Hi, my name is [redacted] and I’m a gadget-holic.

I can’t make it make sense to me. I browsed mini PCs on Amazon for about a minute to find a J3455 8GB / 128GB micro PC for $120 before $30 off coupon. That’s cheaper than just the basic Yellow board and case, which still needs an impossible-to-obtain CM4 module and storage. This one is PoE and sports a $29 NVMe SSD and $80 CM4 w/ 8GB RAM and Wi-Fi, for a grand total of $243 before taxes and shipping. That’s J5005/J5105 money.

But, hey, it does have a Real Time Clock chip w/ a battery. That’s something that nearly all the little ARM SBCs and most of the CM4 carrier boards are lacking, a pain point that nobody notices until they do and then they can’t stop thinking about it.

I bought it ’cause I figure the HA people deserve my money, and I’d rather spend it on a gizmo than their cloud service. I’ll migrate one of my HA instances to it, to give it a proper chance, but I suspect it won’t be long before I want to migrate back to a proper PC that does everything faster and better.