News Polish Raspberry Pi Clone Sports M.2 Socket, Real-Time Clock

[Admin]

The Urve Board Pi is the same and shape as a Pi 3B+ but has built-in PoE, M.2 SSD slot and an RTC. It also has a snazzy white PCB.

Polish Raspberry Pi Clone Sports M.2 Socket, Real-Time Clock : Read more

 

[bit_user]

Ugh. Why not at least use Rockchip RK3399? That would deliver 2x A72 + 4x A53.

If I were content with 4x A55, I'd probably go with the ODROID-M1, which uses the RK3568B:

ODROID-M1 with 8GByte RAM – ODROID

www.hardkernel.com

Some benefits being that its M.2 port is PCIe 3.0 x2 instead of 2.0, it has a SATA 3 port and comes with either 4 GB or 8 GB (the Urve board has only 2 GB). Clock speed is also a little better at 2.0 GHz instead of 1.8, but quite a minor discrepancy.

The main selling point I can see for the Urve board is case-compatibility with the Pi 3B.

 

[w_barath]

Whoever created this design wanted the M.2 SSD on top of the board so badly that they ignored the placement of the SOC, which is going to be smack in the middle of the NAND packages, which will kill them. BZZZT.

 

[Findecanor]

Whoever created this design wanted the M.2 SSD on top of the board so badly that they ignored the placement of the SOC, which is going to be smack in the middle of the NAND packages, which will kill them. BZZZT.

I think it might be possible to use a M.2. SSD safely with a M.2 extension cable, but the CPU would probably still need a serious manual underclock because the extension cable would prevent you from putting a heat sink on the SoC.

 

[bit_user]

they ignored the placement of the SOC, which is going to be smack in the middle of the NAND packages, which will kill them.

The SoC might not run very hot. However, I found one board featuring the RK3566 which claims it's 22 nm. If you keep the CPU load generally low, it could be okay. Cooling the backside of the board should help, though probably not many Pi 3B cases are setup for good airflow there.

I tend to agree that it wasn't worth keeping the Pi 3B's form factor, unless they had some really specific reason.

 

[peachpuff]

Why can't all of these raspberry pi clones also clone its price? 🙄

 

[edzieba]

I'm sick of real-time-clocks! Give me a board with an imaginary-time clock so I can perform all my computing orthogonal to the worldline.

 

[bit_user]

I'm sick of real-time-clocks!

I know you're joking, but I can give an example of why the RTC feature is valuable. I once took the SD Card out of my pi, put it in a PC and mounted the filesystem. Then, I put it back in the Pi and then I hit some issue where the Pi wouldn't mount the filesystem because its "last mount time" appeared to be in the future, or something like that. That's because the Pi was always mounting before its clock had been set from NTP, so it was always mounting the filesystem with its clock set deep in the past.

I could have the details wrong. It was a while ago. I had to lookup the error message I got, put the SD Card back in my PC, and then force the "last mount time" attribute back to an old value. Not a big deal for me, but it's just an example of why it's nice to have a battery onboard to keep the time for you. Most PC motherboards have that, as well.

 

[SonoraTechnical]

If this were based on the RPi4B w/ 8GB and had the M2 slot located on the bottom... that would be the bomb!

 

[bit_user]

If this were based on the RPi4B w/ 8GB and had the M2 slot located on the bottom... that would be the bomb!

I don't know how literally you mean "based on", but the Pi 4's SoC doesn't have extra PCIe lanes. It has like one 2.0 lane that's connected to its USB controller, IIRC. So, they will need a new SoC to offer anything like M.2 slots.

Depending on the state of Armbian for this, you might want to consider an Orange Pi 5:

Orange Pi - Orangepi

Sadly, you can't just assume it'll work out of the box. It seems the manufacturer provides little or no support for it, so look carefully before you leap. Here's the distro I'd recommend:

Orange Pi 5

Enable 3D Acceleration: sudo add-apt-repository ppa:liujianfeng1994/panfork-mesa sudo add-apt-repository ppa:liujianfeng1994/rockchip-multimedia sudo apt update sudo apt dist-upgrade sudo apt install mali-g610-firmware rockchip-multimedia-config

www.armbian.com

 

[texadactyl]

https://urveboard.com/pi/spec "aimed at all enthusiasts and creators of independent electronic projects"

They are not calling it a Raspberry Pi clone. So, I can respect their design compromises, in general. The best feature IMO is the PCIE/M.2 SSD. My biggest disappointment with this product: 2 GB RAM. Linux crawls at this capacity. Maybe their market in Europe can justify that decision. I suspect that using the form-factor of the RPi3B is to be able to leverage a large market of enclosures.

 

[bit_user]

My biggest disappointment with this product: 2 GB RAM. Linux crawls at this capacity.

Depends on what you're using it for. If not running a GUI, then 2 GB could be entirely reasonable. Note that the Pi 3 only had 1 GB. It wasn't until the Pi 4, in 2019, that they even reached 2 GB.