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Orange Pi Zero
This diminutive single board computer powered by a quad core H2 processor can be purchased for very little. At the time of writing $6.99 from Alibaba + shipping.
You will need to purchase a Micro SD card separately at least 8Gb preferably Class 10 or faster. I opted for a 16Gb UHS-I SD card from ebay
For serial access I used a FTDI USB board. This can supply 3.3v via a jumper and from what I read the Orange PI Zero does not like 5v.
http://genupicture.com/images/genu/BI/GENU-BI00171.jpg
I tried a couple of operating systems. I found that RaspbianOS made the SoC run really hot circa 70C you can't keep your finger on its surface for too long.
[ 18.170325] CPU Budget: Temperature: 69 Limit state:0 item[1200000,4,-1,0 0] [ 18.670126] CPU Budget: Temperature: 70 Limit state:1 item[1200000,3,-1,0 0]
I switched to https://www.armbian.com/orange-pi-zero/ and now the CPU runs much cooler too 53C
login as: root root@192.168.1.197's password: ___ ____ _ _____ / _ \ _ __ __ _ _ __ __ _ ___ | _ \(_) |__ /___ _ __ ___ | | | | '__/ _` | '_ \ / _` |/ _ \ | |_) | | / // _ \ '__/ _ \ | |_| | | | (_| | | | | (_| | __/ | __/| | / /| __/ | | (_) | \___/|_| \__,_|_| |_|\__, |\___| |_| |_| /____\___|_| \___/ |___/ Welcome to ARMBIAN 5.30 stable Ubuntu 16.04.2 LTS 3.4.113-sun8i System load: 0.08 0.13 0.09 Up time: 6 min Memory usage: 12 % of 241MB IP: 192.168.1.197 CPU temp: 53°C Usage of /: 82% of 1.4G