My home automation setup will make use of Arduinos and also embedded Linux devices. I’m currently looking into a few boards to see if any meet my criteria. Previously I looked at the Orange Pi One, now I’m looking at the Raspberry Pi 2 (which is compatible with the 3).
The most important factor for me is that the device must be supported in upstream Linux (preferably stable, but mainline will do) and U-Boot. I do not wish to use any old, crappy, vulnerable vendor trees!
The Raspberry Pi needs little introduction. It’s a small ARM device, created for education, that’s taken the world by storm and is used in lots of projects.
Raspberry Pi 2, powered by USB with 3v UART connected
The Raspberry Pi actually has native support for booting a kernel, you don’t have to use U-Boot. However, one of the neat things about U-Boot is that it can provide netboot capabilities, so that you can boot your device from images across the network (we’re just going to use it to boot a kernel and initramfs, however).
One of the other interesting things about the Raspberry Pi is that there are lots of ways to tweak the device using a config.txt file.
The Raspberry Pi 3 has a 64bit CPU, however it is probably best run in 32bit mode (as a Raspberry Pi 2) as 64bit userland is not particularly advanced in ARM world, yet.
Fedora 25 will finally support Raspberry Pi 2 and 3 (although not all peripherals will be supported right away).