Might not be as important now but I just realised there’s another Raspberry Pi alternative. A bit larger and can’t do IO-hats, but might be really cheap, especially in the US. Motherboards from expired Intel Chromebooks. It’s usually an atom or celeron so you don’t really need any cooling, you can remove parts you don’t need like soundcard or extra usb-ports, and with a bit of luck it pulls the power from usb-C. Downside, you need to check that the model can install alternative operating system, and you probably need some kind of monitor hooked up to it when you’re installing.
As an example, you can get a working Acer R11 motherboard for $19.55 plus shipping off ebay. It’s a 4 core Celeren N3160 with 4GB ram and 32GB emmc. Draws 6W. And supports VT-x
Oh yeah, another problem is that most Chromebook users aren’t very technically inclined so it can be kind of hard to get some technical fact straight.
Probably only through usb.
Some do, some don’t. Depends on how evil the company is. Here’s the first paragraph, it can sometimes be hard to find out if a certain model can run without a battery or not. And it can be wrong because someone tried to run it from their old 5V 0.6A phone charger.
