Single board micro computers

[Keith Franks]

Hey all,

Just passing on an awesome link that has just been sent around the Sydney hack space.

It's particularly relevant since we've been discussing this sort of stuff....

http://iqjar.com/jar/an-overview-and-comparison-of-todays-single-board-micro-computers/

Keith

[David Lyon]

On Fri, May 10, 2013 at 10:54 AM, Keith Franks <keithd...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hey all,

http://iqjar.com/jar/an-overview-and-comparison-of-todays-single-board-micro-computers/

Yeah, it's a great wrap-up.

On any of these boards, the biggest problem is that there is so much that you can do :-)

Added to that, there's so many to try. Just getting to the bottom of one machine can
be a lot of work.

[tubular]

Thanks Keith, its a very useful roundup

There are even more out there too... just ordered a couple of Beaglebone blacks

[Luke Weston]

There's a different metric by which you might choose to compare these sorts of boards, other than just their price or memory or clockspeed, and I think it's worth noting.

Of the boards mentioned, how many of them are open hardware?
How many of them even have a PDF schematic available, let alone PCB CAD/CAM files?

How many of them use chipsets where you can actually get the documentation for the silicon, without jumping through hoops with NDAs, or proving yourself to the manufacturer as a worthy customer worth spending any of their time on?

What about if you wanted to make your own fork of the hardware (assuming that you do know how to design the appropriate stuff, high-density interconnects with high-speed digital bus between the processor and memory etc, often BGA packages, etc. and get the boards fabricated and soldered successfully), are you able to actually get access to the silicon in small volumes, even if you can get the documentation?

I think the Chumby Hackerboard is noteworthy in this regard, and it's the exception rather than the rule. It sacrifices being the fastest or cheapest on the market deliberately in favor of being something that is actually useful as an open hardware reference design.

http://wiki.chumby.com/index.php?title=Chumby_hacker_board

The Freescale i.MX233 is a noteworthy starting point if you want to develop an ARM9 embedded Linux system that is actually open. The 1600-page complete manual is free to the public with no BS, and silicon is available in small volumes with no BS, even though your everyday distributors such as Digikey.

On Fri, May 10, 2013 at 1:09 PM, tubular <lac...@tubularcontrols.com> wrote:

Thanks Keith, its a very useful roundup

There are even more out there too... just ordered a couple of Beaglebone blacks

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[Angus Gratton]

Hi everyone,

On Fri, May 10, 2013 at 06:07:13PM +1000, Luke Weston wrote:
> Of the boards mentioned, how many of them are open hardware?
> How many of them even have a PDF schematic available, let alone PCB CAD/CAM
> files?
>
> How many of them use chipsets where you can actually get the documentation
> for the silicon, without jumping through hoops with NDAs, or proving
> yourself to the manufacturer as a worthy customer worth spending any of
> their time on?

+1 to everything Luke said.

Even if you're not likely to develop your own board or roll your own
OS from scratch, having a vendor with decent support makes a huge
difference to the open source/hacking community on a device. Which
winds up with more options (operating system images, availability of
graphics accelerated software, stability, updates, etc.) if you're
buying it to hack on or build projects around.

To take an example from that list, the VIA APC didn't have graphics
source drivers available until 5 months after it went on sale. The
cheap Allwinner based boards (OLIMEX, Cubieboard, Hackberry,
Gooseberry) have decent support but for a lot of non-Android things
they are dependent on community developers reverse-engineering
support.

> The Freescale i.MX233 is a noteworthy starting point if you want to develop
> an ARM9 embedded Linux system that is actually open. The 1600-page complete
> manual is free to the public with no BS, and silicon is available in small
> volumes with no BS, even though your everyday distributors such as Digikey.

Freescale's i.MX6 stuff is quite nice too (Cortex-A9 so GHz-class
CPUs, DDR3 RAM, etc.) Comprehensive available vendor documentation,
clean Linux support, flexible uboot bootloader support, ongoing
software releases including binary drivers for the GPU.

(The i.MX6 computers on that list are the Sabre Lite and the
Nitrogen6X.)

I'm just finishing up a Debian installer image for a $70 GK802
AndroidTV stick (i.MX6 Quad) that I want to use as a personal server,
and it's been really pleasant to work on so far compared to most other
ARM devices I've played around on.


- Angus

[Toby Corkindale]

The author can't be terribly familiar with the actual devices.
They comment that the BeagleBone offers the same performance as a
Raspberry Pi, and the CubieBoard as only slightly higher.
Anyone who has actually used them would have noticed that the
BeagleBone (white) is at least twice as fast as the Raspberry pi, and
the cubieboard somewhat faster again.

But given how many boards are listed, I suppose the author was just
combing through their published specs rather than trying each one out.

By the way, I have a MK802 and a Mini Xplus.. I never use them, so if
anyone would like to purchase them second hand, get in touch?

Cheers,
Toby

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The falcon cannot hear the falconer
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world