Yet another …yet another "Pi killer"

Another blue board from the Banana Pi tree. Surely they should be yellow.

https://www.board-db.org/news/2017/02/2 … inner-a33/

http://forum.banana-pi.org/t/banana-pi- … pport/2791
Allwinner A16 or A33 based…

stereo vision ?

They dont seem to list the price.

Strangely, although I have an RPI 1 and a Zero and the latest version, I never seem to have a project that can make use of them.
Probably because of the price, as it seems extremely wasteful to use a RPi zero to do a job that a BluePill is capable of.

Speaking of other useful and less costly devices…

I went hunting for my daughters microbit today… she informed me that she ‘lost it’ with her pencil case :/

BennehBoy wrote:Speaking of other useful and less costly devices…

I went hunting for my daughters microbit today… she informed me that she ‘lost it’ with her pencil case :/

I think they missed their target slightly with the microbit.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/mediap … obit/specs
It is not bad, but…. I think they could have managed more bang for their bucks, and maybe even a small TFT instead of the led array.
EDIT: I would also be interested to see how well they survive the rigours of sticky fingers and pencil cases.

RogerClark wrote:

I’m currently designing a board using the nRF52840, (64Mhz, Cortex M4F , 1M flash and 256k RAM) which is the latest generation of the processor used in the microbit

ahull wrote:I think they missed their target slightly with the microbit.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/mediap … obit/specs
It is not bad, but…. I think they could have managed more bang for their bucks, and maybe even a small TFT instead of the led array.

BennehBoy wrote:RogerClark wrote:

I’m currently designing a board using the nRF52840, (64Mhz, Cortex M4F , 1M flash and 256k RAM) which is the latest generation of the processor used in the microbit

I saw a video on youtube yesterday for ASUS tinker board… I think it was… That came close to being a Pi killer…. But while it wasnt really faster, it had higher spec and had some better hardware… Better GPU and high res audio as well…

If I was building a Android based in car computer (which I might be doing in the future) I might consider it or something similar over the pi, but mostly because of the higher end GPU and Audio…

Would anything ever be a real Pi killer? no, Pis corner in the market is its competitive low price and support. Its geared more towards the teaching end of the market… The other boards have far less support, and are often double the price of the Pi…

Besides nothing will kill the Pi… its the first. Its the classic, its the one that made it all happen in the first place.

I’ve had my Pi Zero W for about a week now, and although I have not done anything serious with it… I have done the headless setup, – which was fairly painless and can ssh to it from my PC with no problems at all.
(I just needed to get its IP address from my Wifi router as it is set to DHCP)

I think if anything is going to be a Pi 3 killer, its more likely to be the Rpi Zero W, as for a lot of small projects, you won’t need all the USB connections or the ethernet, and if you use a wireless keyboard and mouse, which just uses a single USB dongle, you just need a USB OTG mico USB to normal USB female

‘gut’ feeling is we’d see more and more of these WIFI + BLE + SOC integrated boards coming out of the woods on the ‘beefy’ front (e.g. 512megs ram) and on the MCU front things like STM32 may increasingly ship SOC with 2.4ghz radio either BLE (my guess is more common) or/and WIFI

my thoughts are that for these ‘big’ boards the main thing is that there are a lot of ‘non-C’ programmers who are trying to do stuff with ‘iot’, e.g. driving gpios with python, lua etc. most likely not from the ‘mcu’ camp.

to site an example of these ‘oversized’ controllers that pretty much run arm application processors with lots of flash and ram rather than mcus, there is replicape http://www.thing-printer.com/product/replicape/
that on its own is just interfacing electronics and on top of that u’d need a separate Beaglebone Black

while a good fraction of the low cost 3d printers runs ‘arduino style’ ‘RAMPS’ board
http://reprap.org/wiki/Arduino_Mega_Pololu_Shield

for more complex applications such as 3d printers using those ‘application processors’ boards may have an advantage, it basically integrates the front end ‘driver’ system such as octoprint http://octoprint.org/ into the board, basically taking over the role of the computer that runs/controls the print and could do things such as floating point path calculations which is normally done on the pc http://www.thing-printer.com/redeem/

but it comes at much more cost compared to say ‘RAMPS’

Another small form factor AllWinner board.

https://www.cnx-software.com/2017/08/29 … -core-soc/

Interesting…

I wonder what the real world price is for this, including postage etc, and also the availability.

I suspect the only usable version is the 512k , which is $12 ex carriage.

The RPi Zero W seems to be around £10 ex-carriage, so is only really a couple of dollars more, for something that will have much more support

Xunlong usually charge $3.95 for shipping …

[RogerClark – Tue Feb 21, 2017 10:39 pm] –
I’m currently designing a board using the nRF52840, (64Mhz, Cortex M4F , 1M flash and 256k RAM) which is the latest generation of the processor used in the microbit

…

I finished the schematic yesterday (though it needs to be checked a few times)

I’ll probably start the PCB design today

very interesting, any news on that Roger ?

is there already a nrf52840 core for the arduino IDE out there ?

I don’t know about the nRf52840.

I had to give up on making a board using that device because it needs special PCB features like Via-in-pad that KiCad does not support and the normal pcb factories in China also can’t produce .

You best bet is to ask on Sandeep Mistry’s GitHub repo for Arduino on nRF51 and 52

i did a little google, aliexpress window shopping and run into this
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/New-Ora … autifyAB=0


looked rather interesting but probably not the smallest / cheapest out there

and it seemed these days there is quite a bit of competition to be a smallest possible size

https://www.aliexpress.com/w/wholesale- … ext=nanopi
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/DIY-Nan … autifyAB=0

I think this thing is going to get very hot when Ethernet or WiFi is running.

And the suitable power adapter costs more than the board itself…

Pssst …
The real Pi’s are laughing

On Pi Day tomorrow 3.14, the is being sold locally for $3.14. The Pi 3B is being sold for $29.99.

Snippet from http://socialcompare.com/en/comparison/ … comparison

RPi.png (114.11 KiB) Viewed 225 times

These clones are trying to get the max price for their boards despite having virtually no support.

I looked on AliExpress and the cheapest price for that board was well into the $20 range.

For that money, even here in the far flung reaches of the world I can buy a RPi Zero W

[RogerClark – Tue Feb 21, 2017 8:47 pm] –
Strangely, although I have an RPI 1 and a Zero and the latest version, I never seem to have a project that can make use of them.
Probably because of the price, as it seems extremely wasteful to use a RPi zero to do a job that a BluePill is capable of.

Same here. For most of the io works/sensor works I prefer stm32, for wifi works I prefer esp8266. There seldom come across the situation that we really need the power of PI(of course when that happen we would try esp32 first). I have some PI zeros but they already laid in my desk draw for years . Part of the problem is i have to insert a tf card for every of them, and the linux just takes way too much time to boot up