mango Pi forum:
Is the community which shows some signs of live compared to others where there are less signs of live. This is an alternative to the Raspberry Pi zero platform for us personally.
If we consider the arguments we published on the last pages and consider the advice from spiritual master
Thích Nhất Hạnh «The best way to take care of the future is to take care of the present moment»
and we make our own decision. After all our reviews we did not find a winning single board computer which could convince us completely.
Unfortunately, there is no Swiss quality SBC among those. And if there would be one we suppose that it would be very expensive. Our personal conclusion as Swiss is that it is not worth to invest too much time in the single board computers which are currently on the market and are popular, and also not worth to think to much about their future.
For us personally there are currently many devices on the market which are little developed and many people want to sell those and want to make money out of those but we do not know if this is possible.
And we also conclude if Raspberry Pi Inc. goes bancrupt tomorrow or only sells Raspberry Pi’s for industry there are alternative SBCs on the market which fit our needs.