FriendlyElec / FriendlyArm SBC

1

Hi All,

Recently saw a video from Linus Tech Tips about these open source boards: https://youtu.be/QsM6b5yix0U?si=BIPl-rE9xEVN_Qzr

What I like is Open Source, small form factor, ARM, many options with multiple 2.5 Gbps ports and NVME/SATA storage and more. They seem to lean a lot more in the infrastructure side of things rather than the sensor side, but if you’re doing a lot of data collection and monitoring (Grafana / Influx / MQTT) then they might be an interesting addition (currently I use second hand HPs SFF PCs from eBay, but they’re still very large).

Sure, it’s most likely sponsored, but looking at their website it is certainly an interesting range of products. They don’t have an Australian distributor but can be ordered from their main website.

Has anyone come across these? I will very likely be tinkering with some over upcoming months.

What I don’t like is ripping off RPI naming conventions for clearly very different and not compatible products. But oh well…

2

Hi @Gary126657,

I personally have one running OMV with 8TB of raw capacity. It’s been a very solid system and haven’t run into too many issues with it.

The only weird bug was a software issue where I had 4 drives from a manufacturer that somehow only had 2 unique UIDs between them. The kernel then wouldn’t enable those drives due to it thinking there was just duplicate information.

There was a fix involving adding a quirk to the kernel but I ended up returning two drives and getting 2 from another manufacturer to fix the issue.

2 Likes