There are several interesting alternatives to the original Raspberry Pi 3, namely the 3 variants (all with different SoCs) announced by the Libre Computer Project:
They all have been designed as a drop-in replacement for the RPi 3.
Will these (theoretically/practically) be supported for being used with the AutoPi?
It seems that the Allwinner SoC variant (all-h3-cc) is mainly designed for being used with Android 7, so that one’s probably not a good candidate, but the 2 other ones are supposed to have full Linux support.
We have been talking about what other alternatives there are to the supported RPI boards, but we haven’t had the time to investigate it any further.
Basically there are two things that are important regarding compatibility.
The pin layout should be exactly the same (at least for the pins that our board interfaces with, more info about that soon)
The power usage should match, or be as close to RPI3 as possible.
And of course, the autopi core image is based on raspbian, but it is not a custom image, so if you can get the components and packages to run on another distro, that should work just fine.
I’am considering trying out with an ASUS Tinker Board, can you elaborate a bit upon which pins are used for which purpose ?
Also i would love som hint’s on how to install autopi-core and required packages on a bare Debian.
We unfortunately don’t have any guides on installing it on a a clean debian distribution at this point in time. And i don’t really have any real documentation to give you
But we don’t have that many dependencies, and we will probably look into using different RPI compatible linux distros to achieve faster boot times at some point.
And at the same time we can document the install process.
If you do look into this yourself, we’d love to hear about your findings, issues, suggestions etc.
