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Next Thing Co's $9 computer

posted by CoolHand on Friday May 08 2015, @06:47PM   Printer-friendly
from the good-things-come-in-little-packages dept.

sigma writes:

makezine.com has an article on a new $9 SBC.

An Oakland, CA based team of artists and engineers have built $9 Single Board Computer (SBC) called Chip. Chip runs Debian Linux as its operating system and includes a 1Ghz quad core R8 ARM processor, 512MB of RAM, and 4GB of storage as well as 8 GPIO ports, onboard wifi, bluetooth, battery controller and other goodies.

While the Chip is capable enough to manage office and other general purpose computing, it's mainly intended as a project board. The team has some optional extras, including Pocket Chip, a portable, handheld enclosure with an LCD screen, full QWERTY keyboard, and internal battery. With this combination, the Pocket Chip is a fully functioning $50 computer.

If you’re wondering how Chip could be this inexpensive, you can thank cheap Chinese tablets. The System-on-Chip used in the development board is based on an A13 processor by Allwinner, a Shenzhen-based semiconductor company. As recently as 2013, Allwinner was the second largest tablet manufacturer in the world, and the A13 was the most successful processor in Allwinner’s lineup.

Could this be a Raspberry Pi killer?

 
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 08 2015, @08:48PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 08 2015, @08:48PM (#180469)

    Or you could just run sudo apt-get install sysvinit-core if you would rather use sysv init.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 08 2015, @09:20PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 08 2015, @09:20PM (#180484)

    This is a Debian fork. I doubt it will be able to support a separate init system. I honestly don't understand why everyone and their mother chooses to use debian on their custom ARM device. Wouldn't a gentoo fork work better since most of the things you need would be able to be recompiled on the fly for the device? Send it out with precompiled pacakges, then the rest could be compiled on later. Bam so much easier, and no systemd if you don't want it.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 08 2015, @10:39PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 08 2015, @10:39PM (#180532)

      Name recognition perhaps.
      It's the oldest extant distro. [unnes.ac.id]
      Everybody thinks: beaucoup pre-compiled packages (without thinking "for x86")

      -- gewg_

      • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 09 2015, @01:13AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 09 2015, @01:13AM (#180590)

        Might want to look down and a little to the left on your image, and then apologize to the 10 Slackware users out there.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 09 2015, @06:03PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 09 2015, @06:03PM (#180817)

          Yes. I did see that when I got the image but I forgot to adjust my statement to say "second-oldest".
          Good catch.

          -- gewg_