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INDI Library v2.0.6 is Released (02 Feb 2024)

Bi-monthly release with minor bug fixes and improvements

Finally found a low cost alternative to Raspberry Pi

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Libre Computer Le Potato is a low cost ($35 on Amazon as of January 2023) Raspberry Pi clone, which is widely available.
It is fully open source and comes with many OS images, including latest Ubuntu LTS 22.04.

It does have some shortcomings comparing to Pi 4:
1. Lower speed, e.g. it takes 30s to plate solve an image vs 22s on RPi4
2. It only has USB2 and no USB3, but performance degradation was not noticeable even for 26MB IMX571 mono chip
3. Network is only 100MB and not 1GB, but performance degradation was not noticeable while using VNC
4. Even though Wifi is missing, it can be added using a USB dongle, which also has an advantage of having an external antenna
5. Missing Bluetooth is not a big loss for this use case
6. Even though this computer comes with only 2GB or RAM, it can still work with 26MB IMX571 mono chip by setting up swap space. No performance degradation was observed due to swapping

I updated my script for installing all astro software to support this board.
Script is available under github.com/avarakin/AstroPiMaker4 and instructions are at the end of the readme file.

Alex
1 year 1 month ago #90035

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Orange Pi 3 LTS is $35 too but USB3 and 1G/s network adapter are on board
1 year 1 month ago #90040

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Have an Orange Pi on order and will will (on my site ) compare its performance against my current RPi 4's that I use with Stellarmate. I realize that this boards 2GB RAM limitation is going to impact the performance against the RPi 4's 4GB and 8GB setups... but it could be an interesting option since it was only about $52 USD with the case compared to the almost $200 for the RPi 4's setups.
Last edit: 1 year 1 month ago by Tracy Perry.
1 year 1 month ago #90041

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I went with Le Potato because it has 4 USB ports as opposed to 3 on Orange Pi.
Orange Pi will probably have similar performance as the Le Potato because they use same A53 cores, although Orange has them clocked faster.
2GB of RAM was not an issue with my IMX571 mono camera once I setup 2GB swap. Without swap it was running out of memory.

I see that Orange Pi has model 5 which is about $85 shipped from Ali and should be very fast and it has 4GB of RAM.
Maybe I will order one to try it out. Only trouble is that it does not have Wifi.
1 year 1 month ago #90058

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CPU of Orange 5 is a beast, per cpubenchmark.net it is comparable to Intel Core i5-8265U @ 1.60GHz.
The only catch is that it has more cores, so for single threaded jobs Intel would be faster.
www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Rockchip+RK3588&id=4906
www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+C...+%40+1.60GHz&id=3323
Last edit: 1 year 1 month ago by Alex Varakin.
1 year 1 month ago #90059

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