Le Potato Single Board Computer: All You Need to Know

I tested Libre Computer’s Le Potato single board computer. Here is all you need to know if you are considering this board as a Raspberry Pi replacement.

Intro

Le Potato is Libre Computer’s marketed replacement for the Raspberry Pi 3B line of single board computers. It is widely available and has some features that are not present on the Raspberry Pi line of computers: IR receiver and eMMC connector.

At the heart of the board, there is an Amlogic S905X System on a Chip (SoC), which is the pairing of a quad-core ARM Cortex-A53 CPU clocked at 1.5GHz and a penta-core ARM Mali-450 GPU clocked at750MHz. This is the same system found in many smart tv boxes, so it makes sense that the Le Potato has an IR receiver. I’ll be testing its media server capabilities in a different post.

This board is available in two different RAM versions. I was sent the 2GB version for review. Currently, only the 2GB version is listed on Amazon (their direct store) but I have seen the 1GB listing pop up here and there also.

The Elephant in the Room

You might be thinking “Ok, this seems like a pretty good board, it is (mostly) available, and it is pretty affordable, why hasn’t it taken off?”. Well my friends, although the 2GB version of the Le Potato costs only $35 (same price as the Raspberry Pi 4B 1GB), it doesn’t include many features that the Raspberry Pi 3/4B has:

• No Display connection (DSI)
• No Camera connection (CSI)
• No USB 3.0 (2.0 only)
• No WiFi
• No Bluetooth
• No “Standard” 40-pin header
• No PoE
• Ethernet Speed (100 Mbps): Same as Pi 3, Slower than Pi 4

So, this is hardly a drop-in replacement for a Raspberry Pi 3/4B computer. But it is not all doom and gloom, as the Le Potato has a spot in the sun (garden?) for certain applications. More on this below.

Use Cases

If you are looking for a lightweight Linux-based server or media center, this might just be the ticket. Keep in mind that it has 100Mbps ethernet, so, not really a speed demon when it comes to data transfer. But it should be able to play video content just fine. No 4K here, though. (it does have 4K)

I found this board to be more useful as a Linux server, especially when running specialized software like Pi-Hole or Node-RED. Both of these packages are supported and run smoothly on this board.

Ease of Use

The hardware is well-built and on par with any other quality electronics you might find out there. It’s kind of hard to have low-quality hardware these days but good to see the Le Potato checking this box. Check!

There are plenty of cases designed specifically for the Le Potato. I downloaded the case pictured below from printables.com and it fits like a glove. Another check!

The OS images provided on their website are current, seem to be updated frequently, and there is a good range of offerings. Media center, gaming, and general computing/server images are available. CHECK!

Mainline support seems good. I plugged an Edimax USB Wi-Fi dongle that I borrowed from my Pi 1B and it was readily recognized by the kernel. Setting up the Wi-Fi connection with raspi-config worked just like on a Pi computer (I was using the Raspbian image). Double Check!

Le Potato also has some neat features that are not found on any Raspberry Pi computers. It has connectors for an eMMC module and an IR receiver. Unfortunately, I could not test it working with an eMMC module as I don’t have one.

But now, the not-so-great stuff.

My biggest criticism isn’t about the board itself, which works as expected. Rather, Le Potato’s (and other Libre Computer boards) almost complete lack of organized documentation is a letdown. The Libre Computer website is ridden with broken links and outdated information. Many replies in the community forum by the site maintainers are short and lack detail.

As an example, Le Potato has an IR receiver that I was hoping to test. I had to reach directly to Libre Computer to ask for more details. They quickly replied to my request (very quickly, to be honest) but they just pointed me to a list of 3rd-party documentation, none of which had basic examples of how to use the IR receiver. Really, this can’t be considered “documentation”.

Le Potato’s main documentation is a forum post with links to other forum posts. So, again, much to be desired on the documentation front. Especially considering that the Le Potato was launched more than 5 years ago.

Documentation and easy-to-follow examples seem to be Achilles’ heal of many SBC companies.

I’ve encountered issues when booting after power was cut off from the board, the bootloader was waiting for a keyboard keypress to continue loading the OS, which is not great when you are running it as a headless server. But this issue was resolved by following the instructions in this article: Deactivate GRUB2 recordfail feature.

A couple of days before writing this article, their website had the wrong picture of one of their boards. This has been corrected but it did not inspire a lot of confidence.

In summary, this is not a board for someone just getting started with SBCs and definitely not a board for someone looking for a turnkey solution.

Meat and Potatoes

Now that we got all of that boring stuff out of the way, let’s start using the board in some real-life projects.

Installing software on the Le Potato is noticeably slower than on a Pi 4, but not any slower than on older Raspberry Pi computers. We move forward…

Power Usage

Power usage is definitely one of the main benefits of this board. Idling, it pulls just a tad over 0.5A and not a whole lot more when under load (0.64A). I took these measurements with a Wi-fi dongle and a keyboard plugged in since most all other SBCs have Wi-fi onboard these days.

For reference, a Pi 4B pulls around 0.9 – 1.0 amps when idle. On the other end of the spectrum there is the Pi Zero 2 W that uses 0.25 amp when idle.

Retro Gaming

If you are looking to get this board to do some retro gaming, keep in mind you will only be able to run lower-end consoles. ETA prime has a great demo of the Le Potato running Lakka, an operational system for retro gaming. With that being said, I tried some Master System games on it (my favorite retro console, for some reason) and the games ran fine.

A little retro gaming on the Le Potato running Lakka. It can emulate low-end consoles like Master System just fine. Alex Kidd is the best!

Using GPIOs

I’m pretty well versed in using GPIO on a Raspberry Pi. The RPi.GPIO library makes it easy to use GPIO bindings in Python and there are tons of examples online on how to use it. Needless to say, I spent a little bit of time learning new tools to get and set GPIOs on the Le Potato. The generic software to interact with GPIO on Linux is called ‘gpiod’

This is not bad, since now I have learned how to work with GPIOs outside of the Raspberry Pi environment, but I wish Libre Computer had more detailed steps on how to get started using their boards as examples.

The gpiod library requires you to specify a chip number (the Le Potato has 2 chips with GPIO) and the pin number. Libre Computer’s wiring tool makes it easy to identify which GPIO is which, so kudos to them for providing this tool.

Potato-Hole (aka Pi-Hole for the Le Potato)

Pi-Hole is a Linux network ad and tracker blocking server. It works by checking each DNS request in your network against a list of “evil” DNS’. If there is a match in Pi-Hole’s list, it blocks the request – as simple as that.

I’m happy to report that Pi-Hole works excellently on the Le Potato. The install script ran without any hiccups, and I had a Potato-Hole running in a matter of minutes. This was already expected since I was installing Pi-Hole on Le Potato’s Raspbian/Debian image, which is the same one used by Raspberry Pi computers.

Node-RED

Just like Pi-Hole, installing Node-RED was a breeze. Node-RED is a low-code event-driven application that makes it easy to set up flows. For example, you can quickly set up a flow to download an RSS feed and send a push notification to your phone.

The only error I encountered was loading the RPi.GPIO module during Node Red’s startup. This makes sense since Le Potato doesn’t have the same pinout as a Raspberry Pi. To address this issue, Libre Computer has a piece of software called “wiring tool” that translates their board’s pin numbers to Raspberry Pi-compatible pins. I haven’t tried tweaking Node-RED to use Le Potato’s GPIO pin numbers.

Conclusion

The Le Potato is not for everyone, but it is a perfectly fine replacement for a Raspberry Pi 3/4B if you plan on using it in a server configuration. Libre Computer offers Raspberry Pi OS and Ubuntu images that are tweaked to work with the Le Potato and their wiring tool is an interesting solution.

I am currently using the Le Potato as a Pi-Hole server and it has been working well. You have to spend a little bit of time tweaking things to make it run smoothly, like changing the recordfail timeout so you don’t have to wait for the bard to reboot after power is cutoff.

Affiliate Links

You can support the site by using one of the affiliate links below. By using the links below, you are helping out the website without any additional cost to you. Every time someone buys an item through these links, the website gets a very small commission. I keep all the ad links at the bottom of the page so they don’t interfere with the article flow.

Libre Computer Le Potato (2GB RAM): https://amzn.to/3tQA3uY
Libre Computer Le Potato (1GB RAM): https://amzn.to/3Oehaci
SanDisk Ultra microSD: https://amzn.to/47ekIlY