{"id":123,"date":"2018-03-08T12:31:56","date_gmt":"2018-03-08T12:31:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/aforiaaudio.com\/?p=123"},"modified":"2018-03-08T12:31:56","modified_gmt":"2018-03-08T12:31:56","slug":"deciding-on-an-sbc","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rasaaudio.flinkfusion.com\/rasaaudio\/2018\/03\/08\/deciding-on-an-sbc\/","title":{"rendered":"Deciding on a SBC."},"content":{"rendered":"

We at Rasa decided that we will use two Platforms one for Affordable
\nRASA Player<\/strong> and one for High End Reference Player<\/strong>. Our needs were a powerful SBC hardware with good Software stack.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Features we identified for our affordable player included<\/p>\n

1) Powerfull Quad or higher core SBC ( 1.2 gHz or higher ) with atleast 1GB RAM.
\n2) Ethernet port.
\n3) USB port.
\n4) I2S Port.
\n5) Mature OS and Distro.
\n6) Good Software support.<\/p>\n

We Evaluated the following SBCs for the RASA Player.<\/p>\n

Allo Sparky<\/strong>
\nThis had the same form factor as RPI and had good performance.
\nHad I2S and the RAM we required, but we were not comforable with the
\nmaturity of the Software stack.<\/p>\n

Orange PI (PC)<\/strong>
\nGood inexpensive boards but unsatisfactory sofware support<\/p>\n

Banana PI<\/strong>
\nThey are similar to Orange PI and use somewhat similar SOCs
\nfrom Allwinner on the low end ones.<\/p>\n

Raspberry PI 3
\n<\/strong>
\n
\nWe decided to go with this because it was inexpensive with
\nvery good software support and a vibrant community. It had I2S for
\nconnecting to DACs. Companies such as allo have good Reclockers and
\nDACs.
\nFor RASA we will be using the I2S on RPI3 to drive the DAC
\ndirectly. With a custom analog section built using high quaity
\ndiscrete components. We would be using low tolerence thru hole
\ncomponents for all passives. For the DAC we have selected
\nthe PCM 5102a . There is a blog article on how we chose this
\nDAC here.
\n<\/span>
\nWe Evaluated the following SBCs for the Reference Player.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Features we identified for our High End player included<\/p>\n

1) Powerfull Quad or Octa Core SBC ( 1.6 gHz or higher ) with atleast 2GB RAM.
\n2) Ethernet port.
\n3) USB port.
\n4) I2S Port (Optional).
\n5) Mature OS and Distro.
\n6) Good Software support.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

BananaPI M3<\/strong><\/p>\n

We decided to go with this because it had an Octacore chip
\nwith 2GB ram. The cores automatically throttle down when not in use
\nbut do get very hot when you push them. We had to comeup with a good
\nheat sink to allow all the cores of the M3 to run at full speed for
\nlong times. If the heat sink was not adequete, the cores would hit the
\nthermal protection and scaled down their speed (clock frequency).<\/span><\/p>\n

When we used it continually we started noticing issues like boot problems when USB DAC is inserted .<\/p>\n

Getting to compile the kernel was painfull to say the least.
\nThe compiled kernel will not boot , so after contless hours of researching
\nwe found that you have to use an older version of GCC to compile.
\nThe GCC that comes with the SDK wont do.<\/p>\n

RPI3<\/strong>
\nNot enough horsepower to run our Remote Browser Player.<\/p>\n

Intel Atom Motherboards.<\/strong>
\nToo big and too power hungry , would require a ATX SMPS
\nor noisy DC to DC converters.<\/p>\n

Intel NUC Board<\/strong>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

We finally decided to use this since it was compact and easy to power.<\/p>\n

In the player we decided to use the USB to I2S XMOS solution.
\nAs XMOS reclocks the data based on the sample rate (44.1 or 48) we found
\nthis to be a better solution than to use I2S directly from the SBC. We
\nuse high quality clocks on the XMOS board to ensure very low jitter.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We at Rasa decided that we will use two Platforms one for Affordable RASA Player and one for High End Reference Player. Our needs were a powerful SBC hardware with good Software stack. Features we identified for our affordable player included 1) Powerfull Quad or higher core SBC ( 1.2 gHz or higher ) with … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Deciding on a SBC.”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-123","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-rasa-player"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rasaaudio.flinkfusion.com\/rasaaudio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/123","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rasaaudio.flinkfusion.com\/rasaaudio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rasaaudio.flinkfusion.com\/rasaaudio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rasaaudio.flinkfusion.com\/rasaaudio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rasaaudio.flinkfusion.com\/rasaaudio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=123"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rasaaudio.flinkfusion.com\/rasaaudio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/123\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rasaaudio.flinkfusion.com\/rasaaudio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=123"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rasaaudio.flinkfusion.com\/rasaaudio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=123"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rasaaudio.flinkfusion.com\/rasaaudio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=123"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}