Cheap quad core ARM 7 board

As cheap as a ZET board…
http://www.aliexpress.com/item/Orange-P … 79125.html
… half the price of a Pi

Nice find!

not quite as nice, i spotted this in the sidebars after i’d placed an order – oops

http://www.aliexpress.com/item/Orange-p … 41825.html

stephen

zmemw16 wrote:not quite as nice, i spotted this in the sidebars after i’d placed an order – oops

http://www.aliexpress.com/item/Orange-p … 41825.html

stephen

for almost anything you buy there is a graph, basically a shallow slope line up to a knee, after the knee
the line steepens a lot. think a transistor hfe?? curve flipped about the diagonal.

the knee is usually at the ‘typical’ price, past that its for the go faster stripe.
i usually buy as high up the shallow slope line as i can afford
stephen

I’m a hobbyist, retired and wandering where ever the cheap acquisition winds blow. That clearly puts me in the Maple Mini camp… if I cannot do it with a Maple Mini, I’ll use 2 of ’em… engineering be damned. (There is actually good technical reasons that this is not voodoo engineering…) I bought 20 of the Maple Mini devices when they were at $3, that is 2x the price of one of the pictured board.

IMO, $30 U.S.D. is clearly in the non-discretionary purchase area if the quantities are > 1. That is, not a play project but a project that is intended on earning its keep or one for resale.

Note to be too inquisitive, but what is the target use for your purchases?

Ray

i suspect i’m becoming or at least just acknowledging that i’m a bit of a hardware magpie.

also hobbyist, also retired, did some recumbent trike travelling blackpool, follow coast <5mls
via lands end, dover and hull to blackpool (2500mls). other half (3000+) round scotland is
(yet again) once again likely to be next year.

prior to retiring i was paid to do my hobbies, electronics, programming and linux.

i just like being able to switch breadboards without having to strip them of bits first.
i think i’m actually worse with paperbacks, even though most of my reading now is on my Kindle.

i don’t remember being bored in a long, long time. annoyed, frustrated, baffled, all the usual suspects…

stephen

zmemw16 wrote:
<…>
i just like being able to switch breadboards without having to strip them of bits first.
<…>

stephen

mine’s a mech eng
first job was fortran programming doing quantity surveying on reinforcement steel rods length.
then 4yrs icl, 10yrs marconi and 23+yrs with british aerospace.
first micro (1978 ) serious was a tangerine microtan 6502, wrote a disassembler for their basic so i could print it on a teletype;
i got lucky with 3 or 4 scrap boards from work scrap bins, all official for £5
some when about then, someone’s car got stopped with 12″x12″ x 1/4″ brass plate in boot, he got terminated and prosecuted
as well.
also once saw a secretary walked off site by 2 security guards from her desk in the office, she’d photocopied a 100 sheets of
headed paper for her husband’s business and left them in the gate-house for collection.
hence my attitude to half-inching; never!
each board was 4116 16kbit dynamic ram packed to minimal spacing 0.1″ each way and 7 layer pcb, oh yes 18″ x 12″
i extracted them via a blow-torch and sharp impact with a concrete floor.
my currency for haggling was 8 off 4116 with a spare set just in case, 64k (16kx8x4 =>32)i gave them 128k (64:-)
teletype, paper tape punch, an optical paper tape reader and 2 x 8″ floppy discs
second was a nascom 3, ended up running cp/m on that, modified the floppy disk pcb to handle 3.5″ and 8″
challenge was seamlessly switching the fd1770 chip clock speed. data sheet said don’t and can’t, red flag to ….
first pc, 386sx 16MHz with 4Mb sips, monchrome, it went to 20MHz rapidly

i suspect this should be in Welcome:-)
stephen

i extracted them via a blow-torch and sharp impact with a concrete floor.

Been there, done that. First PC, Commodore PET 2001 4K RAM (still have it, still works). RAM upgraded to 8k a few months after I bought it.

Ray

i thought nice case, don’t remember the nascom in a case; then urrrr oh yes i did case it.
no idea whatsoever as to how much it was, probably exorbitant .
for the price i paid in the early eighties for 5.25″ floppy drive and card, i could buy a decent to
quite good i7 laptop now!
stephen

zmemw16 wrote:… first micro (1978 ) serious was a tangerine microtan 6502, wrote a disassembler for their basic so i could print it on a teletype…

230754

zmemw16 wrote:230754

1954, i’ll swear its gobbled my first reply
.
not 6502 or z80, plessey miproc, or pdp macro-11? or 68xx(x) maybe

stephen

zmemw16 wrote:1954, i’ll swear its gobbled my first reply
.
not 6502 or z80, plessey miproc, or pdp macro-11? or 68xx(x) maybe

stephen