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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: 4, Informative) by takyon on Saturday May 09 2015, @04:34PM

    by takyon (881) <takyonNO@SPAMsoylentnews.org> on Saturday May 09 2015, @04:34PM (#180793) Journal

    I’m a little leery of those Allwinner chips. Who knows what kind of back doors the People’s Republic of China have hidden in those chips? I’m not normally this paranoid, but imagine what a hostile foreign nation can do with hundreds of thousands of “Internet Of Things” under their control? There might be a reason for those chips to be so inexpensive.

    Allwinner? That company is hostile towards the open source community and is a serial GPL violator, their SoCs have no upstream Linux support (no device tree in linux), no proper documentation whatsoever coupled with a lot of proprietary components (CedarX, Mali drivers) and buggy closed sourced libs/blobs, on top of that you have no guarantee that the vendor will continue maintaining their sources in a few years’ time. Sure the price makes that thing attractive but I’d rather pay more to obtain a decent SBC that runs modern versions of Linux with open source drivers. I’ve used an A10-based device two years ago and Linux support was messy, if not broken.

    Allwinner sucks. They steal GPL code, they lie and cheat to cover it up.
    This doesn’t have video onboard, it won’t work right anyways since mali drivers aren’t going anywhere and won’t.
    Instead of selling some crippled POS for cheap they could actually be honest and provide what’s necessary to program the SOC and actually be able to charge more!

    Unfortunately this is not open source or open hardware. From their KS page:

    “We expect to be pushing files out publicly soon after the campaign.”

    Until they make the source and/or schematics they are not open source or open hardware.

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