While the big guns like Arduino and Raspberry Pi may steal all the headlines, there are a huge variety of lesser known but equally, and sometimes even more, exciting single-board computers (SBCs) cropping up from all over the world. Boards like the Pi-shaped D-Robotics RDK X5 have caught us off guard with their impressive compute-to-price ratio, not to mention the outrageously cost-effective Luckfox Lyra family of boards with their many form factors (see “No Computer Required“).

While early Arduinos were essentially ATmega8 breakout boards with the minimum viable circuitry to program them, the 64-bit application processors that power today’s SBCs are vastly more complex than those simple 8-bit microcontrollers. And even if creating your own SBC may be a feasible feat, success often requires fostering an ecosystem and community around it, beyond the hardware itself. I’m fascinated by what some surprisingly tiny teams are accomplishing in this space, so I decided to sit down with two particularly poignant examples to better understand where they came from, how they got where they are today, and what the future holds.

PocketBeagle 2

Small team, big goals

I was astonished to learn that the BeagleBoard.org team has just four full-time staffers, during a call with the Michigan-based nonprofit’s president/co-founder/community manager/software cat herder, Jason Kridner. By the time the first Raspberry Pi was released in 2012, multiple generations of BeagleBoards had already found their way into the hands of makers, educators, and professional engineers.

Hatched in 2007 while Kridner and co-founder Gerald Coley were working at Texas Instruments supporting the OMAP family of Arm-based, high-performance application processors, the project began as a way to explore how to engage the community around their latest high-performance OMAP 3 System-on-Chip (SoC). What emerged, and shipped in July 2008, was a low-cost, USB-powered, tiny computer, at a time when such a thing was far more unique than it is today. The original BeagleBoard was succeeded by the more powerful BeagleBoard xM before the stripped-down BeagleBone was released in 2011, with a white PCB and the familiar Altoids-tin shape and “cape” ecosystem, akin to Arduino “shields.” A more powerful BeagleBone Black launched in 2013, in a landscape that now included the original Raspberry Pi.

Kridner described the BeagleBone to me as a part of a “21st-century survival kit” — where once you might have stuffed your Altoids tin with matches, Band-Aids, and water purification tablets, our modern-day existence revolves a lot more around technology, and a minimalist computer might find greater utility in your life.

With an open-source product and no for-profit arm (in contrast to Raspberry Pi), BeagleBoard lets you dive into whatever layer you want to explore, from the Linux kernel to maker projects to hardware design. Their mission is not to create cheap computers, but rather computers that are accessible. And if you prototype a project using the PocketBeagle 2 for example, there is nothing to stop you designing your final board around the same TI AM6254 SoC. BeagleBoard sees nothing from sales of those processors — unlike Raspberry Pi, where the only practical way to get that Broadcom chip is by embedding a compute module like the CM5. While Raspberry Pi may no longer be referred to as “BeagleBoard but cheaper,” Kridner says that the competitor’s popularity is the best thing that happened to their platform, elevating the whole SBC segment.

The PocketBeagle TechLab Cape was designed to help programming novices learn Linux kernel hacking.

Building on a large community of makers, kernel hackers, and professional engineers, BeagleBoard also participates in Google Summer of Code internships, attends Linux Foundation conferences, and has an extremely active web forum, as well as, to Jason’s open-source-loving chagrin, an active Discord server (he still prefers, and monitors, the foundation’s Internet Relay Chat (IRC) channel!). No special strategy was used to stimulate the community; instead, individuals’ own enthusiasm created a self-selected network of passionate contributors. An all-volunteer board helps steer the organization, along with Jason, CEO Christi Long, and two developer/documentation author/do-it-alls Deepak Khatri and Ayush Singh; DigiKey’s Robert Nelson is the “heartbeat” of their community forums.

BeagleBoard’s openness and flexibility have resulted in a number of exciting projects and products being built around the platform. In addition to the Bela high-performance audio systems (“New & Notable,” GB2), projects like Kulp Lights (kulplights.com) have evolved from BeagleBone capes to entire ecosystems unto themselves, in this case providing the foundation for immense LED light shows. BeagleBoard’s own TechLab Cape for the PocketBeagle helps makers and engineers learn file-based embedded Linux, as well as kernel development using training from The Linux Foundation. In addition to countless capes, MikroBUS support enables the use of hundreds of Click boards (well, two at a time!). By providing a minimalist platform based around standard buses and then “getting out of the way,” BeagleBoard have created a supple platform that makers, developers, educators, and professionals can use as a springboard in executing their dreams.

ZimaBoard 2

A cloud server for every home

Another emerging leviathan in the SBC segment is IceWhale, creator of the new ZimaBoard 2.

I had an incredibly inspiring and delightful call with Lauren Pan and his team, who I discovered are also huge fans of Make:! After developing the LattePanda series of x86-based SBCs at DFRobot, Pan left in 2019 to explore new emerging trends. Looking to the homebrew computers of the 70s, then the personal computers of the 80s, Pan mused that perhaps the 2020s could be the era of the personal cloud — taking all your data, media, smart home functionality, and digital life back from giant cloud platforms onto a server that you control.

Thus in 2021, Pan founded IceWhale, the name suggesting purity as well as great size and intelligence, with the goal of creating a community rather than a company — a team that loves to learn, build, and do. Observing that 20% of Raspberry Pis are used for home/media servers, Pan’s first inclination was to build a cheaper NAS — but the product fell flat with friends he shared it with. He started reading thousands of Reddit and other posts, connecting with YouTubers, and building a much deeper understanding of the landscape. Self-hosting was just starting to gain popularity, though homelabs were still uncommon — what if he could build a $100 home server that can function as a media server, storage, Git server, and run scripts that help automate users’ daily lives, with copious external ports and a finished appearance rather than a bare board? That first year, 1,880 backers (Pan recites from memory!) pledged almost 2.5MM HKD ($315,000) to bring the “ZimaBoard Single Board Server for Creators” to life.

Based on Intel Celeron chips, the ZimaBoard was capable of running Windows, but the team chose to build a new OS for their personal cloud from scratch, the Debian-based CasaOS. It was featured on GitHub’s trending repositories list, and now has an incredible 31.9K stars at the time of writing. The one-line install isn’t limited to ZimaBoards, and can run on Intel NUCs, the old computer gathering dust in your closet, and even their direct competitor, Raspberry Pi!

The ZimaBoard 2 packaging makes a clever stand for the device and two SSDs.

Their most recent Kickstarter, centered around the $169 ($199 MSRP) N150-based ZimaBoard 2, was even more successful, with 2,149 backers pledging 5.3MM HKD. The new board is 3x faster, with up to 16GB of DDR5 memory, dual 2.5GbE LAN, SATA and USB 3.1 ports, MiniDisplayport 1.4 for 4K video, and perhaps most excitingly, a PCIe 3.0 interface, allowing “desktop” cards like GPUs to be added to the device. One of my favorite innovations in the advanced preview I received is that the cardboard packaging can be used to hold the board and two 2.5″ SSDs, instead of the usual sprawling mess that most SBCs and their accessories end up creating on our desks.

The ZimaBoard is born of the community. Lauren says that 99% of people might not like your idea, but if you connect with the 1% who do, you can form a passionate base — which he experienced the moment their Discord server reached 10,000 members. He realized then that ZimaBoard exists because of them, for them, and that the community embracing what his team built could help grow that passionate 1% of believers into maybe 10% of the home server community.

In addition to CasaOS, IceWhale has launched a more compact standalone ZimaOS, which also runs on third party hardware, including QNAP and Synology NASs. Their latest hardware and software are fulfilling that dream of a fast local server that makes it easy to deploy whatever you need for your life without reliance on the cloud. Longer term, they hope to democratize computing again, releasing it from the clutches of a handful of giant cloud companies. I asked about the name ZimaBoard, joking about the 90s malt beverage, and Lauren shared a beautiful story of being inspired by an episode of Love, Death & Robots called “Zima Blue,” about a humble pool-cleaning robot that was hacked and improved to eventually become a profound artist and visionary. [Spoiler alert!] In his final performance, he jumps back into the pool, shedding his complex augmentations, and returns to the simple life of pool cleaning.

Today’s enshittified cloud-centric computing experience feels a million miles away from the ethos of the 8-bit BBC I grew up with, created by a handful of passionate nerds in a turkey shed in Cambridge. Hopefully small, passionate teams creating tiny computers like the BeagleBoard and ZimaBoard will help unshackle us from the capitalistic clouds that threaten to consume our digital lives and beyond, and bring us back to that pure computing experience.

This article appeared in Make: Volume 95.

Tagged beagleboard make95 Single Board Computer

By David Groom

David bought his first Arduino in 2007 as part of a Roomba hacking project. Since then, he has been obsessed with writing code that you can touch. David fell in love with the original Pebble smartwatch, and even more so with its successor, which allowed him to combine the beloved wearable with his passion for hardware hacking via its smartstrap functionality. Unable to part with his smartwatch sweetheart, David wrote a love letter to the Pebble community, which blossomed into Rebble, the service that keeps Pebbles ticking today, despite the company’s demise in 2016. When he’s not hacking on wearables, David can probably be found building a companion bot, experimenting with machine learning, growing his ever-increasing collection of dev boards, or hacking on DOS-based palmtops from the 90s.

Find David on Mastodon at @ishotjr@chaos.social or these other places.

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