After looking at several flavors of Pi such as Raspberry, Orange, Banana, Rock and Big Tree, I stumbled on this Avaota A1 which looks significantly more capable than the Zero’s H616 at a reasonable price of $40.
I’m considering trying one with my K1 and like that it has a CAN bus which should work with my Cartographer probe. It’s cheap enough that if it works well I could consider getting more for my other printers. Any reason why this would be a poor choice or why something else would be a better choice?
The whole ARM universe, having to build to a device tree just bugs me. Linux is supposed to be hardware agnostic. The Surface runs plain vanilla Debian x64 with no customization required. You will have to disable secure boot (or insert the Debian key) in the BIOS.
The only downsides for the surface is 1 USB-C port and no ethernet. A $20 dock solves both issues.
I was considering using an old laptop of similar vintage. But it would need more room than your tablet and my space is tight. So a true SBC or maybe a mini pc would be more convenient for me.
I think device trees were done to give embedded systems a faster booting less resource intensive configuration method. I don’t think it is specific to ARM but just that ARM was mostly used for embedded systems and now we have ARM SBCs being used in non-embedded ways but built on SOCs developed for embedded systems.
My excitement has waned over the Avaota A1 possibly being a good klipper host at a good price. Despite being released 2 years ago I can’t find much evidence of a user community, the Avaota OS is still in a pre-release state with no updates in the past year and there is a single community Armbian build using drivers with significant unresolved issues for wifi, ethernet, USB and other core features needed as a klipper host.
Yah… Either a genuine Raspberry Pi or an MiniPC/x86 tablet is the only way with any community support.
Check eBay for Surface Go tablets. Corporations lease them by the thousands (support for Group policy management). They are horrible tablets so the users put them in a drawer and carry their laptop around. 3-4 years later they go back to the lease company and end up on eBay.