The Raspberry Pi is a computer that fits in the palm of our hand. Since its launch, it has become the choice of many to develop countless projects. It is used as a resource to teach programming, to play retro video games, to domotize our house or to create a weather station. Its uses can be as infinite as our imagination and its popularity is very present in the maker world.
The Raspberry Pi isn’t the only low-priced, tiny computer option. Perhaps it is one of the most famous, but there are very interesting alternatives with cheap prices, some of them very popular, just like the Raspberry Pi.
Options beyond the Raspberry Pi
The Raspberry Pi is suitable for all ages, in fact, one of its first purposes was to use it in the educational sector. There are projects with Raspberry Pi for very interesting children to teach the smallest notions of programming. But it is not the only one and there are alternatives to Raspberry Pi that are also a very good idea if you are looking for a microcomputer. It depends on the projects you want to do, some work even better than the Raspberry Pi.
Rock Pi 4
The size of this board is very similar to that of the Raspberry Pi. It has an HDMI connection and is compatible to run on Android and major versions of Linux. The processor on the Rock Pi 4 board is a 64-bit Hexacore RK3399 with Mali T860MP4 GPU available from 1GB up to 4GB of RAM. This board supports conventional AI stack with GPU acceleration. The dedicated hardware NPU accelerator drives the complex machine learning algorithm by reducing power.
Asus Tinker Board S
This Asus board is one of the most complete on the market. A microcomputer with a fairly powerful processor and a GPU that offers us good performance. The highlight of this board is that it offers us the option of 16 GB of eMMC storage. Its price can be around 140 euros.
Jetson Nano
Good alternative to the Raspberry Pi that can be used for various types of tasks. It has a SODIMM RAM memory module in which we can incorporate expansion points. One of its strengths is the Nvidia Maxwell graphics memory where the graphics section is far superior to that of the Raspberry Pi with which we will enjoy a much higher level of display. As for the processor, it has a 4-core ARM Corte A57 along with a 4 GB DDR4 RAM. Linux is compatible with a series of applications that will help us to function the same as the Raspberry Pi.
Banana Pi M4
The Banana Pi M4 board has a Realtek RTD1395 ARM quad-core processor, Mali 470 MP4 GPU, 1 or 2 GB of RAM and 8 GB of storage. It also has several USB ports, HDMI output, Ethernet connector and USB C port. Also, it has a headphone jack which makes it even more interesting. You can check its technical specifications and see more options from this manufacturer.
Orange Pi Plus 2
It has a 1.6 GHz quad-core Allwinner H3 processor. This board can operate with operating systems such as Android, Ubuntu or Raspbian. Equipped with micro USB, micro SD, SATA, HDMI, CVBS and CSI connections, plus four USB host ports, a Gigabit Ethernet port, and WiFi. Regarding the graphics processing, Mali-400 MP2, 2GB of DDR3 RAM and 8GB of Emmc memory.
