seeed studio LinkIt Smart 7688

Best choice for someone trying to get a taste of single board computer suited for IOT projects. I have got 10+ single board computers and even more microcontroller platforms. But this strikes a proper balance at 580MHz with a modest ram and very hackable Openwrt distribution. Much cost effective than Onion Omega2 ( which requires non standard, non breadboard compatible header pins converter or the expensive expansion board they sell). You can get much powerful SBCs for almost similar or less cost today. But they are not going to be as supported and power efficient than this one. If you have played with microcontrollers for long and want to slightly step up the game, this is the one you should be looking at.

I bought 2 of these. I Made a mistake with the first one and waited until after I had the internet connection to upgrade the firmware. Big mistake since the webui was no longer available and I could not access it so the first one was bricked. I even tried as usb load of the firmware and bootloader but still could not get acces to the device again.The second one: I tried updating the firmware first. Again, after the firmware update I could not access the device.These both came with 9.3 firmware and I tried to upgrade to version 9.4. My advise is: Do Not update the firmware. You probably will not be able to get access to the device after You do it because it won't connect via wifi after the update.If I decide to buy another one, I will play with it for a while before I make any attempt to update.For now, I am very disappointed.

I knew the value of this device before I bought it. It has multiple network modes, it's excellent for a mesh net. The firmware is a solid tiny Linux (OpenWRT, 10-20MB depending on configuration) with dynamic Python and precompiled C support. No Bluetooth (but I absolutely hate BT / BLE).At the end of the day, at work, we prototyped with this chip and decided to use it (actually, the duo - "Arduino" support was invaluable with serial communication support). This is a really solid chip if my description applies.

The support for this product (from the developers website) is rather lacking and if you are trying to rebuild the fw image (using their own instructions) you can forget about that is it wont work (just check out their forums to see proof of this)

Good and small for IoT project

While it works OK by itself, this board is not reliable with the SD card root overlay.

Excellent product

On paper, the specs are quite impressive. I have an LED control board built around the NodeMCU which I adapted to include support for the Linkit.I bought the linkit for its SD capabilities, I2S, and extra horsepower to run more advanced animations and play ambient sounds.But lord have mercy the moment you try to develop on this thing. Development is absolutely convoluted.- It runs OpenWRT. This means you are stuck trying to get a router OS to act like an IoT device, which it doesn't. Thought you were going to use neopixels? I have trouble getting an LED to blink.- It is simply impossible to develop for this thing using Windows. I mean I guess you could hack and slash your way through. Hope you like writing code entirely via SSH over PuTTY- Even in Linux, the setup process is generally a several-page-long article just to get "hello world" to run. Apparently you can actually program this thing in Eclipse, though. That would be an amazing plus.- It has two USB ports, but none of them actually support USB-UART. If you want to use serial with this, you have to buy a USB-TTL adapter and some jumper wires to hack the thing into talking via serial.- If you have any issues along the way, rest assured that absolutely nobody is there to help. Questions on the forum are generally unanswered.For most applications, I would recommend the Raspberry Pi Zero W by far over this.- It runs Raspbian, which has enormous and active support. Almost any small OS will have better flexibility than OpenWRT- It supports not just a desktop GUI, but I like to use the Cloud9 IDE to develop on it.- It does all this with more RAM, more speed, and for the same price (if you can find the pi board alone, anyway)