mjsmall

@Jens Bauer, thanks, yes, I had similar thoughts. I'm interested in full power off. Sometimes it is useful compared to a reset, and I can also script the cluster to fully shutdown after a job finishes. If I did have to push the reset button to boot, I could have simulated that with some wiring and a momentary action switch. Not having to do that means less complexity and I don't have to take a soldering iron to my boards. I will probably use something like these for the relays. I can buy them cheaper from China than I could make them myself. Thanks again for the suggestions. They'll be helpful for anyone else looking to do something like this, too.

Thanks everyone. Good to know about the button push. Makes it easy to run the power feed via relay contacts. Network booting could be useful, especially with a cluster. I'm not too concerned about the SD card performance. The eMMC is relatively cheap, and I guess I can save a few dollars on not buying expensive SD cards for this batch. Not quite ready Armbian support is definitely a down side. There seems to be so few affordable (<$100) SBCs with 4GB RAM/USB 3/GbE. The only other that caught my eye is the Firefly/Libre Computing ROC-RK3328-CC, but I gather I'm in the same position. I'd be open to other suggestions, if there are any? In any case, I'll keep an eye on Armbian support. You guys look to have a good community here and I've been a Debian user since the Hamm days. Matt.

Hi everyone. I'm starting a project to learn about Big Data processing. Roughly, I'll be following the example set by Michael at http://diybigdata.net/odroid-xu4-cluster/ . From other posts he has made, some extra RAM could be useful, so I am interested in the 4GB ROCK64. My basic configuration will be ROCK64/64Gb eMMC/Pine USB3-SATA cable/HDD. I'm looking to buy 4 of these to start the project and do my development and testing before adding extra nodes to the cluster. It seems that the Pine USB-SATA cable performs well, but the SD card reader does not. I'd like to configure remote power cycling using GPIO from a monitoring SBC and a relay card, but someone posted on Pine64 forum that the reset button must be pressed to boot the board. Is that so? It's not a show stopper, but I will have to rethink my strategy. In any case, those are the only possible issues I have noticed so far with using this board as a server. Am I missing something important? I'm fairly new to the SBC ecosystem, but not to electronics or Linux. Thanks! Matt.