But for real openness, nothing beats an older x86 PC.

Rockchip have a reputation of fully working with the open source community, though I can't personally say how well. Most other SoC vendors only do enough to get android going.

However, I was referring to the availability of documentation which for these Chinese SoCs is either officially released or soon leaked.

I'm not taking the "security" bait at all, especially when we're comparing a PC to an even less-explored platform which also requires binary blobs.

(but I'll look into coreboot. I'd get a kick out of trying it.)

I think ESP32 is really the one to beat.

Arduino have been lazily cashing in on their brand name for many years.

I still usually gravitate to the Pi or Arduino, but mostly due to a combination of lack of familiarity with other brands, and being a repeat customer for stuff that just works

Looks like Zephyr has an extremely comprehensive list: https://docs.zephyrproject.org/latest/boards/index.html

Doesn't include prices though, and it's really too comprehensive - it seems to include lots of boards you can't actually buy. So maybe not very useful for finding good boards.

Looking for a successor to the RPi - good documentation, easy to write bare metal for (no SDK), no surprises.

That doesn't make it less true. The GPU/VPU on the OG RPI was always undocumented and closed source that the community had to reverse engineer drivers for. Big L from my side for that.

It's why the OG RPI felt to me like a sneaky way Broadcom could move the stocks of unsold inventory of those set-top-box chips by marketing them as "Linux computers" that pretend to be open source but are actually not. Big brain move on their end to be fair.

So, like pretty much every other consumer level GPU?

A free standard PC, of which a depressingly large number are thrown out every day, easily beats the price and performance of an RPi, in addition to being far more open.

Yes - obviously you can use an old PC for many different PoCs and prototypes. It doesn’t take much imagination to think of those you can’t.

Nearly every "old PC" does offer built-in easily accessible I2C - as "DDC channel" of a monitor plug - VGA, DVI, HDMI, DisplayPort - all have it. Linux exposes those as regular /dev/i2c-*, so any I2C software that works on a RPi or other Linux SBC, will run with those too:

https://web.archive.org/web/20120903090802/http://www.painty...