Libre Computer Le Potato Mini Single Board Computer with USB WiFi 4 and Heatsink (2GB WiFi 4, Libre Blue)

I feel like this is fulfilling the promise of Raspberry Pi where it fell short. I've been the owner and operator of multiple Pi's since 2011, but their supply chain issues or whatever meant I could not practically continue to use them -- I wasn't going to pay the absurd prices demanded for the few available. I also didn't like the higher power consumption and heat of the latest Pi 4. For my purposes, if I was going to use power and make enough heat to run fans, I could use server hardware retired from the datacenter that would be far more powerful than a Pi 4 and cost me less to purchase. But I wanted the low power and price that these Le Potatoes deliver.I found the images on Libre's website or linked from it were problematic. I tried Raspberry, Debian, Android, Ubuntu, and Armbian. I had a lot of trouble with the first three. I didn't want to build my own, so I tried the second two. The Ubuntu image worked fine, but was a little heavy. I did evaluate these as desktop alternatives -- they struggle against Wirth's Law. As such, they're unsuitable for web browsing or Youtube. They'll do it, but it's just too slow. I am using them in a coding class as educational machines running VS Code and Python. They work great for that.I also use them for mini servers. For these, I'm using an Armbian image that seems to work very well indeed. I've used them for Wordpress, but presently, I've ditched CMS and am doing all static pages. I'm using Apache and it works fine. I'll switch to nginx at some point and then these Potatoes will be brilliant.I also run them for BIND, Postfix, Dovecot, and all the associated things like DKIM, DMARC, SASL, SPF, etc.I wish the eMMC was more practical. I looked into it and it's expensive and it is reported to be difficult by many reviewers. I have various low-capacity SD cards on-hand, but even if I needed to buy them, 32GB are about $6, whereas the eMMC of the same size are presently listed at $20 each.

Works great for the price. 3d printed a case for mine and run Pi Hole on it.

I ordered this to run OctoPrint because Raspberry Pis are stupid expensive right now, if you can find them. The board itself is great, and the inclusion of a heatsink and a USB WiFi adapter make this kit a bargain, but getting OctoPrint up and running was a bit of a hassle. I followed some instructions I found online to install Ubuntu and used paukstelis' Octoprint_Deploy script to make it a bit easier, and once I got everything running, it works just fine. Getting the webcam stream working was the hardest part, but there is plenty of help online. Libre Computer's website has a lot of good information on it, and links to the Linux distributions they recommend, so start there.You may have issues with the USB cable sending power to your printer's display. There are fixes for that - either by putting tape over a couple of pins or by using a USB power blocker. You will also need a good Micro SD card, a good power supply, and some sort of case.Overall, I'm very satisfied and have no problem recommending Le Potato as an excellent substitute for a Raspberry Pi. It is actually what Raspberry Pi used to be - an inexpensive little single board Linux computer. And I doubt that Raspberry Pis will ever sell for $40 again, so expect the Le Potato community to keep growing.

I bought this when the Raspberry Pi was in short supply and prices rocketed. It is a good substitute - I'd definitely buy again.

Super good and cheap alternative for 3d printers or any small application requiring a Raspberry Pi. Everything is directly compatible software wise. Building Klipper is the same as an RPi. I bought the heatsink to go with and it runs cool to the touch, looks very nice. It fit in an existing RPi 3 case I had no problem.

I've wanted to get a RPi for a while now but they've been so insanely expensive and/or hard to get lately. Came across this RPi 3 clone and for $35 for "pro" version after coupon, I couldn't say no. I was expecting to run into issues at every turn with this board, my plan was for it to be an emulator console to play old-school games, but for the price i figured it was worth some headache to get it set up and running.Wow was I wrong... Batocera has an image specifically for the Le Potato. I downloaded that image, wrote it to my microSD with BalenaEtcher, popped it into the Le Potato and everything booted right up. I have an old Steam Controller that I used to test with, plugged it in, everything just worked... Le Potato found the WiFi dongle and I got it connected to my network, SSHed to it and transferred my ROM files to it, and just started playing games. I was amazed that every part of this project worked without any kind of issues or troubleshooting needed start to finish.LibreComputer knocked it out of the park with this thing, I know it's technically "last gen" tech, but at least it is priced right and still runs plenty of stuff. I will be definitely be buying more of these little guys (I have plans for a Kali install and maybe as a replacement board for my 3D Printer). Great job Libre!

I'm using this to replace a pi4 for klipper. You get the OS images from their website, I think I'm using their raspbian/armbian image since the official distros won't work with the le potato (I think). Takes a little more setup than tossing a full klipper image onto a pi, but ultimately works great and is priced fairly. I think the main issue I ran into was getting klipper to recognize the potato as a secondary mcu. If you need wifi capability, you will want to get the bundle with the wifi dongle as it's cheaper than buying them separately. Been up for a few months without issues.

Big annoyance and reason for 4 instead of 5 is that if you have a keyboard plugged in, it takes about 1/2 hour to boot unless you hit a key or two. Very annoying. It took a while searching the blogs to find that. If you unplug keyboard and mouse it boots quicker. Other than that it's a decent low-end rPi clone.