I just ordered a Rock Pi X - 4GB / 128GB along with a number of accessories.
I ordered from Allnet China:
 https://shop.allnetchina.cn/

An important note: If you get one of these boards you need to get the heatsink that is made for it also. Either that or the aluminum case that has the heatsink built into it. 

I choose the Economy Express for shipping- Per their shipping information -

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this option is working better because it passes domestic postal services and ships via air cargo into the destination country. There the parcels are handed over to the destination postal services for delivery to the buyer. There are of course also delays but limited

This shipping method was only $5 USD higher for me and  will be here weeks sooner. Check out the "INTERNATIONAL SHIPMENT DELAYS FOR ALL SHIPMENT OPTIONS" link on the top of their website for more details. 

Here's what I ordered and the prices in US dollars:

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#Rock Pi X - 4GB / 128GB: 1 @ $99.00
#2.4GHz /5.8 GHz Antenna + Pigtail bundle: 1 @ $3.99
#USB 3.1 USB-C to USB-C male cable 1m white: 1 @ $3.99
#PD 45W power supply with USB-C connector (US style): 1 @ $7.99
#ecoPI PRO X LP Aluminum housing for ROCK PI X, Black, ROCK PI X INTRODUCTION PROMO (-$5.98 on sale): 1 @ $29.90 ($23.92 sale price)

Cost summary:
Subtotal $138.89
Shipping $25.16
Total USD $164.05

I am really happy with ordering from Allnet and feel secure that my order will be shipped quickly and be safely delivered to be as fast as possible. They seemed very professional and have a great website. I'm not endorsing, just stating my observations and feeling.

Seeed had only one size ROCK PI X available that I could find and no accessories. Not even the recommended heatsink was in stock (a must have!).

I'm really looking forward to getting this. Thanks @DJ for showing us this. I've been waiting for something exactly like this to place an onboard computer on my B9 Robot.

This looks pretty cool but what is use case for this. If I still need a EZB to interface with it for servos and sensors isn't it just a smaller weaker computer than my laptop that I use now? I could see if you have some far off robot operating autonomously but I have never used my robots more than 10 feet away from my laptop or without a network anyway. Will it run face recognition much faster than my powerful laptop? Looks like 4G of RAM vs. the 64G I have now.
What is it that this will bring to a robot? It seems a funny question to ask because of course a robot needs a computer just wondering if this is a big upgrade for us or if it is an acceptable downgrade for people without a network that just want an on board computer.

@Perry_S, It's small and can be mounted directly on or inside a robot. You can rig it to power on and boot up windows when you power on the robot. ARC can then auto start and it's INT script can set up your robot to run.  After that you can use your mobile app to operate the robot or do whatever your imagination or needs show you.

Can you picture powering up your robot, everything setting up automatically. Then when his face rec sees you he says "HI Perry"!

Hey Perry,

From initial impressions, the Rock Pi X doesn't look like much. For me, personally, it's very exciting because it gives us an x86 computer with a small enough form factor and affordable price that I can stick them inside a robot permanently. Running ARC onboard a robot seems extremely powerful.

It's true that we could do this in the past, but not at this price and availability. It's just within reach now. The Atomic Pi was going to be THE solution for me until I found that it was just a surplus board that would run out of stock eventually. It also was on the low end of requirements with only 2GB RAM and 16GB of eMMC.

The Rock Pi X series with 4GB RAM and 32GB eMMC is a viable solution for the future. It gives us long-term access to onboard computer-based robots. I can now make robots that are completely embedded and I can give robots to other people that won't require them to have to use a laptop or do anything to control the robot, they will be completely self-sufficient.

These SBCs can be remoted into when connected to a local network which removes the need for a monitor, keyboard and mouse connected directly to them. I haven't tested it yet but headless operation should be easy with an HDMI dummy plug. I really like the idea of programming embedded robots in this way.

Thanks for answering guys. I am amazed it is so low priced. I might get one just to play around with it. I ask because I remember when I was really into putting Raspberry PI's into my inmoov. It turned out to be an inconvenience because for every little program changes I had to make either required me to plug in a keyboard and monitor or to VPN into it. So basically I was tweaking parameters and scripts from my laptop. So I ended up with a robot that I usually used my laptop to run with a really weak computer in it. Pulled all that stuff and got an EZB. 

Dave, I think the difference between you and I is that you actually have a bot that is so finished
Will be cool to see what you guys come up with.

LOL @Perry! Well, maybe not. Our moto in the B9 robot builders club is "A B9 robot is never really finished". Perhaps the operative words in your statement are"so finished". LOL 

Have fun!!!!!

Well - if/when jeremie makes the add-on ezb for the rock pi x, it'll be awesome. Just use your laptop to VNC into the robot and have full control via remote desktop. But, the great thing is no wifi between ARC and the controller. That means faster video, higher def video, faster response in auto position, etc... When the WiFi is removed between ARC and the EZB, things become magically more awesome

Oh - and if you have a Rock Pi X in the invmoov, you can connect it to exosphere and turn it into a telepresence robot. So you can be out for dinner or at your friends and control the robot in your house. You can move stuff around, pick things up, what ever... That's pretty awesome

I should set that up as a live hack one day . Use the inmoov as a telepresence robot and control it remotely from dinner or something haha

Wow, things keep getting better and better. Jeremie is like your mad scientist at Synthiam! It's ALIVE!!!!

hey everyone - I created a quick guide in the support section on improving performance and freeing storage space with SBC (single board computers). This applies to the rock pi x, atomic pi, lattepanda, etc...

You can view it here: https://synthiam.com/Support/Install/free-space-with-windows-10

Thanks for the tips DJ, Optimizing Disk, RAM and CPU will be crucial especially when we want to run a lot of skills and multiple clients.  

One area we are lacking is GPU support for ML at edge and the dependance on X86 Architecture is a challenge.  Migrating to .NET core with multi architecture support for Lin/Win/Mac opens up a lot more cross platform capabilities. With ARC supporting ARM and CUDA on NVIDIA (Nano, Xavier etc) would be ideal for robotics platforms. Obviously that requires a fair amount of work on Synthiam part.  Another option is to look at partnerships with companies like AMD. ROCm is maturing, they are an X86 platform and are launching edge devices enabled by chips like the V2000 so this could be an option to explore in future.

@Nink, All I read and understood was Bla, bla, bla, bla. LOL! I'm so left behind. Thank God for guys like you and DJ that can conger up the magic we all dreamed about when we were kids.

Unfortunately I can’t conjure anything  up Dave. All I know is my robot needs a brain. My logic is if I post a lot of three letter acronyms I copied from a random Reddit post, DJ will come back and say, here you go, and it works.

Sadly core doesn’t have a GUI yet. It’s on the dev horizon. Migrating to core wouldn’t be difficult and a significant part of our code would migrate well. Until core matures and becomes something more than a web server.

I also don’t really believe in the ml running local. It doesn’t make sense to consume that much power in the robot locally - specifically since the global internet communication infrastructure is barely at capacity. It was significantly over engineered expecting less data compression. But with media compression the way it is, bandwidth and low latency is readily available for cloud computing. 

offloading ml to the cloud is the right thing to do. I don’t even want to consider what batteries would be needed to power a gpu for useful ml. 

Like, come on... tensor flow is a joke to run locally even on the most powerful hardware. There’s a lot of technologies we kinda skip at Synthiam / mostly because we wait for it to mature and stabilize. 

just look at google dialog flow. Ugh that’s the worst. It’s changed so much that it’s impossible to integrate. I should have waited longer before making a skill. Now it’s just a mess. 

The open source and education/exploration space is really fragmented and unreliable. By the time you figure out how to implement something, the technology had changed. 

so back to core... until it matures AND has a GUI, we can’t use it. However I should add that our entire cloud infrastructure and website is core entirely.

I love the EZB and this is why I got into EZ-Robot.  Suddenly I didn't need a 10 pound laptop duct taped to a robot platform. Everything was offloaded to a desktop and now we had extremely intelligent nimble robots. THANK YOU!!!

Moores law kicked in and now you can put an SBC like Rock Pi X directly on the robot so I don't need an external computer anymore.  7nm has brought in 10w SBC's with CPU/GPU/TPU cores onboard.  This opens up a whole new world for Autonomous robots.  Network goes down, robots keep running.  Sure you can still offload complex ML to the cloud you don't need to process local when network is up, but there is enough smarts on board to allow the robot to continue to function off line.   You really don't want a robot that a 12 year old kid can shut down with a $10 jammer he bought on Ebay. 

Hopefully as MAUI matures ARC moves over, it sounds like you have given it a lot of thought and it's on your roadmap. I understand that avalonia probably isn't a strategic move when an official UI is in development.

Avalonia is the only GUI we considered. Actually, when ARC was being developed out of ezbuilder remnants, we drew our a road map. For a brief time we considered porting it to a avalonia, but there were too many restrictions due to dev status. The GUI would have to change significantly, and rendering performance was super terrible. Redundant screen refreshes and redraws. Flickering. And layout issues where things just didn’t line up. 

so the decision was to be aware that one of two things is going to happen soon 

1) core will get a GUI that’s cross platform. We can easily fork and adapt to it. Because it’s something we consider to be core compatible as we continue developing 

2) windows moves to the cloud and runs in a Remote Desktop type portal and is available from any os

one of those two things will happen - depends on what’s first

in the meantime, the love from paying subscribers has gotten us pretty hyped and validated our efforts. So there’s a bunch of work going on for new skills. Such as yolo object detection, intel realsense navigation, and ros node integration. Oh and a unity add on. Oh oh and a two way telepresence option for exosphere that turns absolutely every robot into a telepresence. 

some pretty cool stuff! Lots of ML items planned to. We’ve been collecting a ton of data from exosphere, and now starting to experiment with the robots self navigating. 

I’m really enjoying the ui and performance improvements of recent ARC releases - hope you are to. It’s made a drastic improvement on sbc’s. I’ve been using the up board a lot lately and ARC is so much more response than it has ever been!

Maybe a stupid question but these boards will require a dedicated Windows 10 license, correct. I think those are about $60 so this needs to be considered.

Theoretically you don’t actually have to register your copy of windows.  It will still work.   You could always buy an oem licence on eBay.  Maybe $5

What Nink says. DJ has mentioned this before. I think he said everything in Windows 10 should work except being able to customize your desktop.

No windows license needed. Just install windows and there’s a little message in the corner that says unregistered at all times. 

I don’t register windows on my sbc’s