We are working on our next gen device and looking to upgrade from the RPi 4 we’re currently using.
We are looking for guidance for a more powerful (ie, more CPU performance) solution and wanted to check if you have any recommendation for a currently supported board and/or CPU/SBC.
One of our top candidates is the QCS410 Application Process. I was wondering if it is supported and used by any of your customers.
Finally, what is your recommendation regarding a bring up of a new board with supported or not-yet-supported CPU?
Some of our customers who like a lot more power than a raspberry pi for their edge devices, use one of the Nvidia devices that we support, or an Intel NUC. Have you thought of using them?
We also have a tier in our pricing, where we add support for a board that is not yet supported in our always-growing list of boards. You can check more info about this on our pricing page
For the board that you are evaluating, do you know if there’s a yocto bsp layer that’s already available? Take a look at our docs for adding custom board support ? Are you folks familiar with Yocto?
We have used the nvidia solution in the past but the size/power/cost is not a good fit for our product. Same applies for the Intel NUC. We are looking for a solution that can provide about x2 CPU power at under $80 (preferable closer to $50). QCA, MediaTek and other have some decent solutions that fit our needs but we prefer to continue to use Balena with them - which is why I am reaching out to you.
The boards we are looking into support linux (usually ubuntu/debian or android).
Can you let me know how we can check if yocto bsp layer is supported? is there any place that has a list of supported devices/SBC/processors supported?
It’s great to hear you’re interested in balena supporting your new hardware. We’re in process of making it much easier to support a wider variety of devices, and even allowing hardware manufacturers to easily self-support boards if they’d like, but in the short term you can find our list of supported boards here: Single-board computers - Balena Documentation Maybe one of these options will work for you for now?
If not, none of our currently supported boards have the QCS410 on them, but per my colleague’s response above, you could also create the balenaOS support for it directly if you’re familiar enough with Yocto BSP’s and its boot process, or we could work with you to support it officially as part of a paid support contract. Let us know if you’d like help going down either of those paths!
