Do you folks know if there's any ARM board cheaper than the raspberry pi which can do the (allocating?*) to my miners?
I am happy to make a filesystem, do the cross-compiling and whatever. But 50USD is kinda expensive for a single-board computer which only needs to run a very small footprint program.
*(what's the correct term to use?)
Tp link routers($25usd) can be flashed(dd openWrt) to run cgminer. One of my rigs run on a tp link MR3020 router. But with the pi you can get sd card images from other members/companies with stable firmware.
There is also a version of pi made in China that's $36usd on Amazon. It's the one with the black audio jack.
*The pi use software to configure your miner(chip speeds/voltage commands) along with pool info. This software is usually built on top of a stratum proxy program. So the pi is actually a local proxy server for your miners. It also allows you to monitor what your miners are actually doing since the pools numbers are just good estimates of your hash rate.