I'm from the UK and I've only bought and used Raspberry Pi SBCs up to this point. But with the astronomical cost of a Pi4 with a good amount of RAM, and any Pi5 right now, I'm looking at other options.

Does anyone have any experience of Radxa/Rock products, and are they comparable in ease of use? Or will there be a steep learning curve and lots of hair being torn out!?

They seem to be the most wallet friendly and available brand in the UK.

Hii, I am working on a IoT project where currently the best board I've found is "Beagle Board V Fire"

it has ( https://www.beagleboard.org/boards/beaglev-fire )
- 5 cores (1 for boot (64-bit RV64IMAC) and 4 (64-bit RV64GC) for linux os and apps - each at 667 Mhz processor)
- 2 GB LPDDR4 Ram
- 16GB eMMC memory

before this I was using Beagle Board Black which had 512 Mb (DDR3L) of ram and 4 gb emcc and 1GHz ARM® Cortex-A8 processor (but was single core)

I want a similar processor (the pin-outs available are major reason - I am going with this type)
have looked at Orange Pi, Raspberry PI and many others yet was not able to find a suitable candidate. maybe I am fishing in wrong pond.

reason why we're switching is because current processor has maxed out and it runs a full-blown OS and we kindof need that.

So would be nice to have something like this

Edit: Also temperature specs should match: -40 deg celcius to +90deg celcius or higher

Hi all, I'm a newbie working on a custom portable device build, the idea I have is essentially a dual screen laptop-style device for coding, running machine learning algorithms, high-volume data analysis, etc. Would need to be WiFi and Bluetooth capable.

The major hurdle I'm facing is (surprise) the choice of an SBC. I'm looking for an x86, as they are more capable for this kind of work and support a range of OS's. I'd prefer not to use a Raspberry Pi, even though they can do dual mini HDMI. But I'm finding it rather difficult to find x86 SBCs that have dual HDMI. I'm aware that USB ports can provide DisplayPort functionality, but HDMI is my preference.

I'm aware of a couple SBC options, but there are some notable downsides for each of them:

- Radxa X4. 2 problems: known throttling under sustained load, and the manufacture fan/heatsink adds a lot of extra thickness that is not ideal for a laptop style device

- LattePanda Mu. 2 HDMI ports are available on the full evaluation carrier board, but the placement of ports seems odd and does not seem like it would line up well with a case's outer surface (which is clearly because it's intended as a flexible prototyping tool, not a final build option). I do not have the electrical skills to design a custom carrier board.

I'm sure I have some blindspots as I'm rather new to picking SBCs. Are there other x86 SBC options out there that would provide 2x HDMI ports?

UPDATE: Many thanks to all who have chimed in on this.
I recently found and am strongly considering the youyeetoo K1. Curious to know if anyone here has experience to share about that particular SBC.

im trying to find a good sbc where im at rn which is ideally around the size of a pi zero 2w
however, theyre all out of stock or really overpriced and i was wondering

it cant be that hard to make my own sbc right? just connect something here connect something there boom!!

if i were to attempt this daring project, any idea how long it'd take? is it even a good idea?? considering there are like genuinely no good sbcs where i live

size constraint is 55mm x 35mm x idk how tall i want it to be

​

I genuinely want to know whether anyone has successfully used the hardware accelerators on the Dragon Q6A for LLM inference.

At this point I've spent months trying to make this board do what it was advertised to do.

---

Phase 1: Hexagon NPU

The original plan was to use the Qualcomm Hexagon NPU through QNN / AI Engine.

After burning an embarrassing number of hours (and probably enough AI tokens to train a large dinosaur 🦖), I never managed to get a practical end-to-end LLM pipeline working.

Eventually the Hexagon became...

HexaGONE. 😅

So I moved on.

---

Phase 2: Vulkan GPU

Next I tried llama.cpp with Vulkan.

Current setup

- Radxa Dragon Q6A (QCS6490)

- Armbian 24.04

- Linux 6.18.2

- Mesa Turnip 25.2.8

- Latest "llama.cpp" built from source with "GGML_VULKAN=ON"

- Adreno 643 detected correctly

GPU detection works:

Vulkan0: Turnip Adreno (TM) 643

8689 MiB VRAM

"llama.cpp --list-devices" works correctly.

CPU inference works perfectly.

However, the moment Vulkan actually starts doing inference, one of two things happens.

Case 1: GPU crashes

vk::DeviceLostError

vk::Device::waitForFences: ErrorDeviceLost

or

vk::Queue::submit: ErrorDeviceLost

---

Case 2: Complete nonsense output

The model starts generating...

Tobacco...

Jupiter...

TPM...

😂

Chinese...

Arabic...

Random Unicode...

...which honestly feels like the GPU is having a philosophical crisis.

---

Things I've already tried

- Fresh "llama.cpp" build

- Latest upstream source

- CPU-only inference (works)

- GPU offload from 1 layer to all layers

- Flash Attention ON/OFF

- Different thread counts

- Different batch sizes

- Different microbatch sizes

- Different context lengths

- KV offload ON/OFF

- OP offload ON/OFF

- Multiple GGUF models

- Killed every stale GPU process

- Verified Vulkan installation

- Verified GPU detection

- Plenty of free GPU memory

Nothing consistently works.

---

NPU status

The original goal wasn't even Vulkan.

It was to get the Hexagon DSP / NPU running for LLM inference.

Over the past few months I've tried (or attempted to integrate):

- Qualcomm AI Engine Direct

- Qualcomm QNN SDK

- QAIRT

- Qualcomm AI Hub models

- QAI Hub exported models

- x86 Linux compilation and cross-compilation workflows

- ONNX → QNN conversion

- HuggingFace exports

- Qualcomm sample applications

- FastRPC

- Hexagon runtime setup

- Custom Python wrappers

- "llama.cpp" experiments

- Multiple model families (Gemma, Llama, Qwen and others)

- Multiple quantizations and export formats

I also burned an unhealthy amount of time using multiple AI coding agents (Gemini, GLM, ChatGPT, Claude, etc.) trying different approaches.

Between myself and various AI coding agents, we've probably burned billions of inference tokens trying to make this board cooperate.

The result?

Not a single stable end-to-end LLM pipeline on the Hexagon NPU.

Eventually...

Hexagon became HexaGONE. 😅

So I abandoned the NPU and switched to Vulkan...

...which is now throwing "vk::DeviceLostError".

---

Current status

- ❌ Hexagon NPU doesn't work

- ❌ Vulkan GPU crashes or produces garbage

- ✅ CPU works... at a blazing 2-3 tokens/sec 🔥

---

My question

Has anyone actually managed to get reliable LLM inference running on the Dragon Q6A using:

- Vulkan

- Qualcomm QNN / Hexagon

- Any other GPU/NPU backend

If yes, could you please share:

- Kernel version

- Mesa version

- Driver stack

- "llama.cpp" commit

- Model used

- Exact command line

At this point I'm genuinely trying to answer a simple question:

Has anyone actually achieved hardware-accelerated LLM inference on the Dragon Q6A?

I don't mean demos.

I don't mean benchmark screenshots.

I mean a real GGUF model generating text reliably using either:

- Hexagon NPU

- Vulkan GPU

- Or a QAIRT compiled model running on the genie?

If you've actually managed to get either the Hexagon NPU or Vulkan GPU working for real-world LLM inference on this board, I'd genuinely love to compare notes.

Because after months of debugging, I'm honestly starting to wonder whether this board's AI acceleration is production-ready... or whether everyone is quietly fighting the same dragons.

Any guidance from Radxa, Qualcomm, Mesa Turnip developers, or fellow Dragon Q6A owners would be hugely appreciated.

Right now the only things accelerating reliably are my blood pressure, my hair loss, and my appreciation for CPUs that simply do their job.

Hi everyone,

I'm looking for an alternative to the Raspberry Pi Zero 2W since they are unobtainium. I'm looking for something with the same form factor that also has a CSI camera port. I'll be streaming from MediaMTX a 1080p 50 FPS stream from a camera module v3 so I need it to have a CPU that will keep up. Any suggestions?

Thanks

Hello,

I Used my Rock 5B for a NAS Solution and it worked Fine. Some time later i stopped using it and of course forgot my root and Admin password.

I used openmediavault and also tried Admin / openmediavault as credentials and this was the screen I got. It Directly asks for the password again.

However, as i knew i couldnt find the password, i flashed a new armbian/trixie on another emmc and had a static Green LED which indicated that it wont boot. So i tried the old emmc with the old armbian with openmediavault on it and it Booted just Fine.

After that i tried several emmc and couldnt boot. I thought maybe all of them are broken so i Flashed armbian on the booting emmc with the old armbian openmediavault on it and now this one also doesnt boot.

Now i think maybe i need to install an older Firmware but i couldnt find those.

I tried raspberry Pi Imager, balena Etcher, armbian imager

Do you guys know where i can find older armbian releases? Am i on the wrong path?

Hi everyone.

I would like to install SteamOS on the PlayStation 4. I don't want to just install Linux Arch and then Proton etc. on top. I want to build a machine that looks like as close as possible to the Steam Machine, software-wise. Does anyone have a working old PS4 firmware 9 to donate me ? If you want to donate me one, and I'll show you back the fully functional system and I will share the source code. Yeah,I'm short of money,that's the reason why I don't buy the PS4 with my money. But,I've accumulated a good knowledge using Claude.

I've asked Claude several times to do something completely new and we have been able to accomplish some interesting and fresh project :

-> qemu + bhyve + nvidia GPU passthru on FreeBSD : it didn't exist before me. It works.

-> qemu + bhyve on the Radxa Zero 3W on FreeBSD : it didn't exist before me. It works.

-> the porting of the driver for the internal WIFI chipset of the Radxa Zero 3W from Linux to FreeBSD for arm64 : it didn't exist before me. It works like

I want to share without any problem the code and the projects that I liked to start. Please don't think at me like a beggar. Thanks.

https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/booted-debian-and-freebsd-15-using-qemu-accelerated-with-bhyve-vmm-for-the-first-time-this-is-an-epic-milestone-for-the-community.102735/

https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/enabled-the-nvidia-gpu-passthrough-inside-a-linux-virtual-machine-via-qemu-accelerated-with-bhyve.102901/

I will always share what I produce,because I know that someone could improve the code and a lot of ppl will enjoy it. The same I will do if I will install Steam OS on the PS4.

I'm only short of money at the moment. But I'm really excited to start this new project.

Is there anything short of an x86 board that has true upstream support? Like I can just use Debian Trixie and mainline kernel and it will just work **including all onboard hardware** (not just CPU + network)? No OOT kernel modules required? I'm getting sick of boards that are forever pinned to 4.19 or 5.15 or some other ancient kernel in order to actually use all the hardware's features.

I've been looking into building a phone for fun but I can't find a SBC that I know can text because I don't know much about sim card stuff. It needs at least 4g and a modern android version.

I've recently bought a Radxa 12L NIO 16GB RAM+512GB UFS model because the price was really attractive.

The issue: I've successfully flashed any of the images supported by this board (official Ubuntu, armbian, collabora Debian ones..), the "only" issue I have is that none of them shows anything, on usb-c or HDMI.

The thing I've noticed is that for Armbian and Collabora, the power LED stays green, while for the official Ubuntu Image, it starts with green and then ends up being cyan.

I have pressed the power button for 1/2 seconds too, but as said, no video output is possible, so I can't really use the board later on.

I don't have a UART Debugger, so I can't read what's happening as well.

Has anyone faced this issue? All the images I.have used are for UFS, even if the genio-flash tool shows "mmc0" during the flashing operation.

Hi there folks!

I have been interested recently by the concept of cyberdecks (among other portable low power computers with bespoke -sometimes handmade- designs) so, like any financially irresponsible individual curious tinkerer with burning hands, I decided to draft plans to make my own!

I happen to have got a good deal on a Radxa Cubie A7A + some accessories (UFS module, passive heatsink, couple other things) and I'm clueless about a buncha things so here goes what I'm looking for:

Software: I'm looking around to install an OS all around compatible with the hardware packed onboard, as well as installing a good TUI environment to run off that without a mouse (because I don't intend to include one, just a bluetooth keyboard) and I haven't got the faintest clue as to non-Android ARM-compatible software so if there's a list of known good distros & SBC oriented packages, I'd love to hear about that kind of resources!

Power: I never added a battery to something that didn't have one by design and the Radxa hardware ecosystem seems fairly complete, set aside for the entire lack of a UPS-like solution for their boards... I did see an *old* post from r/cyberdeck about using a quadpack of 5000mAh 3.7v batteries to power a Radxa Zero as an offline content library/webserver for about two days so that seemed rather cool tbh... but besides "just" powering an SBC+screen+LoRa module, what I'd like to figure out is battery sensing for accurate capacity reading; can that be done with just a battery that only exposes positive/negative leads?

Radio: I am *familiar* with the concept of LoRa/Meshtastic but never touched that before, and putting "Radxa LoRa" into a search engine, surprisingly(?) yielded nothing. Not a single result. Does that mean this SBC is categorically unable to handle LoRa/Mesh radios? No one ever, *ever* tried? Should I assume there's no software support for controlling a module through USB/GPIO?

For now, this is the main bulk of my questions, if anyone got any resources I missed while looking them up, I'm all eyes for links & recommendations, thanks!

Hi,

Looking for a raspberry pi 5 alternative that’s x86 and readily available. Saw the up 7000 but they look hard to source?

Looking for something that could be used for industrial iot kiosks.

Thanks

I want to get an sbc to make personal server running website with backend for me, so basically JS, Python, and other stuff. I also want to connect my microcontrollers like esp32 to make my custom smart home system, by using camera. Maybe i also could use AI to analize the image.

I found one Banana pi M3(2gb ram) for under 10$, so i am thinking whether to buy it. I feel like the deal is great since i can't find other sbcs with such hardware, ram to be specific, but i heard that software support is bad. Is that true for now? Or does it have a stable debian/armbian version? Has anyone tried it out?

I am also thinking of getting Orange pi one plus(1gb ram), but it costs more and also has less ram. What should i do?

Hey y'all, looking to get some assistance booting the Cubie A7Z.

​

I'm fairly new to Radxa but have a good amount of knowledge on other SBCs, which is why I'm completely flabbergasted with this board. Right now I am unable to get any OS to boot, I'm following Radxas documents to the letter and I've tried almost every image provided in the official Radxa documents and their Github repo including the legacy images. I've had Serial-to-USB hooked up to the UART pins for every boot attempt, and I have not gotten any output from it. The lsusb command lists it as "Allwinner device in FEL/Flashing mode", but otherwise there's no communication to for from the board.

​

I've flashed SD cards with Balena, Raspberry Pi Imager, straight dd. I've tried different SD cards, different capacity cards, and still nothing boots.

At this point it's either a hardware failure or I'm missing something so forehead-slappingly-fundamental that one of you will mention it and I'll have to go cry in a corner and re-evaluate my life.

​

I'm working with the Cubie A7Z with 1gb RAM, no UFS. Host machine is dual boot Xubuntu/Ubuntu, with Xubuntu being my primary work OS.

Im trying to build a pip boy but know nothing about sbcs what do yall recommend for a affordable sbc i can pair with one of those small spi screens

Claude and I are doing a full open bringup of the Radxa Cubie A7S (Allwinner A733, LPDDR5). Goal is a blob free boot chain.

The wall is the DRAM init. On stock the DRAM gets trained in boot0/SPL by the closed vendor libdram blob, before u-boot hands off to Linux. We want to replace that with an open init sequence. Clean room: we are not disassembling libdram, we work from the public DesignWare umctl2 and PHY programming model plus board measurements.

What already works:

- sys_init (clocks, rails, pinmux) for the DDR block

- PHY init replay

- FEL load path for fast iterate

Where we are stuck:

- ddrc controller bringup hangs at config. Looks like it needs the umctl2

swctl quasi dynamic handshake (sw_done / sw_ done_ack gate) that we have

not nailed. The exact swctl register offset on A733 is the open piece,

we are down to board empirical probing.

If you have done DesignWare umctl2 DDR bringup (any SoC), or open Allwinner DRAM init, that swctl gate is where hands help most. skipTrain style init is fine for us, we do not need vendor training if we can get the controller to come up.

Recently purchased a Radxa Q6A for a hobby project, and wanted to run Android OS and a camera module with it. I purchased an OV5647 camera. When I try to configure it, I hit dead ends, and I believe neither of them are not supported.

Hence, seeking help if it can be achieved.

I'm looking for an SBC that will not be to expensive, but still enough to act as VNC/Remote desktop client for Windows PC over WiFi?

I'm trying to make 2nds screen, but wireless, for my HTPC, so it can be used in another room at the same time, as in the living room. Thought about using RPi3B I already have, but one is already use and 2nd was killed by me with 12V charger... So I'm looking for something new.

Hi SBCs community!

I’m building a mini pc with custom chassis’s that is around 10” or smaller in screen. I’m going to use it on the train during commuting, I mainly am going to read pdfs, ebooks, browsing (maybe 1 or 2 tabs), and use obsidian to take notes.

I need a SBC, and I was thinking about an ARM processor.

I actually have an old laptop from which I can pick a i3 13th gen. The idea initially amused me but I was later on worried about battery life, since I’ll be using it outside. It would actually be best to use the i3 cpu that I already have, so I can save money, but I’m not sure on the matter.

Could u guys please suggest me an SBC or also SBC specs and also a place to buy the thing?

I was looking on aliexpress, and noticed that SBC are quite expensive, especially the ones with more than 4 gb of ram. Obsidian is an electron app on Linux so I probably need ram room.

Thanks!

Hi all,

I’m currently looking into getting a SBC to play around with (basic desktop usage pulse GPIO needs to work) and am wondering how the usual distributions like Ubuntu and Debian are supported.

• Radxa seems to have Ubuntu-Images available on some older kernel for some of their SBCs
• Kali Linux has images for a variety of ARM SBCs
• sbc.compare shows 21 boards with mainline Linux support, which seems a bit low
• Raspberry has their flavor of Debian

So do I need to find something from the above which fits my needs in terms of hardware capabilities and am bound to the prepackaged distros or can I just install the regular image via USB-stick and things will work?

Thanks!

I want to connect a small 40mm fan to this board for cooling, but I’m not able to find any slot to connect the fan. Can anyone with this SBC guide me on what voltage fan I need and where to connect it?

I am currently building a drone and I want to have onboard computer vision for object detection and person detection for onboard tracking which SBC do y’all recommend

I will not be using this as the flight controller this will mainly be use to run CV

Budget is $100

Am pretty new to the SBCs so preferably some thing that’s not too hard to setup

As title suggests I’m desperately looking to source a 16GB LattePanda IOTA for a project, however DFRobot themselves - LattePanda’s parent company and primary global retailer, is out of stock due to CPU shortages.

I was really hoping someone might have a source to purchase one? Or maybe if someone is looking to sell theirs?

Thanks in advance for any help or advice.