Igor_K

This will proove I'm older than you .... but I still use my HP48sx from when I was in the University (as a side note I still works perfectly fine after more than 20 years) .....
 
I'll post a photo of my workbench soon

Some feedback from @chwe and some improvements on the protection circuitry:
 

 
And for the record, electrical cleaner can/will dissolve your electrical connectors...   Also, lead-free solder is an angry and terrible thing.  ;-)
 
I'm charging my Pixel off of one of the power ports while I play music over bluetooth on the Tinker...  

First Pine H64/H6 mainline testing images based on @Icenowy patchset https://dl.armbian.com/pineh64/ Boot log: http://ix.io/18DU

It is a media player on OpenELEC so yes it is idle almost all the time.  Some details are below. 
 
It was about 64 °C now it is about 59 °C. 
 

I bought a couple for testing, could be useful 

The node is in sync now so it took 12 days. 

I just released a new library to act as a DNS filter. This differs from pi-hole in that it runs as a user-level program and doesn't depend on dnsmasq. This allows you to run it on a machine without changing your network configuration. It hasn't been rigorously tested, but appears to work properly. It can either proxy the packets to a trusted DNS server or spoof the return address using RAW sockets to route the response back to the requestor. It can fool web pages (like CNN) as it blocks ads and replaces dynamic ad script requests with innocuous javascript responses.

https://github.com/bitbank2/bb-hole

I don't know to be honest.  If so, and ARMv8 is a benefit assuming the bonus cores and higher clock speeds don't offset it.  Remember the a53 is not a particularly powerful core, it's a power-saving core.  I would say, as of today for ARMv8 boards I'm familiar with, that Le Potato is more stable/mature, tradeoffs include no USB3, and no Gigabit Ethernet.
 
At risk of angering the benchmark gods, https://magazine.odroid.com/benchmark-results/
 
This is probably full of various holes, however the difference are large enough to demonstrate my point.  I couldn't give you a good answer for which is more powerful for a given workload given just how different they are.  (The C2 uses a quad-core a53 Amlogic SoC) 
 
 

@Igor_K See the post below for the parts list. The HC1 wasn't available when I bought them. I have a 480G SSD connected to one of the XU4s and use NFS for backups and security camera videos. I need to be able to swap things in and out based on needs, so the rack was a better choice for me. I can have 9 decent sized SBCs in that tower.
 
 

I concur with the others about the XU4. I have 3 of them in my home made SBC server rack which uses active cooling. The nice thing is the XU4 has a built in fan and they are rock solid (been running them over a year 24/7). The price is right too. If you plan on maxing out the CPU you will need more than the built in cooling.
 
The ROCK 64 looks promising price wise and the ability to have up to 4G. This will be my next server.
 

Just connect your 5V to pins 2 and 4 and ground to pin 6 of the GPIO header.
 
This goes straight to the power input of the RK808. It bypasses the input over voltage protection and current limit. Make sure you don't put in more than 5.5V
 
Edit: Further reading of the schematic (providing it's accurate) shows you should be able to power it directly from a single lipo battery. Obviously this won't put 5V out to any USB devices you connect though.

I haven't had any problems with my XU4 (or HC1)
 
Tinkerboard has micro-usb power input, which would give stability issues.  Powering via GPIO headers bypasses its power input protections.

I upgraded to nightly beta.
 
I added to /etc/network/interfaces:
auto eth0
allow-hotplug eth0
iface eth0 inet manual
pre-up /sbin/ifconfig eth0 down
pre-up /sbin/ifconfig eth0 up
pre-up /sbin/ifconfig eth0 down
 
 
With this extra "pre-up" config I get full duplex connection (without only half duplex).
 
A: Macbook, Samsung TV: 100Mb/s full duplex
B: Old laptop Asus F5R, it is equipped with 10/100Lan card, but for some reason it is advertising itself 10Mb/s only (Live Ubuntu + Acronis True Image CD). Doesn't matter.
 
 
I use this little board for wlan0 to eth0 bridging and it's really good.
 

NanoPi Neo have same problem with kernel 4.9+...4.10+. It's problem in sun8i-emac - driver. After ifconfig eth0 down && ifconfig eth0 up autonegatiation work fine. I think, that problem is garbage in PHY-state register after U-boot.

Problem can be resolved with adding:

pre-up /sbin/ifconfig eth0 down
pre-up /sbin/ifconfig eth0 up
pre-up /sbin/ifconfig eth0 down

in section eth0.

Don't worry, mali driver is built as a module, so unless you load it, it won't eat any resources, except a bit of a SD card storage.