Video 'My Name is C.H.I.P. and I'll Be Your $9 Computer Today' (Video) 111
"But," you may ask, "is C.H.I.P. Open Source?" You bet! No hedging here, just flat-out Open Source, from the bottom to the top, with all software (and hardware specs) freely available via GitHub. And lastly, the "I'll Be Your $9 Computer Today' statement in the headline above is allegorical, not factual. We've seen projected shipping dates for C.H.I.P ranging from "by the end of 2015" to a simple "2016." Either way, we're waiting with bated breath.
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Slashdot: Dave, you are standing next to a really big CHIP here. But this is a smaller version, can you tell us about that?
Dave: This is C.H.I.P. – the world's first $9 computer. So if we look at the big CHIP again I'll show you what's going on. We have a 1 gigahertz ARM Cortex-A8 processor, 4 gigabytes NAND Flash storage and 512 megs of RAM, Wi-FI and Bluetooth PGN Bluetooth 4.0 BLE compliant as well as a full sized USB port, a micro USB with on the go support, GPIO breakout, headers and pins. Here we have built in Bluetooth or rather battery power and charging you can hook any 3.7 V LiPo cell up to it and it will run charged for hours. So the whole thing is completely open source hardware. It runs mainline Linux and mainline U-Boot which means that you can take whatever that is recently committed into Linux and it just runs straightaway on CHIP.
Slashdot: Now, explain how you got that in a nine-dollar piece of equipment?
Dave: So it costs $9 because we're leveraging the enormous economies of scale of the tablet market in China. So we work with a company called Allwinner which is a fabless semiconductor company that builds ARM system on chips and we worked with them to implement a version of an older tablet processor which is now called the R8 which is based on the A13, such that when we paired it with our Linux kernel support and all of the custom drivers that we're now upstreaming, we’re able to basically make a tablet that runs Linux instead of Android without any of the tablet bits.
Slashdot: Can you talk about the display and other input output support that it has?
Dave: For sure, yeah, so, because it has this lineage in the tablet world it can support displays of a number of different sizes up to 8 and 10 inches and they actually connect to a parallel display which just comes out of these pins; you can also configure using a DTS overlay file these pins to not be displayed but to be GPIO.
Slashdot: How about the actual resolutions and when it comes to input, tablets usually deal things with touch screen display?
Dave: Yeah, so there's also built-in touch screen driver support. We’ve broke out nearly everything on the SSD itself. The resolution you're not going to drive 4K display with this. Again it's a tablet display. We do make adapters that convert the parallel display line into both VGA and HDMI. So I just dropped it. Oh no. It’s nine bucks, it doesn't really matter. And so if you do want to use it in a higher resolution situation we can do upscaling and things like that.
Slashdot: Now yesterday you showed some software running on it, can you explain what happened there?
Dave: Yeah, for sure. So I did talk yesterday here at OSCON and you know against all established best practice, I did mostly a bunch of live demos. So we showed a couple of things. We showed a SSH indoor camera auto that we made last year. And also showed the first live demonstration of the CHIP booting mainline Linux and that included flashing and showing the kernel compilation tools. We also opened up our GitHub repositories for all of the changes that we've made. That will be upstreamed into the kernel and U-Boot as well as our SDK that allows anyone to download the tools automatically create a virtual machine and build their own Linux kernel and flash it to CHIP.
Slashdot: You are brave to do that in front of so many people.
Dave: It was a close call, we got it working it sort of the last moment thankfully but yes, it was super fun.
Slashdot: You’ve sold more than a handful of these at point, will people still be able to get these for $9 after the initial 50,000?
Dave: Yeah, we’ve sold about 50,0000 on Kickstarter for nine bucks. C.H.I.P. will be $9 when it becomes available for sale to everyone. It will always be $9—it’s a really important part of what we do. Yeah, and we will be announcing when they become available for pre-order pretty soon.
Re:What does that mean? (Score:4, Informative)
It's akin to a Raspberry Pi. It has a processor, memory, and storage. It also has composite out and USB on board the main board. If you want VGA or HDMI output, you have to spring extra for the extra shield(s).
What they should have said was it's a low end tablet without the touch screen/display.
Re:What does that mean? (Score:4, Interesting)
Indeed.
This is yet another product entering an ever-crowding field. This does not at all seem "new".
And it may not even be "better" or "cheaper" than the alternatives already available for purchase today.
Having said that, I'm more than happy to see this field growing. I find it hilarious we're getting to the point where shipping itself is possibly greater than product price for a "computer".
I'm having all sorts of fun with my Single-Board-Computers. I grabbed a couple (BananaPro) initially to act as simple TFTP servers with a bit of capacity for backup. I am still in an experimental phase to some degree but have started a soaking phase where part of the home network is dependent upon them. I've far surpassed my initial plans. At the moment I have this pair of SBCs working together as a High Availability cluster serving LTSP to clients. I'm typing from one of stations "soaking".
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While the beagleboard line are familiar to many of us linux geeks they don't have anything like the general recognition that tablets or even raspberry pi's do and they have been somewhat uncompetitive for a while (especially since the pi2 and odroid c1 showed up). So they aren't an especially good target for drawing marketing comparisions with.
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Re: What does that mean? (Score:1)
No, it's allegorically useless.
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Cheap crap but still crap.
I prefer to think of it as a modern alternative to a traditional microcontroller for hobbyists, because that's what it seems to be. Look at the number of people already using the Pi as a microcontroller substitute due to the ease of programming (ubiquitous operating environment and standard programming tools) and ready availability. This is not only cheaper than the Pi, but it comes with battery management built in, making it a heck of a lot more convenient to "makers".
The other big advantage this has is i
Re: What does that mean? (Score:1)
Gross. Spit those worms out now.
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If you're going to make fun of someone's writing you should probably check a dictionary first. Bated means "in great suspense; very anxiously or excitedly" and is used correctly in the summary. You're thinking of "baited."
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Well, "with bated breath" means that. "Bated" means "held" or "restrained", though it's practically never used any more except in that expression. It's cognate to "abate".
Optional pedantry: Shakespeare used "bate" in the "restrained" sense, including this from Much Ado: "she will die, if he woo her, rather than she will bate one breath of her accustomed crossness" (Meaning: If he makes a pass at her, she would rather die than cut back even a little bit on her usual insults.)
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Historically, yes. Since it's never used any other way now, the Oxford dictionary has apparently determined your definition is obsolete and the one I gave is correct:
http://www.oxforddictionaries.... [oxforddictionaries.com]
Re: What does that mean? (Score:2)
Don't be a homonymophobe, you insensitive clod. :-)
Re:What does that mean? (Score:5, Informative)
The video make it clear. They said that they are using components designed for tablets in order to take advantage of the economies of scale.
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It's just a low-end ARM-based computer that happens to run Linux instead of Android. The tablet comment is just marketing drool.
How many shipped? (Score:1)
"50,000 C.H.I.P.s have already sold for $9"
And not a single unit shipped! Remarkable, its all profit when you don't actually sell anything.
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Imagine a beowulf cluster of these!
Imagine a beowulf cluster of retarded slashdot memes and the names of the morons who keep modding them up so they can finally feel like part of the group, scrawled on driftwood and scrap lumber and jammed up your ass hole. Splinters!
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I, for one, welcome our new C.H.I.P. overlords.
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In soviet russia C.H.I.P err ... $9's you ...
err
I'll get my coat
people are considering ARM data centers (Score:2)
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Imagine a beowulf cluster of sharks with laser beams on their foreheads!
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Re:Just what I need (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course, this is massively unlikely to have the impact it deserves. Everyone's already got smartphones, which we already spent way more on and are prettier, even though you have to do all kinds of dumb shit to them to give them functionality as flexible as this thing does. It's mostly interesting if you imagine it as something they pulled out of an alternate history. Like, if things had been just a little more like cyberpunk than they already are, maybe your mom would've given you one of these when you were ten and people on your decker forum would make fun of you for using it.
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I see this as being something more like a stick computer. I have one playing a movie right now, an "MK809" that I bought on Amazon for $35.
I see that there's a potentially *huge* market for small, fix-function, programmable, embedded devices that run on a watt or two of power. (My TV stick is powered by the USB port on the side of the TV)
I am thinking about stuff like household A/C controllers that monitor outside weather, inside temperature, and time of day to optimize internal climate control to save mone
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Its important to note that it was really a 29$ computer with shipping included. I remember during the campaign even if you wanted 100 pieces, you would still pay 29$ x 100. And with that price I can already buy a tablet with the tablet stuff [dx.com] for a similar price with shipping included (currently listed as 31$).
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My Raspberry Pi is not in a box in the basement yet. Though, I am hopeful that I'll be able to get around to working on the project I intend to use it in, and then it will be in a box (an old NES) in the basement (hooked up to my TV).
My to-do list:
1) Mount Raspberry Pi in NES case
2) Build and install cables to power and video ports from RPi to original port locations on case
3) Mount Arduino (Uno R3 because it's cheap) in case and plug it into RPi as a USB device
4) Configure Arduino to be a USB HID for the c
Re: Just what I need (Score:1)
Be sure to put that ToDo list in the box with the raspi when you put it in the basement.
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Not bad for something that costs the same as an appetizer at an average restaurant.
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>> Android is far more advanced but Linux is still "Android".
Mr. Mooooooooo, is that you?
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L != A
A == L
Does not compute! Error! Error!
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English "is" doesn't correspond exactly to mathematical "=", so commutativity isn't to be expected.
E.g. A pig is a mammal.
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'is' in this context (and usually) works more like the 'is a member of' operator. I will denote it by e here.
When we say 'x == 2', in a sense, we are saying that 'x e { 2 }', that is, 'x is a member of the set, the only member of which is the number 2'.
When we say 'Android is Linux', we mean that 'all Android devices are members of the set of devices running Linux'.
When we say 'Linux is not Android', we mean that 'there exist devices running Linux which do not run Android' (or that there could exist devices
But can it run Windows? (Score:1)
CHIPS can't run Windows, only bad and evil command-line Linux.
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Ah, yeah, no....
http://hackaday.com/2015/08/13/raspberry-pi-and-windows-10-iot-core-a-huge-letdown/
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Yes and no.
I cant see if the CPU in this thing supports THUMB, NEON, and real floating point or not-- If it does, then it could conceivably run Exagear dekstop on it.
http://eltechs.com/product/exa... [eltechs.com]
It's assembly optimized for arm CPUs with those features, and is fast enough to run x86 emulation at useful speeds. (they claim more than 10x faster than QEMU.) It can be used to run WINE on an ARM platform, meaning that if CHIP supports those CPU features, then CHIP could possibly run commodity desktop softwa
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I'm even making it drive a 1080p displa
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As for the videos, the playback depends. If they are encoded in a format that you can offload to the GPU, then the Pi will be great. I've played plenty of 1080p video on the Pi over the network using the built-in ethernet using omxplayer. The one big caveat is that it only supports a few codecs, and if you try to play a video encoded differently it will go to the CPU and be unwatchable (less than 1 frame per second). It d
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Like I said, the Pi behaves a lot like a late 90s desktop, back when overclocking was worth the effort.
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Benchmarks [raspberrypi.org]. Note the memory score as well as the Integer and Floating point scores. Half of the speedup comes from the cpu crunching, and the other half comes from the memory and GPU.
But you don't have to take my word for it. If you has Raspbian installed you can try it yourself in like 60 seconds. Just run raspi-config and go into the overclocking menu. You do
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For this reason I reencode virtually all my video content to Mp4 h264. The Pi2 plays it wonderfully, and Kodi is great, to the extent that the I only use my PS3 for playing games and accessing things like Amazon Prime video (though for that my Fire TV stick both works better, without updating every fsck'ing week, and also runs Kodi, albeit accessed through the app settings menu). For re-encoding, I tend to use a bigger machine (e.g. 2nd hand Z800 with 12 cores.)
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Someone should create a box (Score:4, Interesting)
that all you have to do is plug in CHIP and you have a media players ready to go with all connections say HDMI and USB.
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I want a straight plug in box that where I can maybe plug in newer versions of CHIP or why hell even a universal box where you can plug in a CHIP or Pi or WHY.
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It already exists; it's called a Raspberry Pi 2, and it's cheaper/smaller than a CHIP with the shields necessary to be a competent media player.
The flip-side of that coin is that if you want to attach a touch-screen, the lack of need for an adaptor makes the CHIP cheaper and smaller that a Pi. The same goes for batteries.
One question (Score:3)
Where's Eric Estrada?
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Erik Estrada. And why no love for Larry Wilcox?
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Erik Estrada. And why no love for Larry Wilcox?
I was blinded by the flash of Estrada's teeth - I forgot he had a partner.
What's with the stupid headline? (Score:2)
'My Name is C.H.I.P. and I'll Be Your $9 Computer Today'
Was there any point to this headline, or did someone just think it was cute (for some reason)?
Android is Linux (Score:2)
From my phone:
[@MSM8974:/]$ uname -a
Linux localhost 3.4.0-g635b2f7 #1 SMP PREEMPT Thu Aug 13 11:22:15 PDT 2015 armv7l GNU/Linux
It's Cortex A8 (Score:2)
For my cheap computing needs, I'd rather get the Raspberry Pi, which is Cortex A9. But what I'm really waiting for is something that implements ARMv8. Probably won't get something in this price range for a while.
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For my cheap computing needs, I'd rather get the Raspberry Pi, which is Cortex A9
Umm no, the raspberry pi 2 is Cortex A7. Original raspberry pi was some arm11 variant.
Another "open" device that isn't (Score:1)
They shouldn't have included the wifi. I'm pretty sure the RTL8723BS chipset is dependent on proprietary firmware.
https://github.com/hadess/rtl8723bs/blob/master/hal/HalHWImg8723B_FW.c contains:
u1Byte Array_MP_8723B_FW_AP_WoWLAN[] = {
0x01, 0x53, 0x20, 0x00, 0x12, 0x00, 0x02, 0x00, 0x12, 0x02, 0x11, 0x28, 0x4A, 0x3C, 0x00, 0x00,
0x9E, 0x0D, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00,
0x02, 0x45, 0x8D, 0x02, 0x53, 0x49, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00
Dear Slashdot (Score:3)
Why are you *still* using Adobe Flash for your videos? Even YouTube knows how to do HTML5 video.
Sincerely,
A Flash Hater
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Maybe they are taking after the BBC which for some reason if you go on the mobile site doesn't use Flash but on the regular site does.
cool (Score:1)
that's cool but does it have systemd on it?