Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2017/09/01/good-deal-on-this-arduino-uno.html
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that’s at least a quattro clone if it’s any sort of clone at all!
Would love a $10 Pi clone with separate bus for Ethernet and USB.
That’s not a very competetive price. How about: Arduino UNO at aliexpress. $2.84 with free shipping. It is from the slowest shipping part of China, so you might just want to buy several of them and stock up.
Edited to add: Now, this board does differ from the one in the article in that it doesn’t use a socketed DIP ATMega328P and uses a cheaper USB<>serial converter chip, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone replace the 328 in one of these. And $2.84 is probably less than you’re going to pay for a 328P in small quantities anyway. The USB<>serial adapter may be an issue if you use an OS with broken drivers or you really want a 16U2 on your UNO from some USB device emulation. But, if you’re savvy enough to be doing that kind of deep voodoo, you probably know better sources for boards. 
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You know your Arduinos! I have a couple of the Aliexpress ones and they’re fine. I like the fact they use the more common smaller USB connector rather than the clunky huge one.
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Yes, the micro-USB connector is way nicer than the older full sized ‘A’ connector. Back before someone found a huge use for the 32U4 chips, the Leonardo boards were pretty cheap. They don’t use a USB<>serial adapter as the 32U4 has USB natively. This lets you emulate various USB devices–like mice, keyboards, storage, etc.
There was even a tiny version of it called the “pro micro nano” IIRC. Those were cheap, tiny, and very flexable. To bad the prices for the 32U4 went through the roof a couple of years ago.
Edited to add: If you want cheap boards with more memory (RAM and FLASH), native USB, and that will fit on a breadboard, take a look at the “blue pill” boards. They go for $1.60 or so over at Aliexpress. They do require a higher level of understanding than a simple Arduino, but you can program them with the Arduino UI, so that helps.
How about one of the Orange Pi boards? They come in a variety of sizes. All of them that have ethernet have it natively–no USB<>ethernet bridge–and they have several USB host controllers on them so that in almost all cases, the USB ports are not behind a hub–so no sharing bandwidth there.
Unless you need some very Rpi specific features–like the LCD or camera connectors–the Orange Pi boards work great as an Rpi replacement. Oh, for OS, look into Armbian. They have both Debian and Ubuntu based builds and many of them run mainline kernels.
Edited: grammar
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