Arbmian vs. Raspbian

[tyrius02]

Given the general lack of availability of Raspberry Pis I've been trying to specifically re-work the Romi image for use with a Radxa Rock 4C+. The effort has been challenging, to say the least.

My question here is simple: is there any appetite for migrating the current Raspbian configuration to Armbian, which is more generalized and includes support for the Raspberry Pis? I can do the heavy lifting (I've actually already done quite a bit of it). I may need some assistance / guidance in a couple of places though. I've made sufficient changes to build the image (opencv was particularly challenging). Unfortunately I don't have the boot loader set up correctly which results in a useless image (it'll flash to an SD card but the SBC won't actually boot).

[PeterJohnson]

Raspbian is a pretty significant and commonly used ecosystem, so I don't anticipate we would completely switch over. Also, this repo is a fork of the pi-gen repo, so is naturally linked to how Raspbian is built. I would worry a switchover to Armbian would be challenging and short-lived, assuming RPi's fix their availability problem in the next year or so.

Are you aware of the XRP activity (https://www.wpi.edu/c/openstem/xrp)? It's an even lower cost platform than the Romi and the plan is for it to interoperate with WPILib in a similar way. It uses the RP2040 (widely available and low cost) so the main downside is that it's not capable of vision processing.