[Alexis] sent in a single board computer he’s been working on. The project goal of his build was making it easily reproducible. From looking at the schematics, it’s one of the simplest fully-functional computers we’ve seen. The build runs CP/M 2.2 off of two 3.5 inch floppies. This opens up a lot of options as to what software is already available. Although it operates over a serial terminal, [Alexis] pretty much duplicated an Osborne I, only at double the speed.
[Alexis] got a little e-fame from his earlier 8088 homebrew computer built from very early 8088’s rescued from an electronics junk shop. These 8088 computers made the blog rounds by playing Still Alive with a SID chip from a Commodore 64 and a YM2151 FM synth chip.
For now, I guess we’ll have to settle for a video of [Alexis]‘ Z80 computer running CP/M. Check out a video after the break of his computer running the greatest Infocom adventure, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
Where homebrew computers are usually complex bundles of wires and chips, [Mike]‘s own single board computer is not. It’s a three-chip computer with only a CPU, RAM, and a microcontroller that is able to emulate the retrocomputers of yore.
Normally, a homebrew computer project requires some amount of ‘glue’ logic – a few NAND, OR, or inverters to combine signals and send them where they’re needed for address decoding. This tiny pocket computer doesn’t need any of that; all the address decoding is done on a 40-pin PIC microcontroller.
With 64kB on the PIC 18F46K22, there’s enough space for all the address decoding logic, space for a pseudo ACIA mapped onto the $DF page, and a ROM image that provides a monitor program and a copy of BASIC. Basically, with the addition of a USB to serial adapter, this is a three chip 6502 single board computer, and with the right ROM monitor can emulate an Apple I, Woz monitor included.
Yes, 6502 projects are a dime a dozen, but [Mike]‘s work with the address decoding logic on the microcontroller is top-notch. There are a few remaining chip select lines in his schematic, and with another microcontroller it would be easy to add VGA out, a compact flash adapter, or some other really cool peripherals. Good thing there’s an expansion port on this thing.
If you’ve ever struggled to fit your program into the RAM and ROM of a small micro, you’ll appreciate [Jack's] creation, the DUO Decimal. DUO Decimal is a small single board computer running on an Atmel ATtiny84. The ’84 has 8KB flash memory, 512 bytes of SRAM, and 512 bytes of EEPROM. Not as bad as a the old days, but still tight by today’s standards.
User input to the DUO Decimal is through two buttons. Output is via a 7 segment numeric LED display. Not the easiest for typing in long programs, but on par with the switches and blinkenlights of the past. 3 bits of GPIO are available for connections to your own circuits.
[Jack] didn’t just design a board, he designed an entire language. DUO Decimal is programmed in an interpreted language called DUO Decimal Numeric Code (DDNC). There are 47 DDNC commands, covering everything from basic math to list manipulation. Programs can be entered through the buttons, or save your fingertips by downloading them through the AVR isp interface. The entire C code for the DUO Decimal, including the DDNC interpreter is available on [Jack's] website.
[Jack] created several example DDNC programs, including a 6 function calculator with trigonometry, a Mandelbrot set tester, and an implementation of the rock paper scissors game. There’s even a platformer action game, though graphics on a single 7 segment display are simplistic to say the least.
Typically, you buy a single board Linux computer. [Henrik] had a better idea, build his own ARM based single board computer! How did he do it? By not being scared of ball grid array (BGA) ARM processors.
Everyone loves the Raspberry Pi and Beagle Board, but what is the fun in buying something that you can build? We have a hunch that most of our readers stay clear of BGA chips, and for good reason. Arguably, one of the most important aspects of [Henrik's] post is that you can easily solder BGAs with cheaply available tools. OSH Park provides the inexpensive high-quality PCBs, OSH Stencils provides the inexpensive stencils, and any toaster oven allows you to solder even the most difficult of components. Not only does he go over the PCB build, he also discusses the bootloader, u-boot, and how to get Linux running.
Everything worked out very well for [Henrik]. It’s a good thing too, cause we sure wouldn’t want to debug a PCB as complicated as this one. What projects have you built that use a BGA? Let us know how it went!
I’m sure you’ve already heard about C.H.I.P, the $9 Linux computer. It is certainly sexy to say nine-bucks but there should really be an asterisk next to that number. If you want things like VGA or HDMI you need an adapter board which adds cost (naively the board only supports composite video output). I also have questions about MSRP once the Kickstarter is fulfilled. But what’s on my mind isn’t cost; this is still going to be in the realm of extremely-inexpensive no matter what shakes out. Instead, I’d like to look at this being the delivery device for wider Linux acceptance.
The gist of the hardware is a small board with a SoC boasting a 1GHz clock, half a gig of ram, four gigs of flash, one USB, WiFi and Bluetooth. It also has add-ons that make it a handheld and is being promoted as a gaming console. It’s amazing what you get out of these SoC’s for the cost these days, isn’t it?
For at least a decade people have claimed that this is the year of the Linux desktop. That’s not the right way to think. Adults are brand-loyal and business will stick to things that just work. Trying to convert those two examples is a sisyphean effort. But C.H.I.P. is picking up on a movement that started with Raspberry Pi.
These are entry-level computers and a large portion of the user-base will be kids. I haven’t had a hands-on with this new board, but the marketing certainly makes an effort to show how familiar the GUI will be. This is selling Linux and popular packages like LibreOffice without even tell people they’ll be adopting Linux. If the youngest Raspberry Pi users are maturing into their adolescence with C.H.I.P, what will their early adult years look like? At the least, they will not have an ingrained disposition against Open Source Software (unless experiences with Rasbperry Pi, C.H.I.P., and others is negative). At best they’ll fully embrace FOSS, becoming the next generation of code contributors and concept evangelists. Then every year will be the year of the Linux desktop.
The C.H.I.P. from Next Thing Co. bills itself as the world’s first nine dollar computer. That’s not a lie; their Kickstarter took in over two million dollars for a tiny single board computer with composite Video, WiFi, Bluetooth 512MB of RAM, 4GB of storage, and a 1GHz CPU. That’s a complete computer, sans keyboard, mouse, and monitor. You won’t get that with the $35 Raspberry Pi – you’ll need to add a WiFi adapter and an SD card for the same functionality – and you won’t get that with any other single board computer.
Understandably, the C.H.I.P. is already extremely successful. The company behind it has about 50,000 pre-orders, and people lined up to wait until well into next year for this computer. Exactly how Next Thing Co. managed to build a single board computer and send it out the door for nine dollars is a question that has yet to be answered, and is leaving more than a few people puzzled.
The Olimex blog has given their opinion of the C.H.I.P, and if that’s to be believed, the news isn’t good. The guys at Olimex know their stuff when it comes to making cheap single board computers; they have more than a few for sale, and they know what the Flash and DRAM market is like. To them, it’s impossible to sell a computer like the C.H.I.P. at $9. A quote from Allwinner for a similar module is $16 at the quantity Next Thing Co. would be looking at. That’s just the module with RAM and Flash – no Wifi, no board, no connectors. How could it be possible to sell this computer for only $9?
C.H.I.P., a small single board computer available for $9.
Anyone who has ever seen a Kickstarter campaign can give you an answer. The C.H.I.P. is a loss leader to build a community. Once the C.H.I.P. is shipping, the community becomes the product. The low price point is a classic technique to build excitement for and a community around a project. There are hundreds of fully funded projects tucked away deep on Kickstarter that prove this point.
From a business perspective, the C.H.I.P Kickstarter doesn’t even make any sense. The original goal for the C.H.I.P. Kickstarter was only $50,000. If a business that is already shipping hardware can’t find an investor or take out a loan to cover the development of a new product, one of two realities are necessarily true: either the product is an impossible pipe dream that no investor or lender would consider, or Kickstarter itself is a marketing tool to build a community.
Next Thing Co. disagrees about Olimex’s $39 claim. In their latest campaign update, they say C.H.I.P. will still be $9 when pre-orders open up. As far as Next Thing Co. is concerned, they’re unfazed by the conjecture of their competitor. [Thomas Deckert] of Next Thing Co. says, “I can tell you there is at least one significant error in that post by Olimex.”
The basic idea of C.H.I.P. is to leverage off the shelf components – the kind you’d find in cheap Android tablets and value line smart phones – put them on a board, and get a Linux distro running. That’s the basic premise of the Raspberry Pi, and that’s the idea behind dozens of other single board computers available today. No company has ever done it for nine dollars. If you take them at their word, that’s what Next Thing Co. will be delivering. Exactly how they’ll be doing this is anyone’s guess, and once these tiny, cheap computers start shipping, we’ll probably learn a lot about supply chains and what’s actually available from those fabulous chip manufacturers. Until then, it’s anyone’s guess.
The 6502 is a classic piece of computing history. Versions of this CPU were found in everything from the Apple ][, to the Nintendo Entertainment System, and the Commodore 64. The history of the 6502 doesn’t end with video games; for the last forty years, this CPU has found its way into industrial equipment, medical devices, and everything else that doesn’t need to be redesigned every two years. Combine the longevity of the 6502 with the fact an entire generation of developers first cut their teeth on 6502 assembly, and you have the makings of a classic microprocessor that will, I’m sure, still be relevant in another forty years.
The folks at WDC recently contacted me to see if I would give their hardware a close look, and after providing a few boards, this hardware proved to be both excellent. They’re great for educators adventurous enough to deviate from the Arduino, Processing, and Fritzing zeitgeist, and for anyone who wants to dip their toes into the world of 65xx development.
The Single Board Computers
WDC sent me the W65C02SXB and the W65c816SXB, two single board computers based on the 65C02 and the 65C816, respectively.
There are hundreds of very well-documented designs floating around the Internet for 65xx-based computers, but most of these designs have a lot in common. If you’re looking to build your own 6502-based computer, you’ll need a CPU, some RAM, and an EEPROM or Flash chip. For peripherals, you’ll be looking at the 6520 PIA, a chip that provides two eight-bit ports of I/O, the 6522 VIA a more advanced I/O chip with timers and a shift register, and maybe an 6551 ACIA communications/serial chip if you’re a purist. This is the standard compliment of chips for a 6502-based computer, and if you believe [Chuck Peddle], the 6502 wasn’t that useful without these support chips.
Both the ’02 and ‘816-based single board computers from WDC feature an ACIA, a PIA, and two VIAs – the second VIA is connected to a microUSB interface designed for WDC’s Terbium IDE (TIDE). More on TIDE in a bit. Each board also has 32kB of SRAM and a 128kB Flash chip mapped into the top 32k of memory. This is a fairly standard layout for just about every homebrew 6502 computer, but there are a few features that make this board special. Every pin you would ever need – data, address, control, and some chip selects – are available on a header running the entire length of the board. This is great if you’d like to interface an SXB with some old hardware, but the potential for creating new hardware is interesting. When I talked to [David Cramer] and [David Gray] at WDC, we speculated on what interesting hardware could be made that supports this gigantic header. The board might be too big and cumbersome for a quadcopter, but a 3D printer controller board is entirely reasonable, and would probably work very well.
The 65C816
The Western Design Center doesn’t just deal with the 6502 and its support chips. It remains the only place where you can get the 65C816, a greatly expanded CPU built on the 6502 ISA.
The ‘816 is a very interesting chip, most famous for its use in the Apple IIgs and the Super Nintendo. With a 24-bit address bus, it supports 16 Megabytes of RAM, has 16-bit registers, and a few new instructions over the 6502. Most impressively, when you first turn a 65C816 on, it starts up in a 6502 emulation mode that is 100% compatible with the 6502 until you flip a bit in a ‘hidden’ register.
With new stack instructions and compatibility with the 65C02, you have to wonder what would have happened if the 65C816 were introduced a few years earlier. The chip was finished in 1984 in time for Apple to use it in the IIgs, and for [Bil Herd] to realize, ‘the reason to use it is because the competition is using it wasn’t going to be a successful pitch.’ A few years earlier, and this chip would have at least been considered in the initial designs of the Apple Lisa, Macintosh, the Atari ST line, and possibly even the IBM PC. It’s the greatest ‘what-ifs’ of computing history.
For the last 30 years, WDC have been the keepers of the 65C816 flame, and of course their educational offerings include a single board computer based around this chip. It is more or less identical to the W65C02SXB with PIA breakouts, VIA breakouts, and an ACIA breakout. The larger set of connectors contains all the data, address, and control lines of the XBus02 connector of the W65C02SXB, save for additional pins for the extra address lines.
Best of all, with a 65C816 development board, there’s no need to deal with the multiplexed data and address lines. Writing ‘816 code is as simple as plugging the board into your computer and mashing the keyboard; the Western Design Center has the only modern ‘816 C compiler, after all.
Terbium IDE
The Sample Project for the SXBs blink a seven-segment display in a pleasing pattern
All of the WDC boards work with the Terbium IDE, the IDE packaged with the WDCTool suite. This is the interface for the compiler, linker, the editor of your choice, and a simulator. Truth be told, it’s not exactly a modern IDE – it’s Windows only, and my battle station (Win 8.1) saw the best results running in WinXP Sp2 compatibility mode.
Although TIDE is a little rough around the edges, it’s not really fair to compare this to Visual Studio or Eclipse; these high-end IDEs will always have more features and more polish than an IDE built for a single platform. Also, it’s an IDE, and being rough around the edges is the default, not an exception.
Aside from compiling and linking, TIDE also has another neat feature that’s directly applicable to the SXB boards: a simulator and debugger.
The TIDE simulator/debugger running the sample project with a seven-segment display
The addition of a simulator and debugger in TIDE is something you’re not going to get if you build your own 6502 single board computer. With the simulator and debugger, you can step into code, set breakpoints, and generally do everything you would expect to be able to do with an embedded IDE.
The sample project for the W65C02SXB was a ‘light up a seven segment display with a VIA’ tutorial, and this demonstrates the potential of the debugger; it even simulates the seven segment display with the help of a little code.
There are a few extra features in TIDE that tie into FPGA-related stuff for WDC’s soft cores for the ’02 and ‘816, but since that’s far beyond the boards I have, those buttons were left alone.
The Microcontroller Development Boards
The W65C265SXB – A microcontroller board based on the 65C816
WDC has not been resting on their laurels for 40 years. Their educational tools also include microcontrollers based on the 65c02 and 65c816. These are the 65C134SXB (based on the ’02, and was originally designed for life support), and the W65C265SXB (based on the 65c816).
Each of these boards feature the W65C134S or W65C256S microcontroller with 32kB of SRAM, a socket for a 32PLLC Flash ROM, one large connector that is more or less the same as their ‘full microprocessor’ counterparts, and three 10-pin connectors that are used for basic I/O, the Serial Interface Bus, and UART signals.
Although these microcontroller development boards appear very minimal – there are only four chips, a hand full of passives, and a bunch of pin headers, after all – appearances are deceiving. The microcontrollers are actually incredible pieces of engineering that really aren’t comparable to anything else on the market.
The W65C265SXB ROM Monitor running in a terminal emulator
Inside both of these microcontrollers is a ROM monitor that functions just like any monitor program you’d find in an ancient computer. With this monitor, you can read and write to memory addresses, jump to addresses, and run code. All that’s needed is a USB cable, a terminal emulator (CoolTerm, Putty, a neat little Python script, or anything else that can connect to something over a serial port, 9600, 8N1) [Rod Biresch] has a great tutorial for entering opcodes into the ‘265SXB to blink an LED. Yes, it’s the most basic thing you can do with a microcontroller, but it does work, and can serve as the first stepping stone to more complex applications of an embedded 65xx ISA microcontroller.
Like their bigger brothers, they are also supported by the WDC’s own development environment, TIDE. With this, you can throw assembly or C at these little boards and they’ll chug right along.
Conclusion
There is one fairly large drawback to the single board computers from WDC – the price. The W65C02SXB and W65C816SXB go for a little under $200 USD. The microcontroller variants – the W65C134 and W65C265 knock $100 off the price of their bigger brothers. When you can get an Arduino Nano clone for $2 with free shipping, this looks insane at first glance. After thinking about it, I’m not convinced the price actually is insane.
While you can pull a 6502 out of any old computer, you’re not going to find new chips from anyone but WDC. Being in the 6502 game is a comparatively low-volume business, and for every classic microprocessor, there are thousands of ARM chips.
That being said, if you were to build a 6502 or 65816 single board computer, you’ll also need those VIAs and PIAs; again, not chips you can pick up for a dollar a piece. I’ve built a 6502-based computer, and in terms of cost, my build wasn’t very far off. If you consider the effort that goes into building your own SBC… well, what do you value your time at?
The microcontroller variants of WDC’s boards are by far their most interesting offerings. There’s a common trope in modern 6502 builds that offload nearly everything to a microcontroller, but keep the 6502 in it’s classic 40-pin DIP format. You’ve seen it done with the Propeller, with an ATMega, and with the Propeller again. The 65C134 and ~265 do this job exceptionally well, and they have a built-in monitor to get you typing in machine code fast. That’s the goal of every homebrew computer, really.
For an educational offering, WDC’s single board computers do exactly what they’re designed to do: get people learning assembly and opcodes and machine codes. There’s still a value in this, especially if you’re going to continue hacking on Arduinos and ARMs. The microcontroller boards are a great introduction to some seriously interesting hardware, and I can’t wait to see the retro/homebrew scene dig into some serious tinkering with these machines.
The BeagleBone is a board that doesn’t get a lot of attention in a world of $5 Raspberry Pis, $8 single board computers based on router chipsets, and a dizzying array of Kickstarter projects promising Android and Linux on tiny credit card-sized single board computers. That doesn’t mean the BeagleBone still isn’t evolving, as evidenced by the recent announcement of the BeagleBone Blue.
The BeagleBone Blue is the latest board in the BeagleBone family, introduced last week at CES. The Blue is the result of a collaboration between UCSD Engineering and TI, and with that comes a BeagleBone built for one specific purpose: robotics and autonomous vehicles. With a suite of sensors very useful for robotics and a supported software stack ideal for robots and drones, the BeagleBone Blue is the perfect board for all kinds of robots.
On board the BeagleBone Blue is a 2 cell LiPo charger with cell balancing and a 6-16 V charger input. The board also comes with eight 6V servo outputs, four DC motor outputs and inputs for four quadrature encoders. Sensors include a nine axis IMU and barometer. Unlike all previous BeagleBones, the BeagleBone Blue also comes with wireless networking: 802.11bgn, Bluetooth 4.0 and BLE. USB 2.0 client and host ports are also included.
Like all of the recent BeagleBoards, including the recently released BeagleBone Green, the Blue uses the same AM3358 1 GHz ARM Cortex 8 CPU, features 512 MB of DDR3 RAM, 4GB of on board Flash, and features the main selling point of the BeagleBoard, two 32-bit programmable real-time units (PRUs) running at 200 MHz. The PRUs are what give the BeagleBone the ability to blink pins and control peripherals faster than any other single board Linux computer, and are extremely useful in robotics, the Blue’s target use.
Right now, the BeagleBone Blue isn’t available, although we do know you’ll be able to buy one this summer. Information on pricing and availability – as well as a few demos – will come in February.
Another week’s news, another single board computer aimed at Internet of Things applications is launched. This time it’s Samsung’s Artik 5, a platform they’ve been talking about for a while now but which you can now buy as a dev board from Digi-Key for $99.99. For that you get Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and Zigbee connectivity, a dual-core ARM Cortex A7 running at 1GHz, 512MB of memory, and 4GB of eMMC storage. There are the usual plethora of interfaces: GPIO, I2C, SPI, UART, SDIO, USB 2.0, JTAG, and analogue.
The single board computer marketplace is starting to look rather crowded, and with so many competitors to choose from at more reasonable prices you might ask yourself why the ARTIK could be of interest to a maker. And given that Samsung are positioning it in their literature on its increased security for use in commercial applications such as IoT hubs, IP cameras and industrial and commercial lighting systems, you’d probably be on to something. If you were to make a very rough analogy with the Raspberry Pi range this has more in common with the Compute Module when it comes to intended marketplace than it does with the Pi Zero.
One answer to that question though could be that it is one of the first devices to support the Thread networking protocol for IoT devices. Thread is a collaboration between Google and a range of other interested parties that has been designed to deliver reliable and secure mesh networking for IoT devices in connected homes. As with all new connectivity protocols only time will tell whether Thread is the Next Big Thing, but it is interesting to note in this board nevertheless.
The ARTIK hasn’t made many waves as yet, though we covered the story when it was announced last year. It is worth mentioning that the ARTIK 5 is only the first of three platforms, the ARTIK 1 will be a tiny board with Bluetooth LE aimed at portable and wearable applications while the ARTIK 10 will be an octo-core powerhouse aimed at mulitmedia processing and network storage applications.
Even though VGA is an outdated and becoming somewhat deprecated, getting this video output running on non-standard hardware is a rite of passage for some hackers. [Andrew] is the latest to take up the challenge. He got VGA output on a Freescale i.MX233 and also got some experience diving into the Linux kernel while he was at it.
The Freescale i.MX233 is a single-board computer that is well-documented and easy to wire up to other things without specialized hardware. It has video output in the form of PAL/NTSC but this wasn’t quite enough for [Andrew]. After obtaining the kernel sources, all that’s needed is to patch the kernel, build the kernel, and build a custom DAC to interface the GPIO pins to the VGA connector.
The first thing that [Andrew] did was load up the Hackaday home page, which he notes took quite a while since the i.MX233 only runs at 454 MHz with just 64 MB of RAM. While our retro page may have loaded a little faster, this is still an impressive build and a great first step to exploring more of the Linux kernel. The Freescale i.MX233 is a popular chip for diving into Linux on single-board computers, and there’s a lot going on in that community. There are some extreme VGA hacks out there as well if that’s more your style.
Even before the announcement and introduction of the Raspberry Pi 3, word of a few very powerful single board ARM Linux computers was flowing out of China. The hardware was there – powerful 64-bit ARM chips were available, all that was needed was a few engineers to put these chips on a board, a few marketing people, and a contract manufacturer.
One of the first of these 64-bit boards is the Pine64. Introduced to the world through a Kickstarter that netted $1.7 Million USD from 36,000 backers, the Pine64 is already extremely popular. The boards are beginning to land on the doorsteps and mailboxes of backers, and the initial impressions are showing up in the official forums and Kickstarter campaign comments.
I pledged $15 USD to the Pine64 Kickstarter, and received a board with 512MB of RAM, 4K HDMI, 10/100 Ethernet and a 1.2 GHz ARM Cortex A53 CPU in return. This post is not a review, as I can’t fully document the Pine64 experience. My initial impression? This is bad. This is pretty bad.
Shenzhen and Guangzhou, the ‘Silicon Delta’
Hardware
This un-review covers the least expensive Pine64, featuring a 1.2 GHz Allwinner A64, 512MB of RAM, Ethernet, HDMI, and two USB ports. This is the reward for pledging $15 to the Pine64 Kickstarter campaign. According to the Kickstarter campaign, this board should have shipped in February. It arrived on April 13th. That’s surprisingly fast for a Kickstarter campaign, and not at all a knock at the Pine team.
Right now, the Pine64 is available for preorder in three configurations. The lowest tier, the one being reviewed here, is $15 USD with worldwide shipping. The Pine64+ includes 1GB of RAM, Gigabit Ethernet, and connectors for a camera, LCD, and a touch panel. This version costs $19 USD, plus $7 shipping to the US, $12 for the rest of the world. The top-tier Pine64+ 2GB includes 2GB of RAM, priced at $29, plus $7 shipping to the US, $12 for the rest of the world.
Although this is a little esoteric for a hardware un-review, I would like to mention the mechanical layout of the Pine64. It’s huge. It’s just a hair larger than 3″ x 5″, more exactly 127mm x 79mm. This is significantly larger than the current crop of Raspberry Pis and the Odroid C2.
There’s a lot of space on the Pine64, and the headers, ports, and plugs take full advantage of this fact. Power, Ethernet, and HDMI are all on one side of the board, USB and the 3.5mm mic and headphone jack are opposite, the SD card is along the side. There’s a DSI header to connect a touch sensitive LCD, but the connector for the touch panel is on the other side of the board.
Concerning the specific Pine shipped to me, I would have to rate the assembly as somewhat lackluster. The board itself is bent in the middle, with a visible gap between the board and spacer of the pin headers. It’s difficult to photograph, but you can see it plain as day. If I were grading Pine’s QA, this would be a solid D – the board works, but I’m surprised that it does.
A very slight bend in the middle of the Pine64. This would never pass QA from any manufacturer.
The hardware is pretty much what you would expect from a 64-bit ARM board. The quad-core ARM A53 Allwinner CPU is effectively the same CPU that is found in the Raspberry Pi 3. The GPU, however, is entirely different. The SoC unfortunately features a Mali 400-MP2 graphics processor, a GPU that isn’t well supported and lags behind the efforts to open source the Broadcom VideoCore IV found in the Raspberry Pi. To be fair, GPU support on single board Linux computers is almost always terrible; the Mali 400 is just slightly more terrible than any other option.
As far as software is concerned. there are a number of distributions available on the Pine64 wiki, including Ubuntu, Arch, and Android images.
Getting Started
Allwinner’s PhoenixCard utility.
If you buy a printer, you’re not getting a CD full of software. If you buy a laptop, all the recovery software will only be available either through a download or on a recovery partition. No one ships software anymore and Pine64 is no exception. You get your SD card images directly from the Pine64 wiki, with Ubuntu, Arch, and Android Lollipop distros available. There’s one problem here – Pine64 isn’t using their own hosting, and have instead relied on Google Drive and Torrents to distribute their software images to everyone. The Ubuntu image is 7 Gigabytes, and as I’m writing this paragraph, it’s downloading at about two megabits per second. You can do the math for that. At least they offer a few torrents for SD card images. I suspect those torrents will be faster once Pine64s ship out to backers and the number of seeders increases.
With the image in hand, you would expect writing an image to a microSD card to be exactly the same as a Raspberry Pi or any other single board computer – use Win32DiskImager or dd and write the image to a card. This is not true for all distributions. According to the Pine wiki and forums, the recommended software to burn an image to an SD card is PhoenixCard, a piece of software developed by Allwinner that writes disk images to SD cards. It may start up with a Chinese UI, and according to community member [Michael Larson] fails one in every fifteen times at writing an image to an SD card.
With a somewhat reliable way to write a software image to the SD card, you would think booting the Pine64 would be easy. Not so. At the time of this writing (and with multiple attempts), several of the distribution images simply don’t work. The Android distro did not boot on my machine, the Arch distribution did not work. The Ubuntu image worked, but this was an effort by community member [Michael Larson]:
Yes, a Pirates of the Caribbean desktop will be most people’s first experience with the Pine64
The Ubuntu experience was tremendously slow on the Pine64 and I suffered several reboots. As of this writing, I have tested all of the software distributions on the Pine64 wiki. Only the Ubuntu distribution works poorly, and right now I consider the Pine64 to be a waste of $15. This will hopefully change in the near future, and I will gladly write a new review when I can boot the Pine.
Peripherals and Expansion
One of the biggest draws of a Linux single board computer is a plethora of pins and GPIOs and peripherals. The Pine64 has plenty of pins, including a 40-pin header based on the Raspberry Pi’s expansion port. This is awesome – there are hundreds of ‘hats’ available for the Pi, and although many of them are built around the Pi’s particular SoC, having the artificial Pi standard available on the Pine is great.
I have one of the first thousand Pine64s in the world. Every ARM/Linux single board computer is built on the efforts of the community around the board, and the Pine64 is no exception. The efforts of Linux hackers like [Michael Larson] have turned the Pine64 from something that rolled out of a reflow oven into a somewhat useful board.
However, Pine, or the people behind Pine, have not held up their end of the bargain. It’s relatively easy to pick up a few thousand ARM chips, hire an EE for a month or two to produce a single board computer, and find a contract manufacturer in China. The hard part is getting the software working, getting the documentation together, and fostering a community that isn’t stumbling in the dark trying to get this board to work. This is where the Pine64 fails. The forums are a mess right now, and the comments on the Kickstarter campaign aren’t much better.
The software support and documentation is so sparse, I literally can not get into a Linux terminal. With a day sunk into setting up the Pine, I only have a picture of a Pirates of the Caribbean desktop that came on a distribution produced by someone completely unrelated to the Pine team. This isn’t just me, either; a few of the Hackaday Overlord devs gave the Pine a shot, too. The results were inconclusive.
This is not a review of the Pine64, because a proper review would look at the hardware and software, do a few benchmarks, blink a few LEDs, and maybe try to get a Dreamcast emulator working. I am unable to do this. In turn, this turned into a review of the people behind the Pine. The Raspberry Pi Foundation has shown that you can rely on the community and user forums for a great deal of support, but you need to bring a bit more to the table than a board whipped up by a contract manufacturer. I do not have a working OS on the Pine64, and the Pine team has not managed to meet my minimum expectations.
The Internet Archive has a truck. Why? Because you should never underestimate the bandwidth of a truck filled with old manuals, books, audio recordings, films, and everything else the Internet Archive digitizes and hosts online. This truck also looks really, really badass. A good thing, too, because it was recently stolen. [Jason Scott] got the word out on Twitter and eagle-eyed spotters saw it driving to Bakersfield. The truck of awesome was recovered, and all is right with the world. The lesson we learned from all of this? Steal normal cars. Wait. Don’t steal cars, but if you do, steal normal cars.
In a completely unrelated note, does anyone know where to get a 99-01 Chevy Astro / GMC Safari cargo van with AWD, preferably with minimal rust?
[Star Simpson] is almost famous around these parts. She’s responsible for the TacoCopter among other such interesting endeavours. Now she’s working on a classic. [Forrest Mims]’ circuits, making the notebook version real. These Circuit Classics take the circuits found in [Forrest Mims]’ series of notebook workbooks, print them on FR4, and add a real, solderable implementation alongside.
Everyone needs more cheap Linux ARM boards, so here’s the Robin Core. It’s $15, has WiFi, and does 720p encoding. Weird, huh? It’s the same chip from an IP webcam. Oooohhhh. Now it makes sense.
Here’s some Crowdfunding drama for you. This project aims to bring the Commodore 64 back, in both a ‘home computer’ format and a portable gaming console. It’s not an FPGA implementation – it’s an ARM single board computer that also has support for, “multiple SIDs for stereo sound (6581 or 8580).” God only knows where they’re sourcing them from. Some tech journos complained that it’s, “just a Raspberry Pi running an emulator,” which it is not – apparently it’s a custom ARM board with a few sockets for SIDs, carts, and disk drives. I’ll be watching this one with interest.
A lot of old science fiction movies show people wearing the same–or nearly the same–clothes. We’re left guessing if this is because there is a single centralized plant mass-producing skin-tight jumpsuits, or if everyone is under orders to dress the same. Now that we live in the past’s future, it looks like science fiction was a poor predictor of fashion. People want variety.
Which calls to mind development boards. How many different ones do we need? Need doesn’t matter, because we have plenty of them. There may be strong leaders: in the 8-bit world, you think of the Arduino, and on the Linux side, maybe the Raspberry Pi. But there are options.
[Eric Brown] recently compared several inexpensive development boards from FriendlyARM including the NanoPi M3, the NanoPi M1, and the NanoPC-T3. These range from about $11 to $60 with the M3 costing $35. You can see an M1 booting on an HDMI screen in the video below.
The $35 board (the M3), in particular, is pretty impressive:
Other I/O: 2x USB 2.0 host ports; 2x USB 2.0 host headers; Micro-USB 2.0 client port; Debug serial port header; 40-pin, Raspberry Pi compatible GPIO connector for UART, SPI, I2C, PWM etc.
Other features — Power and reset buttons; power and status LEDs
Power — DC barrel jack; +5V @ 2A; RTC Battery header; AXP228 power management unit
Dimensions — 64mm x 60mm
The board can boot several Linux flavors and Android. It looks like a strong choice.
The geodesic dome didn’t replace conventional homes, and unitards didn’t replace the business suit. These probably won’t replace the Raspberry Pi, either. We’ve covered other “Pi killers” in the past that either compete on price or features. While none of them are likely to displace the Pi either, they do give you choices, should you dare to be different.
Connecting a headless Raspberry Pi to a wireless network can be quite a paradoxical situation. To connect it to the network, you need to open an SSH connection to configure the wireless port. But to do so, you need a network connection in the first place. Of course, you can still get command-line access using a USB-to-UART adapter or the Pi’s ethernet port – if present – but [Arsenijs] worked out a much more convenient solution for his Hackaday Prize entry: The pyLCI Linux Control Interface.
His solution is a software framework written in Python that uses a character display and buttons to make a simple hardware interface. This allows you to configure all important aspects of a Raspberry Pi – or any other Linux SBC – from a tidily organized click-and-scroll menu. [Arsenijs] implemented a whole bunch of useful tools: There’s a network tool to scan and connect to WiFi networks. A systemctl tool that lets you manage the services running on the system, which is especially helpful when you need to restart a stuck service. A partition tool helps with viewing and unmounting mass storage devices. He’s even planning to add a filesystem browser.
With his Open Source project, [Arsenjs] aims to shorten the development time for embedded projects by taking out the efforts of implementing the basic interface functions from scratch. Indeed, there are countless scenarios, where a basic display interface can be of great value. Given the great project documentation and the fact that this can work with virtually any Arduino or Raspberry Pi LCD-pushbutton-hat or shield, we’re sure this is going to be used a lot. Enjoy the video!
[Edit: A few corrections according to information provided by the project owner have been made.]
Since the introduction of the Raspberry Pi, the embedded Linux scene has been rocked by well supported hardware that is produced in quantity, a company that won’t go out of business in six months, and a huge user base. Yes, there are a few small problems with the Raspberry Pi and its foundation – some stuff is still closed source, the Foundation itself plays things close to their chests, and there are some weird binary blobs somebody will eventually reverse engineer. Viewed against the competition, though, nothing else compares.
Here’s the NanoPi Neo, the latest quad-core Allwinner board from a company in China you’ve never heard of.
The NanoPi Neo is someone’s answer to the Raspberry Pi Zero, the very small and very cheap single board Linux computer whose out-of-stock percentage has led some to claim it’s completely fake and a media conspiracy. The NanoPi Zero features an Allwinner H3 quad-core Cortex-A7 running at 1.2 GHz, 256MB RAM, with a 512MB version being released shortly. Unlike the Raspberry Pi Zero, the NanoPi Neo features a 10/100 Ethernet port. No, it does not have PoE.
As with anything comparing itself to the Raspberry Pi Zero, only two things are important: size and price. The NanoPi Neo is a mere 40mm square, compared to the 65x30mm measurements of the Pi Zero. The NanoPi Neo is available for $7.99, with $5 shipping to the US. Yes, for just three dollars more than a Pi Zero with shipping, you get a poorly supported Linux board. What a time to be alive.
If you’re looking for another wonderful tale of what happens with cheap, powerful ARM chips and contract manufacturers in China, check out my review of the Pine64.
We have run out of fruits to name all the single-board computers on the market, but that doesn’t mean you can’t buy a rotten one. Bad documentation, incomplete specifications and deprecated firmwares are just some of the caveats of buying only by price and hardware features. To help you out in case you just need to find a great and open-enough SBC with community support, [Eric] has put together a decent list with 81 individually reviewed boards over at hackerboards.com.
With 81 boards, the list is as concise as it can be, ruling out almost half of the commonly available boards that are either deprecated or lack the necessary hacker-friendliness to use them off the groomed track. The list is derived from a survey held in June 2016. The survey resulted in more interesting statistics, such as the popularity ranking of certain boards (you can probably guess which one took the cake) and the most valued features of SBCs: Open source software support and the community ecosystem.
[Ncrmnt] had a busted tablet PC with an Allwinner A23 SoC inside. He combined two of our favorite past-times, Linux hacking and 3D printing, to make a rather sweet little single-board-computer out of it, giving the tablet a second life.
Step one was to make sure that the thing works. Normally, you’d hook up a wired serial terminal and start hacking. [Ncrmnt] took it one step further and wired in a HC-05 Bluetooth serial module, so he can pull up the debug terminal wirelessly. The rest of the hackery was just crafting a bootable SD card and poking around in the Android system that was still resident in the flash memory of the system.
Once the board was proven workable, [Ncrmnt] designed and printed a sweet custom case using Solvespace, a constraint-based 3D CAD modeler that was new to us until recently. The case (after three prints) was a perfect fit for the irregularly shaped system board, a 3.7 V LiIon battery, and a speaker. He then added some nice mounting tabs. All in all, this is a nice-looking and functional mini-computer made out of stuff that was destined for the trash. It’s fast, it’s open-source, and it’s powerful. Best of all, it’s not in the dumpster.
There are pictures and more details on his blog, as well as [Ncrmnt]’s TV-stick to computer conversion that we’ve covered before.
The Raspberry Pi Foundation founder Eben Upton has announced that their ten millionth eponymous single-board computer has been sold since their launch back in February 2012. It’s an impressive achievement, especially so since their original sales expectations were for a modest ten thousand. For those of us who watched the RS and Farnell websites crumble under the strain of so many would-be purchasers on that leap day morning four and a half years ago their rapidly exceeding that forecast came as no surprise, but still, it’s worth a moment’s consideration. They passed the Sinclair ZX Spectrum’s British record of 5m computers sold back in February 2015, leaving behind the Pi’s BBC Micro spiritual ancestor on 1.5m sold long before that.
Critics of the Pi will point out that its various versions have rarely been the most powerful small single board computer on the market, or even at times the cheapest. They will also point to the closed-source nature of the Broadcom binary blob that underpins Pi operating systems, and even the sometimes unpredictable nature of the Pi Foundation with respect to its community, product availability and launches. But given that the Pi Foundation’s focus is not on our side of the community but on using the boards as a tool to introduce young people to computing, it’s fair to say that they’ve done a pretty good job of ensuring that a youngster can now get their hands on a useful and easily programmable computer much more easily than at any time in the past.
Would we be in the same position of being able to buy a capable Linux computer for near-pocket-money prices had the Raspberry Pi not been released? Probably so, in fact certainly so. The hardware required to deliver these products has inevitably fallen into a more affordable price bracket, and we would certainly have plenty of boards at our fingertips. They would probably have Allwinner or maybe Mediatek processors rather than the Pi’s Broadcom part, but they would be very likely to deliver equivalent performance at a similar cost. Where the Raspberry Pi’s continued success has come from then has not necessarily been from its hardware but from its community and software. The reliability and ease of use delivered by the Raspbian Linux distribution that Just Works for the parent putting a Pi in front of their child, and the wealth of expert information on the Raspberry Pi forums to get them through any Pi-related troubles are what has given the Pi these sales figures. The boards themselves are almost incidental, almost any hardware paired with that level of background information would likely have met with similar success. Comparing the Pi software experience with for example one of their most capable competitors, it’s obvious that the software is what makes the difference.
It’s likely that Raspberry Pi sales will continue to climb, and in years to come we’ll no doubt be reporting on fresh milestones on ever more powerful revisions of their product. But it’s also likely that their competition will up their software game and their position in the hearts and minds of single board computer users might be usurped by a better offering. If this increased competition in the single board computer market delivers better boards with more for the hardware developer community, then we’re all for it.
So you’ve built out your complete home automation setup, with little network-connected “things” scattered all around your home. You’ve got net-connected TVs, weather stations, security cameras, and whatever else. More devices means more chances for failure. How do you know that they’re all online and doing what they should?
[WTH]’s solution is pretty simple: take a Raspberry Pi Zero, ping all the things, log, and display the status on an RGB LED strip. (And if that one-sentence summary was too many words for you, there’s a video embedded below the break.)
Before you go screaming “NOTAHACK!”, we should let you know that [WTH] already described it as such. This is just a good idea that helps him keep track of his hacks. But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t opportunities for hacking. He uses the IFTTT service and Google Drive to save the ping logs in a spreadsheet, but we can think of about a billion other ways to handle the logging side of things.
For many of us, this is a junk-box build. We’re sure that we have some extra RGB LEDs lying around somewhere, and spare cycles on a single-board-computer aren’t hard to come by either. We really like the simple visual display of the current network status, and implementing something like this would be a cheap and cheerful afternoon project that could make our life easier and (even more) filled with shiny LEDs. So thanks for the idea, [WTH]!
The most interesting market for Intel in recent years has been very, very small form factor PCs. ARM is eating them alive, of course, but there are still places where very small and very low power x86 boards make sense. The latest release from SolidRun is the smallest we’ve seen yet. The SolidPC Q4 is one of the smallest x86 implementation you can find. It’s based around the MicroSoM, a module even smaller than a Raspberry Pi, and built around a carrier board that has all the ports you could ever want from the tiniest PC ever.
The SolidPC Q4 is technically only a carrier board featuring a microSD slot, Displayport, HDMI 1.4B, two RJ45 ports with the option for PoE, three USB 3.0 Host ports, jacks for mic and stereo sound, and an M.2 2230 connector for a wireless module. The interesting part of this launch is the MicroSoM, a System on Module based on Intel’s Braswell architecture. Two models are offered, based on the quad-core Atom E8000 and the Pentium N3710. Both modules feature up to 8GB of DDR3L RAM and 4GB of eMMC Flash.
The interesting part of this launch is the MicroSoM, a System on Module based on Intel’s Braswell architecture. Two models are offered, based on the quad-core Atom E8000 and the Pentium N3710. Both modules feature up to 8GB of DDR3L RAM and 4GB of eMMC Flash. The size of these modules is 52.8mm by 40mm, or just a shade larger than the stick-of-gum-sized Raspberry Pi Zero.
The SolidPC isn’t intended to be a Raspberry Pi competitor. While those cheap ARM boards are finding a lot of great uses in industry, they’re no replacement for a small, x86 single board computer. The pricing for this module starts at $157 according to the product literature, with a topped out configuration running somewhere between $300 and $350, depending on options like a heatsink, enclosure, or power adapter. If you want a small single board computer with drivers for everything, there aren’t many other options: you certainly wouldn’t pick a no-name Allwinner board.
