Good Raspberry Pi alternative for streaming

[DC31]

Recently purchased a couple Inovato Quadra single board computers to see what they could do compared to a pi.

Inovato Home

Inovato Quadra: A Mini PC for school, home, hobby

inovato.com

they are reportedly approximately equivalent to a pi3. For the price ($34.95) you get a lot considering they include the case and power supply and that no SD card is needed. Ordered on Saturday and delivered Monday or Tuesday. Pretty good considering the near non-availability of a pi.

My report thus far:

1. Plug in a usb sound card, install and configure darkice, and you can be streaming in short order. Nothing unusual in the setup. It just requires some basic Linux skills and familiarity with the nano text editor to do the configuration.

2. If you are a little more “cutting edge”, plug in an rtl-sdr stick to the usb port. I have installed sdr-trunk and it seems to be stable although CPU and Memory intensive. I installed the More RAM app from Pi-Apps. Disable the waterfall. Stream out through pulseaudio and darkice or use the streaming options built right into sdr-trunk. Both work equally well. The interesting thing to note here is that the A/V jack on the Quadra does not produce audio. If you want a direct audio output from the Quadra, you need to use a usb sound card. Or leave an hdmi monitor plugged in as that is where it sends audio by default.

3. Another post in the SDR forum thread indicates that another user is successfully running Boatbod’s OP25 on his Quadra.

Thread 'Inovato Quadra running OP25'
OP25 - Inovato Quadra running OP25

So, if you are looking for a RPi alternative, it looks like this one holds good promise a low-cost and compact streaming device.

 

[a417]

any possibility of you posting/sharing the lshw output so we can see what's really under the hood? Might help us get audio out of an audio port w/o a USB audio device being needed.

 

[DC31]

Here is the output. Not much help…

 

[DC31]

Deleted

 

[RenoHuskerDu]

Interesting. Braxman had Pi4s for sale $120 but I missed them. I'm working on filling out local Broadcastify feeds. Another guy here is covering a GATRRS tower with a Yagi from afar, but I have good local LOS from my roof. So I'm planning to get into SDR now and provide a feed. I'm catching up on the last 20 years I missed, living in yurrup. So bear with me for a few questions please.

Have you considered running SDR++ on this setup? The scannerschool guy loves it.

Does it come preloaded with Linux?

Have you tried NooElecs on it? Does it have just one USB port?

What's the power draw? I plan to run my scanning device, broadband, router all on the same UPS, so need to size it. We are rural and lose power several times a year. Ice storms break 6kv utility lines out here. I usually wait at least 30 min before firing up a genset.

 

[dave3825]

Does it come preloaded with Linux?

 

[DC31]

Interesting. Braxman had Pi4s for sale $120 but I missed them. I'm working on filling out local Broadcastify feeds. Another guy here is covering a GATRRS tower with a Yagi from afar, but I have good local LOS from my roof. So I'm planning to get into SDR now and provide a feed. I'm catching up on the last 20 years I missed, living in yurrup. So bear with me for a few questions please.

Have you considered running SDR++ on this setup? The scannerschool guy loves it.

no, I have no experience with SDR++

Does it come preloaded with Linux?

Yes.

Have you tried NooElecs on it? Does it have just one USB port?

yes, my nooelecs work just fine on it. It has one USB 3.0 and one USB 2.0 ports. I have not used a usb hub.

What's the power draw? I plan to run my scanning device, broadband, router all on the same UPS, so need to size it. We are rural and lose power several times a year. Ice storms break 6kv utility lines out here. I usually wait at least 30 min before firing up a genset.

I have never measured power draw but i would guess in the 5 watt range, maybe less. These devices use very little power. The power supply it comes with has an output of 2A/5v If that helps. Ice storms in Texas? Try moving to New England!

 

[wgbecks]

I abandoned the Raspberry Pi's starting with the supply issues and price gouging that began at the onset of the COVID outbreak and made
the decision to switch over to using various Small Form Factor (SFF) Pc's that include the Lenovo M93 Tiny's and HP8200’s to name a few.
These PCs are varied plentiful on the surplus market and far more powerful than even a Raspberry Pi-4B.

These SFF PCs are excellent for running Linux repos such as Ubuntu. They have ample computing power, memory, cooling, and usually
have clean well-regulated power supplies that are wrapped nicely into a small footprint. My only regret is that I didn't make the switch
earlier on.

 

[krokus]

... made the decision to switch over to using various Small Form Factor (SFF) Pc's that include the Lenovo M93 Tiny's and HP8200’s to name a few.
These PCs are varied plentiful on the surplus market and far more powerful than even a Raspberry Pi-4B.

I see the HP 8200 has PS/2 ports for keyboard & mouse, does boot up get held up, looking for those devices? (Hopefully that is BIOS manageable.)

 

[wgbecks]

I see the HP 8200 has PS/2 ports for keyboard & mouse, does boot up get held up, looking for those devices? (Hopefully that is BIOS manageable.)

No problems with the HP 8200 but that is an excellent question. Some PC's don't like to run headless while others have BIOS options
to get around this. Another plus BIOS option is to assume last power state such that the PC restarts following a power outage.

 

[maus92]

I abandoned the Raspberry Pi's starting with the supply issues and price gouging that began at the onset of the COVID outbreak and made
the decision to switch over to using various Small Form Factor (SFF) Pc's that include the Lenovo M93 Tiny's and HP8200’s to name a few.
These PCs are varied plentiful on the surplus market and far more powerful than even a Raspberry Pi-4B.

These SFF PCs are excellent for running Linux repos such as Ubuntu. They have ample computing power, memory, cooling, and usually
have clean well-regulated power supplies that are wrapped nicely into a small footprint. My only regret is that I didn't make the switch
earlier on.

I currently use micros from Dell; one was purchased as a refurb; two were purchased new. You can currently find an i5-6600T based refurb machine with 16gb RAM and 512Gb SSD with Windows 10 Pro for ~$150 - a steal as they are actual computers in a commercial quality case the size of a book (remember those?)

 

[polkaroo]

Unless you're running on solar and battery and squeezing every watt out of an SBC*, I fail to find a reasonable case for insisting on RPi or similar SBCs. Even if the board itself is cheaper, you'll still need a microSD card and a very stable high quality 5v power supply. A surplus USFF PC will be at your door with RAM, SSD (and usually Windows 11 Pro OEM license) for less, and you won't have problems finding one!

*Brand new 11/12th gen Intel CPU USFFs idle <10w.