Luck-Fox Pico Ultra W

The other reviewers were not kidding in how much of a pain it is to work on this device. BUT it does work. I prefer Debian, personally but I'll take Ubuntu. Working with Buildroot has been an interesting experience in frustration and it does work, but it requires a lot more effort to do the same thing you'd do in say, Ubuntu. I'm working on setting this up to be a tiny little NTP server. Not quite fully there yet, but I'll get there!

I wanted a little board for some experiments. This is currently the most powerful Luck-Fox Pico model, as it even includes WiFi. I especially liked that this has two ADC pins on it, which a lot of similar Linux boards do not have. The documentation available online is useful for getting started, and there are forums for getting further help. From what I have seen, Luck-Fox does reply quickly to the forum, so it is a great resource. You might have a little trouble if you blindly follow the documentation, as some assumptions are made, particularly about paths, which are clearly based on their own development machine with username luckfox. If you have some understanding of Linux and programming, it shouldn't be a problem at all. There are two OSs available are Ubuntu and Buildroot. Buildroot has the most support for the low-level functions provided by Rockchip, who makes the processor. Ubuntu seems to provide all the same functionality, just through higher level libraries. For example, you can access audio inputs/outputs more directly with Rockchip, but must use ffmpeg on Ubuntu. It did take me some time to get connected over USB to the board in the first place to flash it. Make sure you have a good USB-C to A cable, and when you connect the board, don't hold the reset button for too long. After flashing, I haven't had problems. It provides power and network over USB, so you can use ssh, samba, etc. to connect, share files, debug, etc. with just the USB if you want.

for about $50 CAD this is a pretty nice micro computer/dev board which is very versatile. overall it works great for many different use cases, i have it currently running as a storage NAS for photos which it does a good job at doing.

This is an excellent dev board for Linux-based applications, thanks to an ARM core, but I've found the initial setup to be a bit harder than necessary under Windows. Unix systems will have an easier time flashing the board to spec. Having wireless capabilties is a massive plus, but I'd have liked to see an SD card reader instead of on-board eMMC for ease of flashing and to potentially be able to swap OS's. The price is nothing to laugh at either, being only a fraction of the price of a Pi (for good reason, a Pi is more much user/beginner friendly. Recommended!