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Let's say you've got something that needs to be computerised at a slightly higher level than an Arduino, with the computing part costing less than about $100-150, and ideally less than $50 (think Beaglebone, Odroid, PCEngine, Pi and clones, Pine, etc). It looks like the only choice is between ARM at the low end and x86 at the high end. Everything else has fallen by the wayside: The last MIPS-based product was the Ci20/Ci40 from 2015 and neither the hardware nor software have been updated since, PowerPC is out there but only as high-priced SBCs and good luck finding a distro that supports it, Sparc is left with Fujitsu working on it for mainframes, and RISC-V is still a glint in everyone's eye - the few SBCs based on it cost more than a low-end server, and despite various enthusiastic press releases I can't see any timeline where I can get a $50 RISC-V device that performs the same as a $50 ARM-based one. And then there's the software support, once you leave the x86 world you've got, outside of various specialised RTOSes, Linux. A very few systems have one or two of the BSDs, often in a hit-and-miss manner, but that's it.
Has Linux + ARM/x86 killed everything else?
(Score: 2) by Rich on Friday February 22 2019, @12:15PM
What about MicroPython on the ESP32? Checks all the boxes, not? Oddball CPU and REPL shell over WiFi should be doable (funnily enough, ssh shell seemed to be a challenge for them, but web REPL over https worked, as I read one of the threads). If the language has to be a bit oddball, too, there's LUA RTOS which comes with the dropbear ssh server. Board costs a fiver from China, tenner local. A bit more downscale, it can run the Arduino libs (with OTA access from the IDE), and bit more upscale, if it's got to be really UNIX-like, ESP32 will also run NuttX, but they seem to have an issue with getting wifi firmware they can use.