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VoCore2 is an open source Linux computer and a fully-functional wireless router that is smaller than a coin. It can also act as a VPN gateway for a network, an AirPlay station to play lossless music, a private cloud to store your photos, video, and code, and much more.
The Lite version of the VoCore2 features a 580MHz MT7688AN MediaTek system on chip (SoC), 64MB of DDR2 RAM, 8MB of NOR storage, and a single antenna slot for Wi-Fi that supports 150Mbps.
Spend $12 and go for the full VoCore2 option and you get the same SoC, but you get 128MB of DDR2 RAM, 16MB of NOR storage, two antenna slots supporting 300Mbps, an on-board antenna, and PCIe 1.1 support.
The story goes on to cover 11 more relatively inexpensive computers (depending on your idea of inexpensive). Read on for the complete list and links to each one.
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Here is ZDNet's complete list of 12 computers:
| 1 | $4-$15 | VoCore2 | Vendor Information |
| 2 | $9 | C.H.I.P. | Vendor Information |
| 3 | $59.95 | cloudBit | Vendor Information |
| 4 | $129.95 | PixelPro | Vendor Information |
| 5 | $92 | Intel Edison with Kit for Arduino | Vendor Information |
| 6 | $60 | NanoPC-T3 | Vendor Information |
| 7 | $55 | BeagleBone Black | Vendor Information |
| 8 | $135 | Udoo Quad | Vendor Information |
| 9 | $40 | Arduino INDUSTRIAL 101 | Vendor Information |
| 10 | $99 | Parallella | Vendor Information |
| 11 | $23 | NanoPi 2 Fire | Vendor Information |
| 12 | $82.99 | Banana Pi M3 | Vendor Information |
What experiences have you had with these? Is there one in particular you would recommend using (or avoiding)? Why?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 06 2016, @02:26PM
yeah, we need to start supporting architectures that are fully open.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 06 2016, @04:21PM
On that note:
Adreno and Tegra WOULD be the best choices, if either was available on an open hardware platform without a stage0 bootloader enforcing signing and control of your trustzone partition to questionable third parties.
Having said that, the Raspberry Pis are by far the most open of the popularly available ARM SoC platforms, has the third best driver support (Tegra then Adreno beat it handily thanks to nouveau and freedreno.) Furthermore, thanks to Eric Anholt's tireless work it has a mostly complete OpenGL 2.1 implementation, which puts it roughly on par with R300(Radeon 95-9800) hardware (and the closest Nvidia equivalent.. 6000-7000 series?) If the open firmware project gets completed, and Broadcom doesn't act like their usual dickholish selves and arbitrarily break future VC4 implementations so the current bootloader code can't be easily modified to support it, or begin requiring signed firmware like Intel, AMD, and Nvidia have (not including end-device manufacturer firmware signing on the ARM side), the Pi could become the modern day C64 or other microcomputer, with complete enough documentation to make it to all sorts of things the manufacturer never intended. Plus, the VC4 instruction set is complete enough to do some VERY interesting things on the GPU beyond simply pushing video pixels. Unfortunately that is also a pitfall: The VC4 has no MMU protection. It is designed as a real time bare memory addressing processor, which means if there are any software exploits possible in the vc4 mailbox implementation or in the userspace glue logic, it is possible for a malicious application to gain system level privileges through a processor very similiar to the Intel ME, and AMD equivalent processor, the one bright side being you can fix the code if such an exploit is found/used, unlike the AMD/Intel situation where you are FUBAR if that happens.