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Raspberry Pi A+-sized $10 La Frite Linux board has better specs at half the price

Libre Computer's $10 La Frite board offers a cheap alternative to the Raspberry Pi A+.
Written by Liam Tung, Contributing Writer

Libre Computer, a maker of Raspberry Pi clones, has launched the La Frite single-board computer, which is available on Kickstarter from $10.

The La Frite board is a follow up to Libre Computing's $25 Le Potato board and is "loosely based" on the design of the Raspberry Pi A+ -- a smaller and cheaper Pi than the $35 Raspberry Pi B+ -- due to the 40-pin GPIO header setup.

It's currently available to backers on the device's Kickstarter page and will be generally available in November.

The cheapest $10 option is a La Frite with 512MB of RAM, while for $15 and up, backers can get a La Frite with 1GB of RAM.

The La Frite is running on an S805X system on a chip that features a quad-core Arm Cortex-A53 at 1.2GHz and Arm Mali-450 GPU Cores, according to Libre Computer's specs sheet.

As noted by ZDNet's sister site TechRepublic, the La Frite can output video to 1,080p displays via HDMI 1.4, making it comparable to the Raspberry Pi 3 B+, while the La Frite offers faster DDR4 memory.

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The computer has two USB 2.0 Type ports, 100Mbps Ethernet, HDMI 2.0, a microUSB power socket, and an eMMC interface.

Key features the Le Frite is missing compared with the Raspberry Pi 3 B+ are Wi-Fi and Bluetooth support. But that could be expected as these were also missing from its predecessor, the $25 Le Potato.

Libre Computer says the board supports Ubuntu, Debian, LibreELEC, Lakka, RetroPie, Android Oreo, and other Linux distributions.

Other boards the Shenzhen-based company has launched include the $35 Renegade, which runs on a Rockchip RK3328 quad-core Cortex A53 processor, and the pricier and more powerful Renegade Elite with a six-core Rockchip RK3399 CPU.

lafrite.jpg

The cheapest La Frite option costs $10 for a board with 512MB of RAM, while for $15 and up, backers can get a La Frite with 1GB of RAM.

Image: Libre Computer

The Le Frite campaign has already raised twice its $10,000 target, which means it will be funded with shipments commencing in November.

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