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• Increasing Website Traffic : 11 Tips To Attract Visitors

  25 août 2023, par Erin — Analytics Tips, Marketing

  For your website and business to succeed, you need to focus on building traffic.

  However, you aren’t the only one with that goal in mind.

  There are millions of other websites trying to increase their traffic as well. With that much competition, it’s important to make sure your website stands out. Accomplishing that can require a great deal of strategy.

  We’ve compiled a list of tips to help you develop a solid plan for increasing website traffic, to expand your reach, grow your audience and boost customer engagement levels — creating more opportunities for your business.Using these tips, more visitors will find their way to your website — meaning more customers for your business.

  Why is website traffic important ?

  Website traffic is essentially the number of people visiting your website. When someone lands on your site, they’re considered a visitor and increase your website traffic. 

  When your website traffic is high, you’ll get more clicks, customer interactions and brand engagement. As a result, search engines will have a positive impression of your website and send more people there, meaning even more people will see your content and have the opportunity to buy your product.

  When using a website for your business or any other venture, tracking your website traffic using a web analytics solution like Matomo is critical.

  

  With over 200 million actively maintained and visited websites in 2023, it’s important to make sure yours stands out if you want to increase your website traffic and grow your online presence. 

  11 tips for increasing website traffic

  Here are 11 tips to increase your organic traffic and elevate your business.

  1. Perfect your SEO

  Optimising your website to show up in search engine results shouldn’t be overlooked, as 63% of consumers start researching a product by using a search engine. Search engine optimisation, or SEO, increases the visibility and discoverability of your website on search engine results pages (SERPs). SEO targets organic searches, which means it doesn’t add to social media traffic, direct traffic or referrals, and it isn’t paid traffic.

  SEO is number one on this list for a reason — most of these tips will directly, or indirectly, improve your SEO efforts. 

  Steps to improve your search engine optimisation can include :

  • Using relevant keywords that are incorporated naturally throughout your content
  • Using a web analytics tool like Matomo, with its search keyword feature, to gain insights and identify opportunities for improvement
  • Using descriptive meta titles and meta descriptions
  • Link to your own content internally with descriptive anchor tags, and make sure unused pages are removed 
  • Keeping your target audience in mind and marketing your content toward them
  • Making sure your website’s structure is optimised to be mobile-friendly, fast and responsive — such as with Matomo’s SEO Web Vitals feature, which monitors key metrics like your website’s page speed and loading performance, pivotal for optimising search engine results

  2. Research the competition

  It’s important to remember that while your business might be unique, it’s likely not the only one in its field. Thousands of other websites from other companies are also looking to improve their website traffic and increase sales, and you have to outcompete them.

  Looking at what your competitors are doing is vital from a strategic perspective. You can see what their content looks like, how they’re framing their specific use cases and what target audience they’re marketing toward.

  Knowing what your competitors are doing can help you find ways to improve your content and make it unique. Are your competitors missing a specific use case or neglecting a particular audience ? Fill in their content gaps on your website, and pick up the traffic they’re missing.

  3. Create high-quality, evergreen content

  If your content is high-quality, visitors will read more of it and stay longer on your site. This obviously increases the likelihood they will purchase your product or service, and it tells search engines that your website is a good answer for a search query.

  High-quality content will also be shared more often, leading to even more website traffic. You should aim to develop content that doesn’t lose relevance over time (aka “evergreen content”). If you include time-sensitive data, statistics or content in your website, blog posts or articles, it’ll be relevant only around that time frame. 

  While this month’s viral content is highly popular, it likely won’t be relevant in a few months. Instead, if you ensure your content is evergreen, it will continue to get engagement long after it’s published.

  4. Implement creative visuals

  It’s important to have engaging, fun and interactive media on your website to keep visitors on your site longer. Like good content, interesting visuals (and the resulting longer visits) can translate to more purchases (and favourable assessments by search engines).

  

  Media can take the form of videos, infographics, images or web graphics. 

  With Matomo’s Media Analytics feature, you can automatically gain even deeper insights into how your visitors engage with your media content, enhancing your understanding of their preferences and behaviours.

  If you have interesting, captivating visuals, visitors will be more likely to stay on your website longer and see what you have to offer. Without captivating visuals to break up walls of text, you’ll likely find visitors will tend to leave your site in favour of something more engaging.

  Just make sure you design your visuals with your target audience in mind. Flashy, fun graphics might not be a good fit for a professional audience, but they’re great for younger audiences. If you get your audience correct, they may also share the images with others. Depending on your business, that might be a useful infographic shared across LinkedIn, or a picture of a clever use case shared on Pinterest. 

  As a bonus, if other companies use your graphics on their websites, that earns you some backlinks — more on those in a bit.

  5. Create a comprehensive knowledge base

  Having a knowledge base is critical to making sure your service or product is well understood and well documented, especially in the tech industry. If a visitor or potential customer is interested in your product or service, they need to know exactly what it will do for them and that they have a good foundation of support in case they need help. A knowledge base is also a good place for internal links (more on those in a bit).

  Visitors can also use your knowledge base as a source of information, and if they cite you as a source, that’ll lead right back to more website traffic for you (see our backlinks section for more about this). If your website is a good source of information, visitors will come back to it again and again.

  6. Use social media often and consistently

  Digital marketing nowadays heavily relies on social media platforms. Having an online presence no longer means just having a website — if you’re not using social media sites, you’re missing out on a huge portion of potential visitors and customers.

  A strong social media presence with profiles on platforms like Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), Instagram or LinkedIn can be invaluable for increasing your website traffic. Visitors to your social media profiles will click on regularly shared content, read your blog posts and possibly become customers.

  Participating in relevant communities and networking with other companies in groups in your industry can also be invaluable. If you participate in online communities and forums for your niche, you can offer insight, answer questions and plug your website. All of this will increase your clicks, which will increase your website traffic.

  If you’ve managed to build your own community on social media, make sure to keep them engaged ! Implementing your own forum, hosting live chats and Q&As, offering helpful and engaging content will make sure visitors keep coming back and spreading the word. 

  7. Use email marketing or newsletters

  Having an email list and sending marketing emails or newsletters is a great way to increase website traffic. You can offer exclusive content, and promise discounts or resources to your subscribers for when they return to your website. This will help keep your loyal audience engaged, entice new customers to subscribe to your newsletter, give you a chance to upsell to people who have already expressed an interest in your product and potentially convert curious subscribers into customers.

  8. Make sure your content can earn backlinks

  A backlink is when a website links to a different website — ideally using relevant anchor text — and it’s an effective strategy for increasing referral traffic, that is, visitors who get to your website via a link on another website. The more backlinks you have, the more your referral traffic will increase. Social share buttons make it easy for people to cite you on social platforms, too. 

  We’ve already talked about making expert content that’s link-worthy, but also make sure that you’re creating linkable assets (like those interesting visuals mentioned earlier), building relationships with other sites that will link to you (like by inviting an expert or influencer to write on your page and promote it from their platform, or by writing your own guest content for their sites) and sharing your own content. All of this can help increase your referral traffic, particularly when you’re linked from websites with a higher domain authority than you have.

  You can also make sure your website is listed in online directories. Some sites will do interviews and roundups, as well — these are great opportunities to increase your backlinks.

  9. Optimise your CTR

  Click-through rate, or CTR, is the percentage of users who click on specific links to your website. A high CTR means your visitors are following a link — whether in an advertisement, a search result or a social media post — and a low CTR means they’re passing it by. Optimising your CTR can greatly improve your website traffic.

  To improve CTR, identify successful elements such as copy, imagery, and offers in your ads, enabling you to amplify effective elements and minimise less impactful ones.

  10. Ensure your website is responsive and mobile-friendly

  If a visitor is frustrated by your site being slow, laggy, clunky or not mobile-friendly, they won’t stay long. That doesn’t look good to search engines if that’s how your visitors got there. Your website needs to be clean, responsive, user-friendly and accessible.

  If your website is slow, try increasing your website’s performance by :

  • Optimising images : Reduce the size of images and compress them for faster load times. Opt for JPEG format for photos and PNG format for graphics. 
  • Limit the use of plugins : If you are using a CMS like WordPress, consider removing plugins that are unnecessary or not essential.
  • Embrace lazy loading : To further enhance site speed and reduce initial load times, set up your site to load images and content only as visitors scroll down. Prioritising the content and images at the top of the page makes the site feel faster. Some CMS platforms will offer this option, but others may require a bit of coding to set this up. 

  Many people rely on their phones to research services or products, especially if they’re doing a quick search. Make sure your website is friendly to mobile users. It should scale vertically and scroll smoothly so users aren’t frustrated when using your site. They should be able to find the info they need immediately without any technical issues.

  11. Track your website’s metrics

  As you test out each of these strategies to increase your web traffic, don’t forget to closely analyse the performance of your site. To truly understand the impact of your efforts, you’ll need a reliable web analytics solution. Think of a dependable web analytics solution as your website’s GPS. Without it, you’d be lost, unsure of your direction and missing out on valuable insights to steer your growth.

  Matomo is a powerful web analytics tool that can help you do just that by providing information on your site visitors and campaign performance, complemented by an array of behavioural analytics features that delve into user interactions. Among these, our heatmap feature stands out, enabling greater insights into user interactions and optimisation of your site’s effectiveness.

  

  Google Analytics is another powerful analytics option, though it has challenges with data accuracy ; there are multiple other web analytics solutions as well.

  Regardless of what web analytics solution you choose, the process of analysing your website metrics is incredibly important for identifying areas of improvement to increase website traffic.

  Increasing your web traffic is a process

  Increasing website traffic isn’t something you accomplish overnight. It’s a comprehensive, ongoing endeavour that requires constant analysis and fine-tuning. 

  By applying these tips to create consistent, high-quality content that gets spotlighted on search engines, shared on social media and returned to again and again, you’ll see a steady stream of increased traffic. 

  With Matomo, you can understand your visitor behaviour to see what works and what doesn’t as you work to increase your website traffic. Get your free 21-day trial now. No credit card required.

• Privacy-enhancing technologies : Balancing data utility and security

  18 juillet, par Joe

  In the third quarter of 2024, data breaches exposed 422.61 million records, affecting millions of people around the world. This highlights the need for organisations to prioritise user privacy. 

  Privacy-enhancing technologies can help achieve this by protecting sensitive information and enabling safe data sharing. 

  This post explores privacy-enhancing technologies, including their types, benefits, and how our website analytics platform, Matomo, supports them by providing privacy-focused features.

  What are privacy-enhancing technologies ? 

  Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETs) are tools that protect personal data while allowing organisations to process information responsibly. 

  In industries like healthcare, finance and marketing, businesses often need detailed analytics to improve operations and target audiences effectively. However, collecting and processing personal data can lead to privacy concerns, regulatory challenges, and reputational risks.

  PETs minimise the collection of sensitive information, enhance security and allow users to control how companies use their data. 

  Global privacy laws like the following are making PETs essential for compliance :

  • General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in the European Union
  • California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) in California
  • Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA) in Canada
  • Lei Geral de Proteção de Dados (LGPD) in Brazil

  Non-compliance can lead to severe penalties, including hefty fines and reputational damage. For example, under GDPR, organisations may face fines of up to €20 million or 4% of their global annual revenue for serious violations. 

  Types of PETs 

  What are the different types of technologies available for privacy protection ? Let’s take a look at some of them. 

  Homomorphic encryption

  Homomorphic encryption is a cryptographic technique in which users can perform calculations on cipher text without decrypting it first. When the results are decrypted, they match those of the same calculation on plain text. 

  This technique keeps data safe during processing, and users can analyse data without exposing private or personal data. It is most useful in financial services, where analysts need to protect sensitive customer data and secure transactions. 

  Despite these advantages, homomorphic encryption can be complex to compute and take longer than other traditional methods. 

  Secure Multi-Party Computation (SMPC)

  SMPC enables joint computations on private data without revealing the raw data. 

  In 2021, the European Data Protection Board (EDPB) issued technical guidance supporting SMPC as a technology that protects privacy requirements. This highlights the importance of SMPC in healthcare and cybersecurity, where data sharing is necessary but sensitive information must be kept safe. 

  For example, several hospitals can collaborate on research without sharing patient records. They use SMPC to analyse combined data while keeping individual records confidential. 

  Synthetic data

  Synthetic data is artificially generated to mimic real datasets without revealing actual information. It is useful for training models without compromising privacy. 

  Imagine a hospital wants to train an AI model to predict patient outcomes based on medical records. Sharing real patient data, however, poses privacy challenges, so that can be changed with synthetic data. 

  Synthetic data may fail to capture subtle nuances or anomalies in real-world datasets, leading to inaccuracies in AI model predictions.

  Pseudonymisation

  Pseudonymisation replaces personal details with fake names or codes, making it hard to determine who the information belongs to. This helps keep people’s personal information safe. Even if someone gets hold of the data, it’s not easy to connect it back to real individuals. 

  

  Pseudonymisation works differently from synthetic data, though both help protect individual privacy. 

  When we pseudonymise, we take factual information and replace the bits that could identify someone with made-up labels. Synthetic data takes an entirely different approach. It creates new, artificial information that looks and behaves like real data but doesn’t contain any details about real people.

  Differential privacy

  Differential privacy adds random noise to datasets. This noise helps protect individual entries while still allowing for overall analysis of the data. 

  It’s useful in statistical studies where trends need to be understood without accessing personal details.

  For example, imagine a survey about how many hours people watch TV each week. 

  Differential privacy would add random variation to each person’s answer, so users couldn’t tell exactly how long John or Jane watched TV. 

  However, they could still see the average number of hours everyone in the group watched, which helps researchers understand viewing habits without invading anyone’s privacy.

  Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKP)

  Zero-knowledge proofs help verify the truth without exposing sensitive details. This cryptographic approach lets someone prove they know something or meet certain conditions without revealing the actual information behind that proof.

  Take ZCash as a real-world example. While Bitcoin publicly displays every financial transaction detail, ZCash offers privacy through specialised proofs called Zero-Knowledge Succinct Non-Interactive Arguments of Knowledge (zk-SNARKs). These mathematical proofs confirm that a transaction follows all the rules without broadcasting who sent money, who received it, or how much changed hands.

  The technology comes with trade-offs, though. 

  Creating and checking these proofs demands substantial computing power, which slows down transactions and drives up costs. Implementing these systems requires deep expertise in advanced cryptography, which keeps many organisations from adopting them despite their benefits.

  Trusted Execution Environment (TEE)

  TEEs create special protected zones inside computer processors where sensitive code runs safely. These secure areas process valuable data while keeping it away from anyone who shouldn’t see it.

  TEEs are widely used in high-security applications, such as mobile payments, digital rights management (DRM), and cloud computing.

  Consider how companies use TEEs in the cloud : A business can run encrypted datasets within a protected area on Microsoft Azure or AWS Nitro Enclaves. Due to this setup, even the cloud provider can’t access the private data or see how the business uses it. 

  TEEs do face limitations. Their isolated design makes them struggle with large or spread-out computing tasks, so they don’t work well for complex calculations across multiple systems.

  Different TEE implementations often lack standardisation, so there can be compatibility issues and dependence on specific vendors. If the vendor stops the product or someone discovers a security flaw, switching to a new solution often proves expensive and complicated.

  Obfuscation (Data masking)

  Data masking involves replacing or obscuring sensitive data to prevent unauthorised access. 

  It replaces sensitive data with fictitious but realistic values. For example, a customer’s credit card number might be masked as “1234-XXXX-XXXX-5678.” 

  The original data is permanently altered or hidden, and the masked data can’t be reversed to reveal the original values.

  Federated learning

  Federated learning is a machine learning approach that trains algorithms across multiple devices without centralising the data. This method allows organisations to leverage insights from distributed data sources while maintaining user privacy.

  For example, NVIDIA’s Clara platform uses federated learning to train AI models for medical imaging (e.g., detecting tumours in MRI scans). 

  Hospitals worldwide contribute model updates from their local datasets to build a global model without sharing patient scans. This approach may be used to classify stroke types and improve cancer diagnosis accuracy.

  Now that we have explored the various types of PETs, it’s essential to understand the principles that guide their development and use. 

  Key principles of PET (+ How to enable them with Matomo) 

  PETs are based on several core principles that aim to balance data utility with privacy protection. These principles include :

  Data minimisation

  Data minimisation is a core PET principle focusing on collecting and retaining only essential data.

  Matomo, an open-source web analytics platform, helps organisations to gather insights about their website traffic and user behaviour while prioritising privacy and data protection. 

  Recognising the importance of data minimisation, Matomo offers several features that actively support this principle :

  • Cookieless tracking : Eliminates reliance on cookies, reducing unnecessary data collection.
  • IP anonymisation : Automatically anonymises IP addresses, preventing identification of individual users.

  

  (Image Source)

  • Custom data retention policies : Allows organisations to define how long user data is stored before automatic deletion.

  7Assets, a fintech company, was using Google Analytics and Plausible as their web analytics tools. 

  However, with Google Analytics, they faced a problem of unnecessary data tracking, which created legal work overhead. Plausible didn’t have the features for the kind of analysis they wanted. 

  They switched to Matomo to enjoy the balance of privacy yet detailed analytics. With Matomo, they had full control over their data collection while also aligning with privacy and compliance requirements.

  Transparency and User Control

  Transparency and user control are important for trust and compliance. 

  Matomo enables these principles through :

  • Consent management : Offers integration with Consent Mangers (CMPs), like Cookiebot and Osano, for collecting and managing user consent.
  • Respect for DoNotTrack settings : Honours browser-based privacy preferences by default, empowering users with control over their data.

  

  (Image Source)

  • Opt-out mechanisms : These include iframe features that allow visitors to opt out of tracking. 

  Security and Confidentiality

  Security and confidentiality protect sensitive data against inappropriate access. 

  Matomo achieves this through :

  • On-premise hosting : Gives organisations the ability to host analytics data on-site for complete data control.
  • Data security : Protects stored information through access controls, audit logs, two-factor authentication and SSL encryption.
  • Open source code : Enables community reviews for better security and transparency.

  Purpose Limitation

  Purpose limitation means organisations use data solely for the intended purpose and don’t share or sell it to third parties. 

  Matomo adheres to this principle by using first-party cookies by default, so there’s no third-party involvement. Matomo offers 100% data ownership, meaning all the data organisations get from our web analytics is of the organisation, and we don’t sell it to any external parties. 

  Compliance with Privacy Regulations

  Matomo aligns with global privacy laws such as GDPR, CCPA, HIPAA, LGPD and PECR. Its compliance features include :

  • Configurable data protection : Matomo can be configured to avoid tracking personally identifiable information (PII).
  • Data subject request tools : These provide mechanisms for handling requests like data deletion or access in accordance with legal frameworks.
  • GDPR manager : Matomo provides a GDPR Manager that helps businesses manage compliance by offering features like visitor log deletion and audit trails to support accountability.

  

  (Image Source)

  Mandarine Academy is a French-based e-learning company. It found that complying with GDPR regulations was difficult with Google Analytics and thought GA4 was hard to use. Therefore, it was searching for a web analytics solution that could help it get detailed feedback on its site’s strengths and friction points while respecting privacy and GDPR compliance. With Matomo, it checked all the boxes.

  Data collaboration : A key use case of PETs

  One specific area where PETs are quite useful is data collaboration. Data collaboration is important for organisations for research and innovation. However, data privacy is at stake. 

  This is where tools like data clean rooms and walled gardens play a significant role. These use one or more types of PETs (they aren’t PETs themselves) to allow for secure data analysis. 

  Walled gardens restrict data access but allow analysis within their platforms. Data clean rooms provide a secure space for data analysis without sharing raw data, often using PETs like encryption. 

  Tackling privacy issues with PETs 

  Amidst data breaches and privacy concerns, organisations must find ways to protect sensitive information while still getting useful insights from their data. Using PETs is a key step in solving these problems as they help protect data and build customer trust. 

  Tools like Matomo help organisations comply with privacy laws while keeping data secure. They also allow individuals to have more control over their personal information, which is why 1 million websites use Matomo.

  In addition to all the nice features, switching to Matomo is easy :

  “We just followed the help guides, and the setup was simple,” said Rob Jones. “When we needed help improving our reporting, the support team responded quickly and solved everything in one step.” 

  To experience Matomo, sign up for our 21-day free trial, no credit card details needed. 

• My SBC Collection

  31 décembre 2023, par Multimedia Mike — General

  Like many computer nerds in the last decade, I have accumulated more than a few single-board computers, or “SBCs”, which are small computers based around a system-on-a-chip (SoC) that nearly always features an ARM CPU at its core. Surprisingly few of these units are Raspberry Pi units, though that brand has come to exemplify and dominate the product category.

  Also, as is the case for many computer nerds, most of these SBCs lay fallow for years at a time. Equipped with an inexpensive lightbox that I procured in the last year, I decided I could at least create glamour shots of various units and catalog them in a blog post.

  While Raspberry Pi still enjoys the most mindshare far and away, and while I do have a few Raspberry Pi units in my inventory, I have always been a bigger fan of the ODROID brand, which works with convenient importers around the world (in the USA, I can vouch for Ameridroid, to whom I’ve forked over a fair amount of cash for these computing toys).

  As mentioned, Raspberry Pi undisputedly has the most mindshare of all these SBC brands and I often wonder why… and then I immediately remind myself that it has the biggest ecosystem, and has a variety of turnkey projects and applications (such as Pi-hole and PiVPN) that promise a lower barrier to entry — as well as a slightly lower price point — than some of these other options. ODROID had a decent ecosystem for awhile, especially considering the monthly ODROID Magazine, though that ceased publication in July 2020. The Raspberry Pi and its variants were famously difficult to come by due to the global chip shortage from 2021-2023. Meanwhile, I had no trouble procuring these boards during the same timeframe.

  So let’s delve into the collection…
  

  Cubieboard
  The Raspberry Pi came out in 2012 and by 2013 I was somewhat coveting one to hack on. Finally ! An accessible ARM platform to play with. I had heard of the BeagleBoard for years but never tried to get my hands on one. I was thinking about taking the plunge on a new Raspberry Pi, but a colleague told me I should skip that and go with this new hotness called the Cubieboard, based on an Allwinner SoC. The big value-add that this board had vs. a Raspberry Pi was that it had a SATA adapter. Although now that it has been a decade, it only now occurs to me to quander whether it was true SATA or a USB-to-SATA bridge. Looking it up now, I’m led to believe that the SoC supported the functionality natively.

  Anyway, I did get it up and running but never did much with it, thus setting the tone for future SBC endeavors. No photos because I gave it to another tech enthusiast years ago, whose SBC collection dwarfs my own.

  ODROID-XU4
  I can’t recall exactly when or how I first encountered the ODROID brand. I probably read about it on some enthusiast page or another circa 2014 and decided to try one out. I eventually acquired a total of 3 of these ODROID-XU4 units, each with a different case, 1 with a fan and 2 passively-cooled :

  

  Collection of ODROID-XU4 SBCs

  This is based on the Samsung Exynos 5422 SoC, the same series as was used in their Note 3 phone released in 2013. It has been a fun chip to play with. The XU4 was also my first introduction to the eMMC storage solution that is commonly supported on the ODROID SBCs (alongside micro-SD). eMMC offers many benefits over SD in terms of read/write speed as well as well as longevity/write cycles. That’s getting less relevant these days, however, as more and more SBCs are being released with direct NVMe SSD support.

  I had initially wanted to make a retro-gaming device built on this platform (see the handheld section later for more meditations on that). In support of this common hobbyist goal, there is this nifty case XU4 case which apes the aesthetic of the Nintendo N64 :

  

  ODROID-XU4 N64-style case

  It even has a cool programmable LCD screen. Maybe one day I’ll find a use for it.

  For awhile, one of these XU4 units (likely the noisy, fan-cooled one) was contributing results to the FFmpeg FATE system.

  While it features gigabit ethernet and a USB3 port, I once tried to see if I could get 2 Gbps throughput with the unit using a USB3-gigabit dongle. I had curious results in that the total amount of traffic throughput could never exceed 1 Gbps across both interfaces. I.e., if 1 interface was dealing with 1 Gbps and the other interface tried to run at 1 Gbps, they would both only run at 500 Mbps. That remains a mystery to me since I don’t see that limitation with Intel chips.

  Still, the XU4 has been useful for a variety of projects and prototyping over the years.

  ODROID-HC2 NAS
  I find that a lot of my fellow nerds massively overengineer their homelab NAS setups. I’ll explore this in a future post. For my part, people tend to find my homelab NAS solution slightly underengineered. This is the ODROID-HC2 (the “HC” stands for “Home Cloud”) :

  

  ODROID-HC2 NAS

  It has the same guts as the ODROID-XU4 except no video output and the USB3 function is leveraged for a SATA bridge. This allows you to plug a SATA hard drive directly into the unit :

  

  ODROID-HC2 NAS uncovered

  Believe it or not, this has been my home NAS solution for something like 6 or 7 years now– I don’t clearly remember when I purchased it and put it into service.

  But isn’t this sort of irresponsible ? What about a failure of the main drive ? That’s why I have an external drive connected for backing up the most important data via rsync :

  

  ODROID-HC2 NAS backup enclosure

  The power consumption can’t be beat– Profiling for a few weeks of average usage worked out to 4.5 kWh for the ODROID-HC2… per month.

  ODROID-C2
  I was on a kick of ordering more SBCs at one point. This is the ODROID-C2, equipped with a 64-bit Amlogic SoC :

  

  ODROID-C2

  I had this on the FATE farm for awhile, performing 64-bit ARM builds (vs. the XU4’s 32-bit builds). As memory serves, it was unreliable and would occasionally freeze up.

  Here is a view of the eMMC storage through the bottom of the translucent case :

  

  Bottom of ODROID-C2 with view of eMMC storage

  ODROID-N2+
  Out of all my ODROID SBCs, this is the unit that I long to “get back to” the most– the ODROID-N2+ :

  

  ODROID-N2+

  Very capable unit that makes a great little desktop. I have some projects I want to develop using it so that it will force me to have a focused development environment.

  Raspberry Pi
  Eventually, I did break down and get a Raspberry Pi. I had a specific purpose in mind and, much to my surprise, I have stuck to it :

  

  Original Raspberry Pi

  I was using one of the ODROID-XU4 units as a VPN gateway. Eventually, I wanted to convert the XU4 to something else and I decided to run the VPN gateway as an appliance on the simplest device I could. So I procured this complete hand-me-down unit from eBay and went to work. This was also the first time I discovered the DietPi distribution and this box has been in service running Wireguard via PiVPN for many years.

  I also have a Raspberry Pi 3B+ kicking around somewhere. I used it as a Steam Link device for awhile.

  SOPINE + Baseboard
  Also procured when I was on this “let’s buy random SBCs” kick. The Pine64 SOPINE is actually a compute module that comes in the form factor of a memory module.

  

  Pine64 SOPINE Compute Module

  Back to using Allwinner SoCs. In order to make this thing useful, you need to place it in something. It’s possible to get a mini-ITX form factor board that can accommodate 7 of these modules. Before going to that extreme, there is this much simpler baseboard which can also use eMMC for storage.

  

  Baseboard with SOPINE, eMMC, and heat sinks

  I really need to find an appropriate case for this one as it currently performs its duty while sitting on an anti-static bag.

  NanoPi NEO3
  I enjoy running the DietPi distribution on many of these SBCs (as it’s developed not just for Raspberry Pi). I have also found their website to be a useful resource for discovering new SBCs. That’s how I found the NanoPi series and zeroed in on this NEO3 unit, sporting a Rockchip SoC, and photographed here with some American currency in order to illustrate its relative size :

  

  NanoPi NEO3

  I often forget about this computer because it’s off in another room, just quietly performing its assigned duty.

  MangoPi MQ-Pro
  So far, I’ve heard of these fruits prepending the Greek letter pi for naming small computing products :

  • Raspberry – the O.G.
  • Banana – seems to be popular for hobbyist router/switches
  • Orange
  • Atomic
  • Nano
  • Mango

  Okay, so the AtomicPi and NanoPi names don’t really make sense considering the fruit convention.

  Anyway, the newest entry is the MangoPi. These showed up on Ameridroid a few months ago. There are 2 variants : the MQ-Pro and the MQ-Quad. I picked one and rolled with it.

  

  MangoPi MQ-Pro pieces arrive

  When it arrived, I unpacked it, assembled the pieces, downloaded a distro, tossed that on a micro-SD card, connected a monitor and keyboard to it via its USB-C port, got the distro up and running, configured the wireless networking with a static IP address and installed sshd, and it was ready to go as a headless server for an edge application.

  

  MangoPi MQ-Pro components, ready for assembly

  The unit came with no instructions that I can recall. After I got it set up, I remember thinking, “What is wrong with me ? Why is it that I just know how to do all of this without any documentation ?”

  

  MangoPi MQ-Pro in first test

  Only after I got it up and running and poked around a bit did I realize that this SBC doesn’t have an ARM SoC– it’s a RISC-V SoC. It uses the Allwinner D1, so it looks like I came full circle back to Allwinner.

  

  MangoPi MQ-Pro with more US coinage for scale

  So I now have my first piece of RISC-V hobbyist kit, although I learned recently from Kostya that it’s not that great for multimedia.

  Handheld Gaming Units
  The folks at Hardkernel have also produced a series of handheld retro-gaming devices called ODROID-GO. The first one resembled the original Nintendo Game Boy, came as a kit to be assembled, and emulated 5 classic consoles. It also had some hackability to it. Quite a cool little device, and inexpensive too. I have since passed it along to another gaming enthusiast.

  Later came the ODROID-GO Advance, also a kit, but emulating more devices. I was extremely eager to get my hands on this since it could emulate SNES in addition to NES. It also features a headphone jack, unlike the earlier model. True to form, after I received mine, it took me about 13 months before I got around to assembling it. After that, the biggest challenge I had was trying to find an appropriate case for it.

  

  ODROID-GO Advance with case and headphones

  Even though it may try to copy the general aesthetic and form factor of the Game Boy Advance, cases for the GBA don’t fit this correctly.

  Further, Hardkernel have also released the ODROID-GO Super and Ultra models that do more and more. The Advance, Super, and Ultra models have powerful SoCs and feature much more hackability than the first ODROID-GO model.

  I know that the guts of the Advance have been used in other products as well. The same is likely true for the Super and Ultra.

  Ultimately, the ODROID-GO Advance was just another project I assembled and then set aside since I like the idea of playing old games much more than actually doing it. Plus, the fact has finally crystalized in my mind over the past few years that I have never enjoyed handheld gaming and likely will never enjoy handheld gaming, even after I started wearing glasses. Not that I’m averse to old Game Boy / Color / Advance games, but if I’m going to play them, I’d rather emulate them on a large display.

  The Future
  In some of my weaker moments, I consider ordering up certain Banana Pi products (like the Banana Pi BPI-R2) with a case and doing my own router tricks using some open source router/firewall solution. And then I remind myself that my existing prosumer-type home router is doing just fine. But maybe one day…

  The post My SBC Collection first appeared on Breaking Eggs And Making Omelettes.