This is an excellent price point for this capability. I've been playing around with a lot of different ARM implementations from Atmel to Nvidia and many places in between. What struck me is how spoiled I had become to x86 machines all having esssentiall the same set of "features" just at different service levels. I find myself wanting a Marvell CPU (good at networking) and an nVidia GPU (great at throwing pixels around) with an Atmel floorplan (easy to layout). I'm not complaining, it is a lot more fun exploring the choices people have made putting together their ARM SoCs than it is exploring the differences between an Intel Core i3 and a Core i5.
Dual gigabit, wi-fi and the ability to run Ubuntu makes this very interesting for a "home router / hub" type device. Video output makes it interesting for a media player device. Putting both in one low-powered box is awesome...
> Dual gigabit, wi-fi and the ability to run Ubuntu makes this very interesting for a "home router / hub" type device.
For that type of appliance, I'd rather have OpenWRT than Ubuntu. Comes pre-fit to the job at hand. And with a reasonable secure configuration by default, as opposed to whatever the thing you've hacked together yourself accidentally leaves open.
That said: Having medium-powered, cheap, compact and appliance-like general purpose computing available is certainly a nice change.
Big computers with lots of cores and gigahertz gets boring pretty quickly. These kinds of things sort of takes computing a bit more back to its roots.
No thanks, OpenWRT package management is awful. None of the advantages of OpenWRT apply to a machine that has enough resources to run a typical distribution.
Sure, it's no aptitude or pacman, but you have to remember that OpenWRT is a full fledged distribution (package manager and all) that fits on an image of less than 4MB!
>Sure, it's no aptitude or pacman, but you have to remember that OpenWRT is a full fledged distribution (package manager and all) that fits on an image of less than 4MB!
It's nice when resources are a limitation. But that's not the case here.
I asked myself why I was toying around with OpenWRT and DD-WRT when my N66U router can easily run Debian with a 600 MHz MIPS CPU and 256 MB of RAM! Why suffer the pain of a half-Debian when I can have FULL Debian?
I have a Bus Pirate wired up to the router's UART and a JTAG adapter attached to the JTAG port. Now if only I could get the CFE bootloader to talk to my PC so I can boot the kernel over TFTP and run debian installer or a debootstrapped rootfs. =( I can't even get ping!
You've got that slightly backwards. GigE always has auto-MDIX support, slower Ethernet ports might not support it but generally do in all semi-modern hardware.
While that looks a bit more sophisticated than my current setup, it wont fit nor run on my actual router. And to me, that's a deal-breaker.
I like having my setup sub-divided into separate things, in small, dedicated boxes. I don't want to have to run a PC as router in my otherwise neat and tidy home.
I used to do that, mind you, but I don't feel like going back to that anytime soon.
yeah, I bet it's really rough to find space in your house for that. it's a shame, too; I got a quote for $45 each in lots of 20 on that unit. I can easily sell them for triple that price, with pfsense installed, and a cheap plastic housing.
pfsense is basically designed to take a computer and turn it into a high quality router. Very impressive, I recommend you check it out if you get the chance.
Sadly it doesn't have any arm support whatsoever which is extremely disappointing.
The PogoPlug also meets these specs for $20. Even though it has these specs it never reaches close to full speed. I suspect this could hold true for this pc as well.
Some years ago I bought a Seagate Dockstar (that was derived from the first pogoplug imho) for around 30-40$ (the street price was 80-100) and I'm still using it with Debian (nothing too fancy, just samba, transmission bt client and minidlna)
It's a pity Amazon USA doesn't ship electronics to Spain (and while Amazon UK does, the price is much higher). I'll search the 2nd hand market, because it looks like a really great device for that price for little hacks and such :)
This Seagate is quite cheap (24 pound)
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Seagate-STAK200-FreeAgent-GoFlex-Sha...
and it seems to be hackable too even though, according to this article[1] , you can't simply enable ssh (you need a serial connection[2], I think I bought one of this cable for a couple of euros from some chinese site, but I've never used it, it was just as a "brick" insurance for my dockstar :-))
NB of course a raspberry pi is always a great solution for its price
The problem with pi is USB2.0 with 100M NIC located on USB hub. It's a bottleneck for filesharing throughput. So far there's been no good device that offers USB 3.0 with gigabit ethernet. Even the Pogoplug doesn't count because it has bottlenecks elsewhere.
As an "all-in-one" this looks appealing (although the Wandboard Quad is still probably a better deal once you factor in all the additional charges that CompuLab tends to add). If you're looking at something specifically for networking/routing, it might be worth noting that other i.MX6 boards have had GigE performance issues: http://boundarydevices.com/i-mx6-ethernet/
My understanding is that it's not a board issue but rather a flaw in the i.MX6 silicon that would affect any board using it. Freescale claim that it just limits the data rate achievable from the built-in Ethernet, but my experience is that the i.MX6 gets a lot of Ethernet overruns even at much lower data rates, resulting in packet loss and unreliable Ethernet. TCP often works around it but UDP/connectionless protocols are thoroughly broken on this SoC.
I would think twice before using the i.MX6 as a router. A laptop maybe, but not something for which you require/expect reliable network links.
Agreed that these are pretty low-level issues - even testing w/ a separate PCIe controller didn't help much. For routing and hackability I'd go w/ a Mikrotik RouterBoard, or for pure price/performance (and a really polished UI), I'd go w/ Ubiquiti's Edge Routers.
For video this doesn't really work. I tried a bunch of ARM devices to use as my HTPC. Problem is video codecs are not optimized for ARM. I think ARM devices are good enough for 6Mbps videos but software is not there yet.
It's not really that that useful to talk about "ARM devices" as a class as they vary wildly in capabilities and this will lead you to make very misinformed, or in this case, totally wrong statements.
I'm using my Raspberry Pi for showing full HD video on my TV and the files are on my iMac which is connected with the 10/100 Ethernet controller. I have not had any problems watching movies on my TV. Or is it something else you're talking about?
If decoding happens in your Mac (PLEX) then Raspberry doesn't really do anything. Raspberry can not decode a Loseless REMUX MKV from Blu-Ray in my experience. Maybe GPU can help, but I have not seen any ARM board with decent GPU like Nvidia ION.
The GPU in the RasPi is very good. In fact, the system should properly be viewed as a GPU with a CPU grafted onto it. It's common for 1080p24 H.264 to be decoded on it, and there are options to license MPEG2 and VC-1 accelerated decoding as well.
The Pi is an interesting system in that it has a truly impressive GPU (according to the manufacturers "capable of BluRay quality playback"), especially compared to its bottom-shelf CPU. Which means you need everything encoded in h.264 or some other format the GPU can do, but that's achievable.
I have yet to have any issues streaming video to my rPi using OpenELEC [1]. OpenELEC is an embedded linux distribution to run XBMC and has a build optimized for the rPi specifically. The rPi can be a little laggy in the menus at times, but I haven't experienced issues with playback.
I've been running Freescale's OMX video codecs (via Android) on this iMX6 architecture and it's working great. It's all hardware/GPU based and a typical h.264 stream @ 720p doesn't take more than 3-5% CPU.
typical yes, but if you get something that actually uses the software decoder because the hardware decoder doesn't support it, you'll peak to 100% cpu and choppy playback.
You didn't think the software decoder takes 5% cpu did you ? :)
Sadly the rk3188 on-chip controller is only capable of 100mbit. There's a few more (particularly Freescale) units with gigabit, but generally more expensive. Gigabit or USB3 is when these things start to look insanely attractive IMHO (as possibilities to attach e.g. storage to the external bus exist)
The imx6 onboard Ethernet can't really do gigabit but the second Ethernet on this new machine is apparently a PCIe connected Intel chip which is more promising.
yeah but no integrated dual gig ethernet 'n stuff.
so yes the price/feat ratio is higher on TFA.. but it offers something that's hard to find elsewhere right now, for the router+tv+everything box.
Oh hell, another one!? I'm running out of room in my lab for all of these cheap single board computers that I simply can't resist buying! Please make it stop!
Does anyone know if the "two RS232 serial ports" is a typo?
If they are real serial ports it sounds too good to be true. They would make great S1 ntp boxes with GPSDOs. I have a sneaking suspicion that line is a typo and/or they have some whacky interdependence on USB and the lines will be riddled with jitter.
I've programmed the iMX6 serial ports and they are true serial UARTs. No USB funny business going on at all. All ports can also run in RS-485 mode with the correct pin setup.
From the diagram on the company's website, it looks like it does indeed have two RS232 ports - although they both have the "ultra mini connector". See http://utilite-computer.com/web/home for a picture.
I am not convinced that it is not rs232 over USB. I can get a DB9 to USB adapter and plug a GPS into any computer. The PPS will come in over the USB port but the jitter will make the signal useless for timing applications.
I'm working on a project where a customer wants to update an old 16-bit control panel and make it run with a touchscreen, ethernet, and H.264 A/V playback. The control panel talked over RS-485 to a motor control board that sat somewhere else in the machine.
So I took the original code, recompiled it to arm-eabi, and stuck it into an NDK library on Android 4.04. So now I have an Android UI in the foreground talking over JNI to the orignal (unmodified) control panel code in the background. All I needed to do was switch the serial driver code a bit to handle the iMX's UART setup and pthread up the old UI event loop to let it run free underneath Android.
The board I'm using is a custom-designed PCB with an iMX6 Solo (single A9 core), but we used the SABRE-SD reference design from Freescale as our starting point. For proof of concept I used a Boundary SabreLite (now called BD-SL-i.MX6) for $199. That comes with two RS232 ports with DB-9 breakout connectors.
I don't think you'll find a cheaper design than this Utilite, although they really don't have full pricing online yet. I'm guessing the $99 is for the Solo or even SoloLite and the multiple core units will be significantly more than this.
They also don't say how much RAM is on the $99 unit. "Up to 4GB" says nothing about the specs on the cheapest one. I've found I need at least 256MB to run the FSL AOSP build in a minimal form.
You seem concerned about GPS as well, this Android build from Freescale contains a driver for the Atheros Orion GPS chipset over UART. So I think they have a lot you can work with out of the box.
Others have already reported that the asynchronous serial port ("RS232") is a "native" uart (so I assume properly timed interrupts are available).
But: For the serial data of a timing GPS receiver, that fact should be completely pointless if you settle to use one of the GPIO pins (of which I assume that board has several available for your use, or at least some that can be re-purposed from other chip-functions by changing the pin-muxes) for the timing critical PPS signal.
See here for an example to connect the PPS to a raspberry-pi GPIO pin and use that function with ntp, I assume that the example could be transfered easily to the i.MX of the particular board mentioned in this thread.
I see that I should check my posts for repeating figures-of-speech... .But let me try a second (and last time) to persuade you of my arguments! :-)
But I can assure you that it's ok to have a timing GPS connected to a USB serial port, as long as you feed the timing signal to an input that supports proper PPS timestamping. Here's a graph of a Trimble Thunderbolt PPS connected to a PC's parallel port. The serial port the device connects to is a USB dongle, but that's completely irrelevant for the PPS precision.
So, up to this point, there's no speculation about using a USB serial device, while the actual timing signal is connected elsewhere, and here's where I speculate only a little:
I have no reason to assume that the generic PPS on GPIO support would be any worse than the parport- solution, because the implementation is pretty much identical (recording a timestamp in a minimal interrupt routine), especially as it's been shown to work for a conceptually similar CPU.
One caveat from the I.MX6 datasheet: "One of the five UARTs (UART1) supports 8-wire while others four supports 4-wire. This is due to the SoC IOMUX limitation, since all UART IPs are identical." http://cache.freescale.com/files/32bit/doc/data_sheet/IMX6DQ...
The pictures appear to show one port on the front and one on the back (on the left side of each) that match what I find searching for 'ultra mini serial connector', so it doesn't look like a typo.
I looked a little more and it looks like you can plug a RS232 converter into the ultra mini ports but it does the serial connection over the USB bus. This makes the serial ports useless for feeding the computer the Pulse Per Second signal from the GPS. Oh well back to the GPIO pins on the BeagleBone.
For general computing purpose (e.g. HTPC + bittorrent + samba), there are always something missing with these small ARM computers. I am holding on to my AMD E-350, especially with the rapid improvement in the radeon driver lately.
Gigabyte Brix with AMD Kabini is going to be interesting, and possibly very competitive in pricing without sacrificing performance:
Wyse and HP will probably refresh their thin client product lines with the new AMD APUs as well. Re-purposing those if you can get them second-hand can be quite cheap and get you the hardware you want (HP has standard BIOS, Wyse boots SUSE so should work with some fiddling).
As a side note, I have had a lot of fun with thin clients in the past few years due to a variety of interesting x86 architectures (AMD Geode, Transmeta Efficeon, VIA Nano) each with its own little quirks and features (accelerating torrent hash checking and peer handshaking with hardware sha-1 crypto engine and montgomery multiplier on VIA cpu was probably my silliest project).
What I'm looking for is a board with a reasonably fast CPU (preferably dual core), SATA and a a PCI-E or USB3 port for a fast 802.11n/ac wifi adapter. PogoPlug v4 is almost there, but the CPU is too slow to sustain more than ~40MB/s of I/O.
Last month I had a chat with Raspberry Pi's founder Eben, I asked him between or beyond Raspberry Pi and Arduino, did he think there's a chance to birth other new platform? If so, what characteristics this new platform should have?
And he said "There's scope for something very powerful (almost PC-like) in the $70 price range. If I was starting a new venture today, this is where I'd aim."
I really do hope for a world where (if we accept DRM as a given) DRM is more universally accessible. I'd love to get one of these machines to use a media center PC, but I can't do things like watch Netflix/Amazon Prime on them.
(I know I can get a Roku box or similar, but I'm yet to find something that can replicate all the functions I want. An Android machine would be perfect)
Already mentioned, but Android should support the Netflix app. The restrictions being you can't have a "rooted" version of Android. The larger issue to me, is does this include the licenses/use of said hardware decoders? Raspberry Pi doesn't, and it's a pita to use the actual hardware decoding for video. This is of concern to me.
Another issue is that's the base/lowest price? There are already competing boards/kits that may be better priced than this is. Once you add the cost for the faster (quad-core) cpu, and storage, how will this compare to an AMD ITX based solution? Whenever I see a media solution like this, that's always the path I go down. When I'm going to actually spend more than $200 for a full version of an ARM solution, I tend to rethink that an ITX solution with an AMD board/APU seems like a better deal.
I honestly think it will take a bigger name to actually push a decent solution like this. Apple TV hasn't done too well here, and nothing else even comes close to that. Roku and other media hubs are pretty limited, but effective. What I don't like so far are the solutions integrated into the TV... those in the blueray players are a little better, but still, would like to see something more open as a platform. I do think that something like Ouya could be that, but Ouya is targeted at games, and almost no media so far... though I haven't checked the Ouya store in a few weeks.
Android with Netflix/Hulu/Amazon plus XBMC ought to make a very satisfying set top box. If you're doing that though, you might be better off buying an Ouya for the same price, and getting the controller + games as well.
My biggest issues with the Ouya are that the one USB port is USB2 (not 3), and that the options for USB storage are pretty gimped currently. Some apps aren't too bad at being able to use USB storage, others are.. and you can't install anything to secondary storage as it stands.
Definitely true. I stream most of my media (home server, seedbox, or Netflix) so the storage isn't that big a deal. I have an 8gb flash drive for ROMs and haven't come close to filling the internal storage with games.
I wouldn't use the Ouya for serious storage anyway because I couldn't readily access or manipulate that data through the network, but that's just me.
On a side note, if anyone is looking to build something like this, please consider building a low-end device (running on Linux) with 16 or 32 RS-232 ports that I can SSH to...
Other than that, give it two USB ports so that the end user can connect a wireless USB NIC and/or a 3G/cellular card if they need to. Two (at most) 10/100 or 10/100/1000 Ethernet ports would be perfect. Video (VGA/HDMI/whatever) wouldn't be necessary, nor would sound.
Keep it under $200 and I imagine the networking industry will be happy to take them off your hands real quick.
I was trying to remember the name of that one. I've had something of an unfortunate predilection toward small, low-power, general purpose Linux boxen. As a general rule, if I think something looks like a good idea, it is doomed to failure. I really like the looks of this one!
I looked at this market last week and settled on ~$150 x86 FoxConn NanoPCs instead. Why? Mostly time saving worrying about driver support and cross-compiling non-x86 kernels. Also, they can be stuck on the back of a monitor to stay out of sight. Google ChromeOS devices were also suggested for consideration but written off due a combination of cost and the perceived risk of rapid deprecation.
I do R&D for laboratory machines. We're trying to break away from the clunky old components (which also almost always use Windows). I started with the Pi but it was too underpowered. Now I'm using hardkernel's odroid u2, which has been a decent experience. But Hardkernel's support is spotty, site is shady, and shipping takes forever. Plus the dual ethernet and SSD are exactly what I was looking for (using usb replacements now which aren't as good). I used an Atom but had trouble with video drivers in Debian. Crossing my fingers on this one. Will pre-order if they offer. I'd love it if someone could offer touchscreens that would easily plug into it, as this has been tough for me.
One of the issues with arm is that its a whole separate world of compatibility and performance from x86— it's easy to get a order of magnitude less performance accidentally if you're not careful with what you're buying. I'm sure the same is true for x86 too, but people coming from that background have the experience to avoid it.
I'm really looking forward to getting a Cortex-A57 based U2 like device, aarch64 sounds fun.
Actually one is on the way and I'm hopeful. I found the odroid to be incredibly fast and the 2gb ram it provides is great since the machine runs a gui, web server, and other various things.
Looking at the back of this unit some of the ports seem awfully close together. With that many it might have been better to stack some of them vertically vs. trying to lay them all out side by side?
How exactly it will manage to squeeze ssd into this price tag? Something don't add up. Otherwise a welcome evolution that is even developer station ready at the higher end.
Since the price is "starting from $99" then i assume the base model will be without SSD, and either allow you to add your own or use microSD card / USB to boot.
Something adaptive that you'll probably fidget with anyway vs something that is hiding behind a sofa cushion most of the time and needs direct line of sight to work.
While it's more expensive the native gigabit ethernet ports are nice to have. I use my RPi as a dev server/file server and I sometimes have problems with the USB based ethernet going brain dead and needing a USB bus reset (I keep a USB wifi adapter plugged in so I can still SSH in). I don't really fault the RPi since I'm not using it for what its designed for (hell, the ARM CPU is actually the coprocessor to the GPU[1]).
I think I'll pick one up. It will make for a much better dev server/Time Capsule clone/AirPlay server clone/router than my PI, and then I'll have a free RPi to use as a micro-controller.
I have one of these (mk802ii to be exact) as well as a raspberry pi. I run lubuntu on the mk802 and it does what I need it to do. However, that doesn't include fast networking and/or video playback.
Personally I would happily fork out an extra $50 to get 2x gb ethernet and decent video performance.
I wonder why CompuLab chose an ARM SoC over a recent Atom-based one. The Atom-based Clover Trail SoC, for example, is competitive with the Tegra 3 in terms of power consumption and performance. And of course an x86-based system can run a lot more software out of the box.
This sounds pretty handy as a replacement for an old tower I have hooked up to my tv. The one thing that the RPi offers that I would love to see on this is gpio access. Arduino tethering is fine but I love having really easy access for quickly hacking.
Graphics Processing Unit supporting OpenGL ES 1.1 and 2.0, OpenVG 1.1, and OpenCL EP
I'm curious about what level of output this GPU can do -- are we looking at an OUYA competitor or bitcoin-miner, or is it only powerful enough for basic desktop acceleration?
Going on the MX6 specs[1] and GFLOPS alone[2], it should be a bit faster than Ouya's Tegra for the cheapest option and handily beat it on the more expensive models. Bitcoin mining is out of the question - it's basically a tablet-class GPU.
GFLOPS isn't the whole picture of course, but my Google-fu is failing me at the moment.
By the way, bitcoin can no longer be efficiently mined on GPUs since the network hashrate has been increasing tremendously with ASICs (tenfold growth in the past 6 months and continuing steadily)
Alas, the Vivante GC2000 cannot do bitcoin mining (not that you'd want to, anyway). The GPU can indeed do do OpenCL, but the maximum kernel size is limited whereas double-SHA1 requires quite a lot of operations.
It's more aimed at computer vision applications such as image filters for robotics.
Yes. You can actually use OpenCL on the i.mx6. It's pretty cool. That said, there is still quite some room for improvement in the drivers (see my other post above). It is also more limited than desktop-class GPUs (CL embedded profile), so don't expect to be able to run all current OpenCL code unmodified.
One of the many we've seen over the past 12 months. the iMX6 (NDA-free hardware reference) and dual gigabit make it stand out, but it's hardly revolutionary.
Feels similar to Tonido, but fancier looking. Having been using the Tonido for a few weeks as a development web-server and it has been pretty good so far.
