I like to build an ARM SBC based server. What are proven boards and which of them have low specified SOC. My intention is to use something like a Pi zero, but is 512 Mb or 1 Gb sufficient? Also, what is a good low recourse Linux build to use? Initially, it will be used with the IC-718.
I have been running wfview on my Inovato Quadra (a $35 SBC). I’ve experimented with both the command-line wfserver version and the GUI wfview that we are all familair with. I’ve also recently tried the IC-7300 as well as my usual IC-718. It works really well. With the 7300 and the spectrum data, CPU usage for the GUI version is about 25% with an active opus client. CPU usage for the command-line wfserver is even lower at about 10-11%.
The Quadra is not a beefy SBC. Performance is similar to the Raspberry Pi 3, I am told. Given the 10-11% CPU usage, I suspect even a Pi 2 would be ok.
With regards to ram, the quadra has 2 GiB ram, but I see that memory usage, with the full xfce GUI desktop running and the command-line server running, is 443 MiB. htop reports that wfserver’s resident memory size is 28KiB and shared memory is 19KiB. Yes, not even a MB.
A pure-server install without a desktop would of course use even less total memory.
Storage space increased by about 100MB when I installed all the required libraries and tools to build wfview. If you’re cross-compiling you would need even less since you wouldn’t need all these developer tools and libraries.
Which Linux distro did you mount on it? The Inovato shows only an Armbian version available. Anything I must respect to get an Linux OS mounted and the XFview software running? Are the guidelines on doing a factory restore on the Inovato forum sufficient?
I haven’t needed to reflash or restore yet — I used the OS outbid the box. You’ll have that challenge with the box you linked to, but I think it will go fine. There is a tutorial on the forum somewhere.