PeterJohnson
commented
1 year ago 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.
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).