Polish Pi

The Raspberry Pi is without a doubt the de facto single-board computer (SBC). However, while the worldwide pandemic began creating shortages on consumer products that seemed to change by the week, the Raspberry Pi became one of those products that unfortunately got caught up in the shortage. Some can still be found online, but at extremely elevated prices through the resellers. As a result, users that do not have any spare boards laying around for projects have turned to alternative options that are still available for purchase. Some of the more well known Raspberry Pi alternatives that exist are the Banana Pi, Libre Computer Board (Le Potato), Rock Pi 4, and Asus Tinkerboard.

An additional alternative users can now consider comes from the Polish company URVE. Like many of the other alternatives it is built to have the same form factor as the Raspberry Pi. This includes placement of connectors, the 40 GPIO pins, and mounting holes. Nonetheless, it does sport some key differences — such as a Rockchip RK3566 quad-core processor, 8GB eMMC flash, M.2 SSD socket, and a real-time clock (RTC) with battery backup. The RK3566 offers some interesting features, namely a neural processing unit (NPU) and a Mali-GPU. Consequently, the SBC can make for an interesting choice for applications requiring execution of machine learning algorithms. The NPU core supports pre-processing merging, channel quantization, lossless compression of neural network parameters, convolution, and deconvolution.

A list of the highlight features can be found below:

• Rockchip RK3566 quad-core Cortex-A55
• 1.8GHz clock speed
• Mali GPU and 0.8 TOPS NPU
• 2GB LPDDR4
• 8GB eMMC
• HDMI 2.0
• 4 line MIPI DSI to 2560x1440A60Hz
• LVDS to 1920x1080@60Hz
• 1Gbit Ethernet
• 2.4G/5G Wi-Fi (802.11 a/b/g/n/ac)
• Two USB 2.0 ports
• One USB 3.0 port
• One USB 2.0 OTG port
• M.2 SSD connection
• microSD connector
• microphone input
• PoE connector

The company provides OS images for the SBC including Android 11 and Debian 11. In addition, URVE also offers a multimedia software for the SBC which has been made with digital signage applications in mind. The URVE board will cost around $90 USD and ships with a u.FL antenna. Although it may be a more expensive alternative to the Raspberry Pi, it offers some unique features that can make it an interesting choice based on the application.