i don’t think its looks that good to me though.
stephen
However, for a lot of things, it is perfect. I am setting up my own IOT automation in my home using a bunch of esp8266 modules for motion sensors, light switches, and the like. I have been working on my base station for a while and tried out a few sbc boards, and even using a modded router with openwrt. But, this thing fits the bill pretty well. (I just wish it also had an ethernet port, but, not necessary.
All of that being said, most things have their place, including the CHIP. Will it be a good KODI or steam box, no. Will it be a good simple headless local server for light load, absolutely.
( And I already know the naysayers are getting ready to go on and on about the GPL violations of Allwinner. But, I really don’t care. Just my opinion.)
If they are shipping directly from China, it make even more difficult to understand.
So, you are like child waiting for his new toy …
Keep us informed about your experience !
If they are shipping directly from China, it make even more difficult to understand.
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As for display it shouldn’t be too hard to add a parallel LCD- it’s an Allwinner chip, hardware description is loaded during boot-up. And since I have 2 or 3 ILI9325 320×240 LCDs lying aroung….
EDIT:
Also it’s nice to see that Allwinner made it to mainline kernel after all GPL violation issues they had.
I got my CHIP yesterday and tinkered with it all day. I have to say, I am thoroughly impressed. It is very high quality. It comes with a nice back plate. There is a ton of documentation. I installed Debian on it, fairly painless on Ubuntu. The WiFi works very well. The chip os and the Debian build both are very stable.
I think this is my new favorite board. I wish it was a little faster, but, it will work for most of my headless projects. There are 5 things that I love about it that every other sbc, including the Raspberry pi, fall short on.
1. The bluetooth and wifi built on. I have an Orange Pi Plus that has built on wifi, but it requires an external antenna. This one is onboard.
2. The flash memory is built on. No SD card required.
3. It is low power. It only pulls about 300 ma, so you can power it from a computer USB port.
4. And this is my favorite thing. The usb port to power it allows you to flash new firmware AND it shows up as a USB serial port so you can just plug it on to your computer and access the terminal directly, while powering it, all from one cord. I didn’t know this was a feature until I heard the bong of a new usb device and saw it was a USB serial converter. No need for a USB serial cable to setup the wifi so you can ssh in. It is amazing.
5. THE PINS ARE LABELED. It is no nice not having to look up the pins every time I want to wire something up
I love this board, ordering a few more.
next q, when … … … …
stephen
But for me, the shipping on all of these is the killer, as its many times the price of the board
-it’s not as small as RPi Zero but still small
-header pinouts are labelled on sides (like genuine Arduino/Genuino)
-included AV cable is short (like 15 cm)
BUT there is something strange with USB host
-booting with 3 port USB 2.0 hub with Ethernet (VID/PID 1a40:0101 for hub and 0458:014f for Ethernet) connected- board doesn’t get past u-boot splash
-connecting this hub after boot causes CHIP to stop working- leds are still on but screen goes black and there is no response to any input
-connecting Saitek Eclipse usb keyboard after boot causes the same failure
-booting with Saitek Eclipse connected- board boots but the same failure when X starts
Note that Saitek Eclipse has backlit keys but I didn’t have any problems with Saitek keyboard before- it worked fine with RPi v1 and v2, Cubieboard 1 and 2, several Android tablets and phones (using OTG adapter)
I guess too little power is provided for USB, I can’t see any other explanation.
When the initial rush is over and they fix the bugs, i will probably get some, but at the moment I have too many other projects that are also on the bleeding edge, i dont have time to spend getting any more Beta products working 
Same USB devices work OK when plugged into my PC’s USB ports on the case. These are called “root hubs” in Windows’ device manager, I think.
I’ve bought 6 or so USB2 and 3 USB3 hubs. I find some work for odd USB devices, some don’t. I think it depends on what chipset they use internally.
Most of my hubs have an option for external 5V power. This matters not for most MCU boards as they are 100mA or less. But I use 7 port hubs with 7 power switches and the sum of the loads can sometimes require the power to the hub.
Then there’s the other topic: Many USB3 hubs won’t work with odd USB devices but same devices work in a USB2 hub.
I rarely have trouble with USB/Serial cables that use the FTDI chipsets. I do have trouble with some older Prolific brand chipsets, and most no-name chipset cables. So I spend 20% more and try to always use FTDI – because they and the driver just work.
These can be big time-wasters. I don’t buy too-cheap hubs, and try to guess which ones have the latest USB chips.
Yes … all true. I no longer have a Win7 device here, having converted ALL XP and Win7 to Linux Mint and Ubuntu … you may remember that I used to be a rather successful MCSE in a fortune 50 company, but I simply can no longer (as an individual) put up with MS’s crap on legacy device support. We are now living in a time when if you are not Win10, you are nothing to Micro$oft and they say the same in every communicated message, just in a round-about way. I did try one Win10 upgrade from W7 on a dual-core Intel box with 2G or RAM … In my case, ‘they’ lied about increase boot time and responsiveness; my experience was sub-zero. This HP box is now Linux Mint. I recently purchased a replacement for a 14 year old HP server which became surplus due to the fact that there was no World Trade Center to deliver the package and it got into the surplus queue. The new HP came with Win7 Professional and was promptly formatted to Ubuntu. It is working beautifully as a back-up server to a WinVista box that will likely die in the near future – No worries, a mirror image copy under Ubuntu awaits being promoted from #2 to #1.
It almost seems that every update to a non-W10 installation has the sole purpose of slowing down response and consuming needless zillions of CPU cycles. Now, I certainly know how to optimize my W8.1 and it is, however, the process only lasts until the next critical patch and then it’s off into the dumps.
Even in W.8.1 I have had mixed success with Hubs, parasitic or powered. These days, I do my very best to just use a single 2.0 port for my ESP or STM32 efforts. The other two 2.0 ports I use for my camera and cellphone and other thingies. USB 3.0 exists on one of my boxes, but I generally try and buy surplus or refurb items for my playtoys: computers are just like cars, drive a new one off the lot and you suffer a significant depreciation instantly.
Ray
Curious opposites.
I have no love for Microsoft’s effective monopoly. But I have several critical software tools I use daily for my consulting work. They’re not supported for Linux or Mac. I have run OS X in a window on this PC, under Win 7. And I’ve got Mint on a bootable disk. I like Mint. But, oh well.
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Not good to dwell on the negative in this.
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Not good to dwell on the negative in this.
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that unix was put into schools to infect the next generation and let former pupils use what they were used too.
pretty sure microsoft did much the same sort of thing.
bbc/acorn tried with some success
linux – free and open – seems to have baffled a generation or maybe two, with the concepts
of free and open.
arduino and raspberry, both seem to have learnt the technique
somewhere in the current mix seem to be the various and assorted sbc’s
target currently seems to be smaller, smaller, cheaper, more cheaply and very heavily loaded with interface capabilities; although wifi, usb and good video/sound seems the minimum requirements.
stephen
target currently seems to be smaller, smaller, cheaper, more cheaply and very heavily loaded with interface capabilities; although wifi, usb and good video/sound seems the minimum requirements.
stephen
TDP of potential victims TDP???
uni’s and students were and may well still be heavily supplied with ‘free’ or ‘greatly reduced with student card’ software.
my day, cdc6600, fortran and mccracken’s fortran book(sp?)
stephen
i mean that the lecturers are from a generation heavily biased toward microsoft
srp
i mean that the lecturers are from a generation heavily biased toward microsoft
srp
When you issue “vagrant up” for the first time it will get timeout when trying ssh login (however VM will run in background).
Solution:
1) issue vagrant halt command (it will force VM shutdown)
2) open VM settings and change Eth card to one of AMDs (emulated Intel card just doesn’t work)
3) issue vagrant up and get a cup of coffee/tee- this time VM preparation will work fine but it takes some time
This problem occurs on Windows but it’s likely that Linux and osX are also affected.
Also under Windows there is no need to add virtualbox folder to PATH (although official docs says otherwise)
Reason we were given for C#- “it’s much harder to make a mistake in C#”
