Due to the limited raspberry pi 4 on the market, can I use banana pi M5 as an alternative to raspberry pi 4 for astroberry? On the Web it is written that Banana pi M5 & M2 Pro can run the raspbian OS. Or does anyone have another alternative?
wiki.banana-pi.org/Banana_Pi_BPI-M5

I assume it will not run out of the box, as Astroberry and Raspian is especially tailored to Raspberry Pis. Banana Pi offers a Raspbian version adapted to their SBCs. Differences will be in the boot process and the Kernels being used. After that the Raspbians for Banana Pi and Raspberry Pi will be the same and can run the same software.

Are there any PC based mini computers or SBCs that can be recommended for running Kstars/EKOS/INDI?

Regards and CS
Guido

You can't use an SD card image meant for a Raspberry Pi on anything other than a Raspberry Pi.

To use another SBC, such as Banana Pi or ODroid, you first install the OS that they provide, then you run Rob Lancaster's AstroPi3 script which will download the source and build it for you on your SBC of choice. Pretty simple really.

Personally I'm running an ODroid N2+, with 4 CPU cores at 2.4 GHz, and 2 more CPU cores at 2 GHz, 4 GB RAM, and it even has a native m.2 SSD connector on it, although I'm using eMMC, which is still much faster than the dog slow SD cards that Raspberry Pis use. And it's cheaper than a Raspberry Pi (even if you could find one).

That m.2 connector sounds very tempting. But I could not find it mentioned in the specs . Is yours some different version?

Ugh, I've been looking at so many different SBCs, and so many different ODroid models, I got them mixed up in my head.

It's the ODroid M1 with an m.2 connector. As a bonus it's available with 8 GB of RAM.

Even if I use this command in the banana pi raspbian terminal it won't work?
wget -O - www.astroberry.io/repo/key | sudo apt-key add -
sudo su -c "echo 'deb www.astroberry.io/repo/ buster main' > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/astroberry.list"
sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade
sudo apt install astroberry-server-full

Yeah that could work

I was wondering how a Beelink Mini PC T4 pro (Apollo Lake N3350, 2 cores) would compare against a Pi 4. According to benchmarks it's a bit faster for single core but slower when all cores are used. Size and power consumption would be comparable. It needs a 12V power supply.

It was not my intention to advertise this particular system. It was just one of the first that showed up in my search. I am happy to hear about further alternatives.

I also saw that there is a NUC11 (Celeron N5105, 4 cores) available now, but it comes with a 19V power supply. The box is also physically larger.

I don't have one, but that Beelink Mini PC T4 pro should work nicely. It has eMMC storage, which is significantly faster than SD cards. Plus, you could dual-boot Windows on it if you wanted to.

Hi at all...is possible to use the OKdo x Radxa ROCK 4 Model C+ 4GB Single Board Computer Rockchip RK3399-T Arm Cortex-A72 with Astroberry?

Thanks

I can only recommend the MeLe Quieter2Q. I guess the 3Q and 3C work also wonderfully.

Not only it is much faster than the RPI, but it is also small (even though a little bigger) and consumes even less power !!! .

Yes and no. I have a Rock Pi 4B, which was an upgrade over a Raspberry Pi 4.

You *cannot* just insert an Astroberry SD card into a Rock Pi and boot it.

Instead, what you do is install a standard OS distribution,either Radxa's version of Debian Bullseye (customized for Rock Pi, downloaded from the Radxa website) or Armbian Bullseye (also available for Rock Pi, which is downloaded from the Armbian website). Both are based on Debian, and will work.

Then you add the Astroberry repository to your APT sources.list, and install the packages. You won't get a full out of the box Astroberry experience, you will need to do some configuring, but it should work.

There are instructions on the Astroberry website. Go to documentation, then to the advanced install section. It says Bullseye isn't supported, but there are Bullseye packages available for Astroberry. I think the documentation is out of date in that regard.

I personally never used Astroberry because I'm a software developer and I just built everything from source code. I don't necessary recommend that approach to non-developers though.

Oh, and if you really want to speed up the Rock Pi, use eMMC and not an SD card. It's much faster!

I hope this helps!
-- Kevin