e64As with other low end ARM hardware the $50 I paid for the Pine64 isn’t enough for a fully working system. You will also need a serial port adapter, I recommend the CP2102 of which you’ll find millions on Amazon for under £10. Also, a micro SD card. And a USB to micro USB cable to power the board.
The total cost of this shouldn’t be more than another $40, taking the total cost of the hardware to about $90.
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I think 90$ is quite generous even with the adaptors. Are you looking at Fedora been headless or with a graphical IDE as per normal ?
I’m trying to document what it would cost someone coming at this for the first time. If you’re used to x86, then you wouldn’t necessarily understand that these systems are shipped incomplete — without any way to power them up or look at their output. And so you would need to spend $90 (in total) on the various bits. Still very cheap, but you need to know in advance what you need.
At the moment I’m just aiming to get Fedora working at all.
Figured as much…At least it’s more in the ball park than say expecting to get a computer to just work for $15-40 with out some further support.
Also the idea of serial debug is still quite alien to those outside embedded environments or just wrinkly enough to remember them as input devices du jour. I’ve had a few pine 64 boards for a while but too busy to have a good play until the end of the month or so ….just in time to try your first attempts maybe 😉
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