Thanks for the reply, I will try to keep my response as brief as possible, unfortunately, I never succeed there but I will try.
I can’t say that I agree with your comparison of RPi being a horse and buggy with unstable USB. RPi suffers from being under powered which caused problems with the USB, and causes it to become jittery and laggy. I fixed this with a 4500mA power supply. Since I added the larger power supply, all those problems have gone away. As for the VIM3, I have your port of Ubuntu 20.04 I believe it is installed on the SD Card which I am using until I find and OS I find stable enough and well enough to run OctoPrint on. This may be why I find the VIM3 very laggy and slow compared to running Raspberian on and SD Card on the RPi. Perhaps if I ran your port on the EMMC or PCIe NVMe SSD the performance would be much more as I was expecting it to be with the faster processor.
So, that was my first question which I never really asked properly. Why would the VIM3 seem to run so much slower then I would have expected. I do realize that running off and SD Card is not ideal, but benchmarking the 2 systems both using an SD Card for the OS, the RPi runs faster. I concede it’s likely the SD Card.
Next question, is your port of Ubuntu stripped down, oor modified in anyway that take functionality away in order for it to work with the VIM3? What was the purpose of porting Ubuntu, and what would happen if one were to install the official release version? Does this have to do with the AI / Neural Network logic in the VIM3? I am just trying to understand not question any motives or say anything bad about your decision to port it.
Please forgive my ignorance here, but again, I am not a developer. I am a Systems Admin and Application and Systems Engineer who does a lot of tinkering and making projects with dev boards. Everything from Application Servers, Web Servers, Portals, Dashboards and Control Centers etc. and I am not sure what you meant when you said that the “Khadas boards have RTC, just order the battery” not caring if I embarrass myself, as admitting your don’t know means your open to learn and I have no clue what RTC is / means, and what a battery has to do with it. Since you mentioned NTP, I am assuming that your trying to tell me that the Khadas boards have an internal clock, but no battery to keep the time, hence (if I recall correctly) there is a battery port on the board and this is prefered over using NTP)? This would not be a problem for what I am working on. You can set an NTP server in Ubuntu, so if I didn’t get a battery, Ubuntu could still track time.
Now, I will explain in as little words as possible what I am trying to do, and why I was asking the questions I was, and I will admit, I don’t have much experience with dev boards. I have only used Raspberry Pi 4 B’s and this is for simple reasons. Cost, ease of use, and endless modules, accessories, addons, and other tech that allows you to take a simple Raspberry Pi and you can’t turn it into just about anything you want. The availability of accessories and technologies on the market that support RPi’s is just huge and allows you to create. If you can conceive it, it’s a high likelihood you can find the parts, documents, and software to build it.
While I have wanted to try other dev boards, I am not a wealthy person, and I can not afford the $100’s even s high as $650 for other dev boards. This means until I found Khadas, the Raspberry was my only option but costs for Raspberries have spiralled out of control, and your VIM boards are very reasonably priced, and on paper, the hardware is better and faster and while I have not seen this increased performance, I don’t doubt it is there and it’s how I am running it.
Because the VIM3 especially is very cost effective I wanted to try it to see if I would be able to do many of the same things on the WIM that I currently do on the RPi, and right now, that is getting OctoPrint to install and run, and use the setup as an alternative for those who can’t afford Raspberries. I have tried to do this but I ran into multiple errors while installing OctoPrint on the Khadas, and my first thought was that it had to do with the Ubuntu Port, While OctoPrint says it "should run on a ny debian based Linux OS. So my first thought was to ask if you guys had any plans to build a straight up Debian Linux port in the hopes that Khadas VIM3 for some reason would allow for a better install of OctoPrint through Debian. I spent all day trying to get OctoPrint to install and run on the VIM3, and sadly I had to give up for now.
I will be trying again, and should it continue to fail then I would have to consider using an unofficial Docker Version of OctoPrint. So that is what I am trying to do. I want a dev board that I would be able to purchase around half the cost of a Raspberry, and create OctoPrint Servers for the 3D Printers in the groups I am a member of. I have become the resident OctoPrint expert in a many of these groups, and since they taught me most of what I know about 3D printing, I would like to give beck to those who gave their knowledge to me by creating an inexpensive OctoPrint server using the VIM hardware as it’s the most cost effective, more powerful tiny PC that would make a great server but for some reason all my attempts have failed, and I am merely trying to learn as much as I can about the design of this board, what your intentions were for this board when you guys designed it. Who was your target customer, or target application, and if there is any plans to port some of the more common Linux OS Flavors, as some may work better then others and allow me to see my project come to fruition.
It’s possible that I am trying to use this board in a way that it was never designed, There is just no way for me to know as again, I am not a developer, I don’t understand how to write a line of code, but that doesn’t mean that if I am given the right hardware and software I would be unable to get things to work as I would like to. It’s an ARM 64 system which means it should work as any other ARM64 PC though not knowing what this was designed for originally, I don’t know if there is any fundamental reasons why I am unable to get OctoPrint to run on the Ubuntu Port, and therefor curious if there is any other ports you do support.
My apologies that wasn’t a few brief words, but I did try my best. The bottom line is I really want this board to be a replacement to my Raspberries, and I was trying to find out if there is a fundamental reason why I am unable to achieve this. (some would say it’s my ignorance, and that may be a fair statement, but it doesn’t mean I should not try… This board could be the next Raspberry (that is not an insult) I mean that purely in terms of cost and the functionality that I believe can be done. Raspberry has held the top spot for years with no challengers because people could afford them, documentation (as you mentioned) is everywhere for everything, and thre is almost nothing you can’t buy to add on to your Pi and expand it’s functionality. No one came out with serious competitor until the Khadas boards.
Now, I would like to be able to use these boards instead of Raspberries, but only if I can get it to work with the different apps and servers that I would normally use the RPi for.
I don’t know if this has cleared anything up, or just made myself sound like an ignorant moron, but that is where I am at. I want to most importantly use your boards to create OctoPrint Servers, and offer them to my clients who want to use OctoPrint, but 1. can’t afford a Raspberry, 2. Don’t have the knowledge or time to build their own OctoPrint server, 3. Use the Khadas for other apps and servers that normally would be done with a Raspberry.
I would like to learn more about the whys for this lines creation, who your target market was, and if I am able to do what I really want as explained above, work with your guys on getting a bunch of boards to build my servers with.
Sorry if I made thing more confusing. I am not good at short posts and explaining myself in few words,
If I have made things worse, don’t worry about it. I will keep trying to get things to work and just keep going through trial and error in hopes I can get it to work, I really want this board to be everything I hope it can be but I don’t want to waste your time either.
Cheers.