The Beagles at least have mainline kernel support, but things like pine64 and odroid still rely on a lot of patches or binary blobs.
Thanks for pointing out the X-15, though.. I've not looked at Beagles since the Beaglebone Black. It looks like an impressive board with mainline kernel support.
Besides TFA's chip requires desoldering and resoldering an SMT chip from the RPi's tiny and densely populated motherboard, not exactly Soldering 101.
Moreover if you're really just starting with low level programming, want to mess with basic electronics and things like that then don't get into PCIe, actually don't even get into Linux. Just get a cheap-o ARM microcontroller board, a multimeter and a $10 saleae digital analyzer clone from ebay and play with that, you'll learn a lot more that way.
That's why the Raspberry Pi is so popular.
I agree with everything you said about using cheap microcontrollers to experiment with basic electronics projects.
Or if you want to build a cluster, like this guy:
I have an STM32-based controller board next to me (I'm a firmware developer) and I had originally suggested that instead of us spinning up a custom board, we use a BeagleBone or RPi Compute Module and build out the I/O and take advantage of all the OSS out there. I got a lot of pushback that I wasn't willing to fight (I said it a couple years ago with the same results), but if we had gone that route, the entire project would have been done months ago. Same would have been true the first time I brought it up on that other project.
Sure the Pi's are cheap and attractive, but it's the ecosystem that provides the real value. And these days, with software usually being the main cost of the project, you can't beat OSS.
There’s a lot to be said for having a commercial product with multiple revisions to avoid painful guesswork.
Also, the heterogeneous 2xA72+4xA53 CPU setup is ehh.. :/ What's really cool about the RPi4 is that there's four A72 cores. And now 8GB RAM. And https://rpi4-uefi.dev.
Can you elaborate on this? Who is subsidising the Pi, and why?
Edit: Not sure why downvoted. Broadcom very much is able to write off a ton as donations to charity, since the rpi foundation is a British charity. They also get sweet heart deals from the UK based on that. The UK gets the ability to put a passable personal computer on every child's desk, like they've been attempting to do since the BBC micro days.
If I donate $1000 dollars so that I can "write it off," do I come out ahead financially?
Which I'm not counting as a negative. This is successful example of charitable giving where everyone wins.
Just because Kramer didn't know the process behind writing things off, doesn't mean that there isn't a real process and it isn't being used in this case.
This is the whole reason why the rpi foundation is a charity, to allow these financial structures.
I'm not saying it isn't a real process. I'm saying it isn't magic. Reducing your taxable income by $1,000 doesn't mean you save $1,000.
But marking your engineers' spare time as donated since your contract owns everything they produce anyway, and selling chips at cost and marking the profit as a donation when you were probably going to take a loss on them does in fact net you ahead.
The closest I’ve seen to what you describe was a BBC Microbit my son was given as part of holiday club but that was sponsored by Maxell, not the British government, Broadcom, or anyone else.
Also the Microbit was designed by BBC R&D with government grants. Maxell is just the distributor.
The Raspberry Pi isn't a giveaway item and so schools need to make an investment in hardware or obtain sponsorship to kit out their STEM resources with them.
1M BBC micro:bits were distributed free to Yr 7 pupils as part of a project in 2016 - schools had to register/apply at the time, so if your school did not participate their pupils would not have received anything, however, as you have mentioned, other sponsorship also made units available.
Best have a word with your school's STEM/Technology people to see how they are supplementing your children's curriculum with technology resources.
So the answer is "No, there is no alternative in the same price range."
There's no other board in this range because the other chipmakers aren't subsidizing their boards or ecosystems in this fashion. So there's no answer to that.
But I know what my time is worth and I'd rather spend $150-$200 more on a Beagle X-15 or Boundary Nitrogen or Toradex Colibri and get the documentation and schematics and all the source I need to make it do things like eMMC and PCIe. If I spent more than 2-3 hours on hacking chips into the board I've already lost.