Single board computers or SBCs are smaller, lower cost and lower power consumption computers than desktop motherboards. While typically computationally less powerful, they offer a balance between performance and energy consumption, like a Raspberry Pi Zero. This allows them to be used in situations without access to mains electric, where solar panels or similar are used to provide electrical energy. They are also useful for projects such as running a personal server for cloud storage, for those that do not wish to trust large companies with their private data.
A searchable database of all SBCs available is hosted on BoardDB.