Like most people, I entered COVID as a normal hobby geek with a Linux server I played around with and a healthy hardware habit with a side of home automation and DD-WRT. I emerged from COVID enrolled in college, now with two servers (one new build, one rebuilt from my first one), two Pi, multiple instances of Home Assistant (one dedicated) and putting sensors on everything a sensor could go on and rewiring switches for wifi control of overhead fans, flashing every compatible router I could find on Amazon Warehouse with DDWRT in my home for an ad hoc mesh network (no, it didn't work, but I didn't care) while cabling everything to switches and creating a really hilarious network deathtrap tripping hazard, a massive media library (discovered Handbrake and making multiple resolutions) and a Sonos home theatre system. And yes, played an unhealthy amount of Animal Crossing and got an NVIDIA Shield Pro for streaming and Plex, as you do. I'm sure everyone can relate.
SBC's were the natural escalation; I had credit card bills to pay off and that's going to take a while.
I gatewayed with Pi like ten years ago but it took off during Later COVID when I noticed my credit score and started testing it as a NAS, Media Server (later: Cassiope Media Server, my second end to end Linux build), then got into learning about the kernel itself. I already had an Odroid (Home Assistant Blue) so why not go on, so project-based SBCs seemed healthy; I had a reason for buying one. This led to more Pi's--as I couldn't use Kernel Pi (Eurydice) for it and Andromeda Pi was masking my personal network, then I needed one for a Pihole (Iphigenia, Hecuba), which is how I ended up with a BeagleBone Black (Medusa) for an Open Thread Border Router. Still pretending I wasn't just collecting them like cats, I networked them together and just enjoyed looking at them and making them matching banners with figlet with the excuse I was learning how to do network-wide deployments over SSH (true) and learn Debian OS (technically, I am doing that) and started PoEing things (my credit card bills may not be getting lower, no).
The count stands at a total of 9: one (1) Pi Zero W, one (1) Pi Zero 2 W, one (1) Raspberry Pi 4B 4G, two (2) Raspberry PI 4B 8G, one (1) Odroid N2+, one (1) Beaglebone Black, one (1) PocketBeagle, and one (1) BeaglePlay. (Other: two Linux machines, Watson and Cassiope). Yes, they all have names and technically, each is associated with a project. The BeaglePlay's (Circe) associated project is 'create my own documentation on what it does because Beagles don't document'.
So which ones do you use, why, origin story, feelings: go.
(I'm moving in a week and half my hardware is being packed. I'm about to have to take down my network and Home Assistant and may be freaking out. I'm not sure I know where any light switches are here, either.)
Thanks! I was looking at the Pi Zero due to general familiarity with the Pi ecosystem, but BeaglePlay sounds interesting. I will definitely investigate.
One other thing I'm wondering about is what sort of linux distro would be best? It should boot fast and be robust in terms of not easily getting corrupted if it gets powered off without a proper shutdown. I have intentionally made the C++ software not manage any files locally for this reason, so it would only be the OS that could potentially bork itself.
Raspberry Pi OS is solid; that's the first kernel I reconfigured and recompiled myself and the first OS I felt comfortable making more major changes and at this point, it's basically fully designed for the abilities and limitations of a Pi. But there are many distros you can check that have made an effort to work specifically with the Pi. I concentrate now on with the Zeros and Beagles with low eMMC is getting a very solid and fast sd card to run off off and keep a clean copy.
Weirdly, I've really gotten into sdcards as drive; I finish my configuration and get it how I want, then make an image and either back it up or put it on a backup card; no downtime I mess anything up or need to reinstall, just switch cards (or move the card from one Pi to the other). I was thinking that might be convenient for you too; once you get a solid configuration done and your programs loaded and ready to run, you copy it and keep some backups on extra cards. Like yes, nvme and ssd and usb and eMMC are much faster but they are not convenient when it's Thing That Has This Very Specific Job where all I have to do is whip out my backup card, switch it out, and keep going.
I am so weirdly curious about what you decide to go with and why. This is one of the uses of SBCs I always thought was the most obvious: field work, especially if it's impractical to go over network or testing/data checks are intensive and need direct contact.