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slipshod ARM's infrastructure is.

That and the quazi-open status of most chips is what kills it for me. I had a SheevaPlug years ago that was great. It ran my house's HVAC and web server and did some light downloading. The uBoot was fairly straight forward and the Kirkwood chipset made its way into Debian. I never had a reason to replace it so I didn't.

Recently I got a CubieBoard since it billed itself as "Open Source Hardware". It was shit. Nothing on it was open. uBoot was a mess. It only ran specific versions of Ubuntu that didn't have anything 'opensourced' from a Chinese manufacturer. It overheated and shut itself down constantly. Then had the same experience with a OLinoXino and Wandboard.

With what I spent on useless ARM paperweight I wish I just got myself an old low powered embedded x86 board. BIOS and UEFI may not be all that, but for the most part it's consistent.

I've held out hope for years for someone to introduce a cheap ARM laptop that had a 12 hour run time.

Price wise, try Olimex offerings, Olinuxino range A13, A10 and A20. Equivalent to RPi, if not better, are called Lime. The A10 Lime has SATA, 1 USB OTG and A8 CPU. The A20 Lime uses A7 instead. Non Lime have other features, like 1GB RAM (more pricey than RPi).

Cubieboard 4 (CC-A80). There's some stuff at Sunxi Linux page. A10-OlunuXino-LIME as well.

My SheevaPlug is still easier to use than both of them.

I followed this guy and used one of these to connect and got from bare metal to single stepping blinking an LED. I leave the rest as an exercise for the dedicated student ;-)

Most of the competitors to the pi are junk. They're unsupported, not open source.

The Raspberry Pi is not open source hardware, it never has been. You can't even get the gerbers nor full documentation on the Broadcom BCM2835 SoC, let alone the full design files.

In contrast, competing boards like Beaglebone Black and Olimex's OLinuXino range like the A10-OLinuXino-LIME, A20-OLinuXino-LIME and A20-OLinuXino-LIME2 are fully open source hardware with all the information being provided. In the best tradition of open source, everyone is welcome to make their own derivatives using these open materials. All four boards are also substantially more powerful and flexible than the RasPi, very well made and fully supported.

The Raspberry Pi Foundation has declined to make the RasPi open source hardware despite years of requests from the community.

Most of the competitors to the pi are junk. They're unsupported, not open source.

The Raspberry Pi is not open source hardware, it never has been. You can't even get the gerbers nor full documentation on the Broadcom BCM2835 SoC, let alone the full design files.

In contrast, competing boards like Beaglebone Black and Olimex's OLinuXino range like the A10-OLinuXino-LIME, A20-OLinuXino-LIME and A20-OLinuXino-LIME2 are fully open source hardware with all the information being provided. In the best tradition of open source, everyone is welcome to make their own derivatives using these open materials. All four boards are also substantially more powerful and flexible than the RasPi, very well made and fully supported.

The Raspberry Pi Foundation has declined to make the RasPi open source hardware despite years of requests from the community.

Most of the competitors to the pi are junk. They're unsupported, not open source.

The Raspberry Pi is not open source hardware, it never has been. You can't even get the gerbers nor full documentation on the Broadcom BCM2835 SoC, let alone the full design files.

In contrast, competing boards like Beaglebone Black and Olimex's OLinuXino range like the A10-OLinuXino-LIME, A20-OLinuXino-LIME and A20-OLinuXino-LIME2 are fully open source hardware with all the information being provided. In the best tradition of open source, everyone is welcome to make their own derivatives using these open materials. All four boards are also substantially more powerful and flexible than the RasPi, very well made and fully supported.

The Raspberry Pi Foundation has declined to make the RasPi open source hardware despite years of requests from the community.

A good middle ground for 45 Euros (about USD$56) is the OLinuXino LIME2:

• Dual core Cortex-A7 ARM @ 1GHz
• 1GB DDR3 RAM
• Dual core Mali 400 GPU (open source friendly)
• 2D accelerator and Video accelerator
• SATA
• USB 2.0
• Gigabit Ethernet
• HDMI (1080p)
• LCD connector
• MicroSD connector
• 160 GPIOs

I dont care about Broadcom's politics. I cant change them and the Pi has been incredibly useful to me in learning and teaching electronics. I would love for the whole thing to be open, but its just not happening, so we must accept that the net gain from the PI is still a benefit to humanity, no matter how slightly 'impure' the ideology. Most of the device is 'open'.

Yes, but for some reason I find hard to fathom it attracts attention away from other products that would be just as good at fulfilling the same goals and *are* completely open. I have no doubt that if, say, Olimex's OLinuxIno sold in similar quantities to the RPi it would be available at about the same price, rather than a slightly higher for a much better board, as it is currently.

Would you mind tell me who are the competitors? I am pretty interested in alternative products if any at a competitive price.

I'm personally a fan of Olimex's boards. They're open hardware, and tend to have superior boards to the RPi at only slightly higher prices. E.g. their entry level board (details here) is £28 versus about £20 for a RPi model A. It has a much faster processor (1GHz superscalar Cortex A8 vs 700MHz previous-generation single-dispatch ARM11, so probably about twice as fast), more GPIOs (74 pins vs RPi's 26), USB-OTG, audio-in, RTC, plus uses a processor that does not rely on an undocumented proprietary DSP to boot. And did I mention it's open hardware, so you could build your own if wanted to?

I'd be interested in seeing a computer board with usb, gpio and hdmi and audio that runs linux for about the same price. Got a link?

Has all that, but $75: A20-OLinuXino-MICRO

One of my favorites out there today is the A10-OLinuXino-LIME. ...

The Beagle Bone was good in its day, but it is kind of over the hill. The processor is underpowered compared to other ARMs

Just to be clear, the A10-OLinuXino-LIME, BeagleBone white and BeagleBone Black all contain a single Cortex-A8 core, and the TI AM3359 runs at the same 1GHz speed in the BBB as the Allwinner A10 does in the LIME.

The original BeagleBone (white) ran its AM3359 at 720MHz so its CPU performance is a bit less, but the BeagleBone Black (BBB) superceded it a year ago and at a much lower price. As a result, the reasonable current-day comparison is between A10-OLinuXino-LIME and BBB, and on CPU power their similar speed Cortex-A8 cores make them pretty much identical.

I have all of these boards and many other similar ones, and my assessment is that BBB is much more capable for embedded projects because of its additional dual realtime 200MHz PRU cores (which are quite unrivalled), while the A10-OLinuXino-LIME is more suitable as an extremely low end desktop-style "computer" because of its dual USB2 host sockets and rather more capable MALI-400 GPU.

This assessment doesn't change when the just-released A20-OLinuXino-LIME is brought into the comparison, except that the dual Cortex-A7 cores in the A20 make it a far better general purpose "computer" than its A10 sibling for a mere 3 euro more in price.

Far more OI, better all the way around.

https://www.olimex.com/Product...

Most of the functionality of Improv is available in an existing 30-euro board, with the only major exception being form factor and the ability to plug into a baseboard for memory expansion.

Since that product is open source hardware, extending its design with a DDR3 memory connector could serve as a useful stop-gap. At heart, it's exactly what you were aiming for in specs, but in the "wrong" form factor. Given the price, it's hard to complain.

Since Olimex produces a few of their OSHW products in a "SOM" form factor (separate CPU modules and baseboard) and the company has been extremely open and supportive of the OSHW community for a long time, wouldn't it be in both your interest and theirs to work together directly in developing an EOMA-68 system?

Their current A10-OLinuXino-LIME and -4GB products are selling like hotcakes and they hit the price point that you were aiming for. Although "hardware is hard" and requires juggling a lot of facts and figures as you explained, Olimex has the hardware skills and production systems to make interesting things happen fast, and they've demonstrated their juggling abilities repeatedly.

I think it would be very beneficial to the OSHW community if there were some direct collaboration with that company towards your very worthwhile project, and it's not out of line with what they already do.

Since Olimex produces a few of their OSHW products in a "SOM" form factor (separate CPU modules and baseboard) and the company has been extremely open and supportive of the OSHW community for a long time, wouldn't it be in both your interest and theirs to work together directly in developing an EOMA-68 system?

Their current A10-OLinuXino-LIME and -4GB products are selling like hotcakes and they hit the price point that you were aiming for. Although "hardware is hard" and requires juggling a lot of facts and figures as you explained, Olimex has the hardware skills and production systems to make interesting things happen fast, and they've demonstrated their juggling abilities repeatedly.

I think it would be very beneficial to the OSHW community if there were some direct collaboration with that company towards your very worthwhile project, and it's not out of line with what they already do.

I was thinking of things like the olinuxino which is cheaper than a Pi and seemed to be building a fanbase when a change from mailing list to web forum chilled the community. Or the Beagle Bone which is more open and technically superior, but has a nasty habit of throwing up problems no one else seems to have ever seen (according to google, that is). Or the Fox G20 which is a nice board and seems to have a good community, but isn't generally well known since the bulk of the community round it is still Italian.

back to the beaglebone black, it seems. its fully open source (today), it runs both android and linux and has onboard flash enough so that you don't need sdcards (but can still use them).

So are the OLinuXinos, besides some of them having twice the RAM for those who need it.

PS: feta bucks!

I often wonder why Olimex don't seem to ever get any /. love. The A13-OLinuxIno Micro is available with for 35 euros (very similar price), and has been available for many months now. There are also options with higher specs for €45 and €55. Plus it's an open hardware design, and a fully open-source software platform (no binary blob drivers).

You can get a perfectly good little Linux running computer for $50 and you're whining about it? The Raspberry Pi Foundation was set up with the goal of getting more children to do programming at home and in school. That is their purpose. The board is as cheap as it is partly because Broadcom are supporting the initiative. I don't know what you mean by "the device doesn't work right". Of course it works right. Hundreds of thousands of people are using them.

These boards are similarly priced, have a processor that's about twice as fast, twice as much RAM, much better GPIO support, and a fully open source hardware and software environment that was achieved without selling anyone's soul to Broadcom. But because the Pi was set up by people who are good at PR, it gets all the attention.

Exactly. Chips with no MMU (Cortex-M4 et al) cannot run real linux because an MMU is a fundamental requirement for real linux (or any other serious operating system). Otherwise, Cortex-M4 is ARMv7 just like Cortex-A8.

OTOH, Freescale i.MX233 is only ARMv5 and is VERY lightweight, but does have an MMU. As a result you can run real linux on it.

In the above I use the expression "real linux". There is also a bastardized linux called uClinux which can run without an MMU. Of necessity, there can be no memory protection between processes, and there can be no fork. There is a vfork to allow multitasking, but any program which fork's (and that's practically every non-trivial program) has to be customized compared to the version for real linux. (See Q2.5 in the above link)

Largely irrelevant, but the actual temp range according to their FAQ is:
What is the operating temperature range of A13-OLinuXino-WIFI?
The board works in the commercial temeprature range 0+70C

Check out Olimex: https://www.olimex.com/dev/index.html, particularly the upcoming A13-OLinuXino. My understanding is that they are making hardware that is vaguely similar to the Raspberry Pi, but with full documentation.

If you're working on Linux, then just download gcc-arm-linux-gnueabi with your package manager, or build from source. If you're working on Windows, it's a little more complex; I have used OpenOCD.

You can order the STM32F4Discovery from Digikey, Mouser, Arrow, Avnet, Element14, Newark, etc. They're pretty widely available.

Olimex has some good references in the software section of their USB JTAG page.

Olimex is aiming for a EUR 40-50 Cortex device for release in September, ~4x more powerful than the Raspberry Pi.

http://www.olimex.com/dev/a13-olinuxino.html

For my RPi, I dusted off my soldering skills and built a clone of
http://www.olimex.com/dev/mod-rtc.html

I'd have thought that Eastern Europe would also have been a viable option. For example, Olimex are already a big player in the 'cheap dev board' space and they do their manufacturing in Bulgaria.

If you want to do low-level hacking, like on Arduino, but you'd like some more speed and memory, and have ethernet and USB, it's probably better to look for a simpler ARM based microcontroller.

These guys have some nice boards (click ARM on the left): http://olimex.com/dev/index.html

The Pi doesn't have much user programmable I/O, and it's also harder to access SoC features from the application, or get really accurate timing (Linux isn't very good at real-time stuff).

It's been a few years since I've had anything made, but at the time Olimex in Bulgaria seemed to be the cheapest for one-off stuff.
Places in North America wanted too much cash, and the Chinese outfits weren't worthwhile unless you ordered a bunch of stuff.

The one exception was.... advanced had a deal for students, not sure if that still exists. (I think it was $33 for a small double sided - normally you need to buy four, but a student could get a single). I'm not a student so it doesn't apply anyway.

Me too! This is totally, positively, awesome. I looked through the code and it should port super easy to any system that can provide a libusb-like host interface to the USB bus. Which isn't exactly tough. First I'm going to use it to drive a display using an Olimex LPC-E2468 running plain uCLinux just to check it out; then I plan to port it to my own (MIT license) networking RTOS. This is exactly what I have been looking for!

http://www.pad2pad.com/
A printed circuit board manufacturer providing all your custom printed circuit board

http://www.olimex.com/
Electronic design and PCB sub-contract assembly

http://www.eurocircuits.com/
PCB manufacturing; verified a la carte on demand specifications ...also...

http://www.emachineshop.com/
Machine shop to create custom parts, products and prototypes

http://www.tapplastics.com/
TAP Plastics specialize in fiberglass resins and fabrics for fiberglass repair, plastic containers, and custom fabrication

(non-affiliation yadda yadda goes here)

There are already a number of small-amount manufacturers, as you call them. Some are prototyping shops, some will build any number of items for you.

http://www.emachineshop.com/
http://www.tapplastics.com/
http://www.pad2pad.com/
http://www.olimex.com/
http://www.eurocircuits.com/
(no affiliation to any of them)

But you have to supply a sellable idea that's not been done yet, and bear the cost of iterating the bugs out of the design.

Also, and more to the point, the burden of IP is on your shoulders; at least, they're just punching out parts on your behalf and AFAIK that's not been contested in court as of yet.

This is like the 100th PIC-based web server. Do these guys never think to see if someone else has already done a PIC web server before writing their own? Hard to be sure since I can find mention of the dimensions, but this one looks to be about the same size. This one's been around for ages. And there plenty more. There's even this mini web server/tcp-ip stack for the PIC that compiles to a remarkable 30 bytes of PIC code.

Nothing to see here. Move along...

Go to digikey.com and you can buy a bunch of different ARM micros for less than $10 in single units (search for Luminary, AT91SAM or LPC2). You can quite easily make your own PCB.

Or you can go to http://www.olimex.com/dev/index.html and find a lot of different pre-built header boards for $25 or so. For $10 to $50 you can add a JTAG debugger from olimex or amonex. All the dev software is free: http://www.olimex.com/dev/index.html and openocd.

Whatever way you choose, there are plenty that will give you change from $100.

Go to digikey.com and you can buy a bunch of different ARM micros for less than $10 in single units (search for Luminary, AT91SAM or LPC2). You can quite easily make your own PCB.

Or you can go to http://www.olimex.com/dev/index.html and find a lot of different pre-built header boards for $25 or so. For $10 to $50 you can add a JTAG debugger from olimex or amonex. All the dev software is free: http://www.olimex.com/dev/index.html and openocd.

Whatever way you choose, there are plenty that will give you change from $100.

Wow ... Great ... But this sort of thing has been available for ages from several vendors! And at reasonable prices as well!
See http://www.olimex.com/dev/index.html for a list of various processors supported!
I have used Olimex boards in the past. Not a bad way (and cheap!) to jump start a project!

A quick Google search will find many other vendors of cheap prototyping kits from many different companies. (Although ... many are reselling the OLIMEX stuff.)

Mind you, the source is from a country that may scare your average paranoid homeland security guy.

Learn how to make your own PCBs, it really isn't that hard and not as expensive as you might think! try http://www.olimex.com/pcb/index.html

Agree with the PIC vs the AVR. It's the same as the i386 vs m68k... One is a disgusting kluge, the other is an elegant architecture.

In this modern age, though, I'd ditch both and go for the ARM - the kits aren't that much more these days (eg: from $30), and you can do a *lot* more with them... Obviously, the more you pay (up to ~$200) the more-capable the board you get...

Simon

You can get some cheap ARM based processors theses days, e.g. with 64K of flash for a few bucks -

http://www.olimex.com/dev/sam7-p64.html

Thumb code is pretty dense, and the core is pretty high performance at 60Mhz.
Plus you can put the core in an ASIC with a hardcore if you have the volumes. And it's damn small too. The downside is that you don't have the resources to run a real OS.

ARM7s are probably overkill for some stuff, so you can get a microcontrollers down to a PIC at a few Mhz with a few hundred bytes of code space and integrated A-Ds.

Or if you want a TCP/IP stack, you're better off with a bigger procesor. We don't know what this box needs to do. Maybe it needs a TCP/IP stack for example. The point at which I'd switch to a BSD or uClinux kernel is fairly low, and that needs a more FLASH/RAM than you can fit on a microcontroller. At which point, you're in a very different price class.

Not only is it not the first time, there are even homebrew, opensource versions.

Try the OpenEEG Project. You can even partial or complete hardware from Olimex, a circuit board manufacturer.

I'm waiting for someone to write a Winamp or WMP plugin that takes input from an OpenEEG feed :)

Nice links. And here's some karma whoring (not that me needs it).

Creative people and projects:
- http://www.diyaudio.com/ (DIY audio equipment forum)
- http://sound.westhost.com/projects.htm (audio stuff schematics)
- http://headwize.com/projects/index.htm (DIY headphone stuff)
- http://www.hauptwerk.co.uk/pedalboard.html (DIY MIDI pedalboards, just add keyboards and software and you have a MIDI organ)
- http://www.diysubwoofers.org/ (what it says)
- http://www.plasmatweeter.de/eng_plasma.htm (DIY ionic tweeter)

Places to buy stuff:
- http://www.newark.com/ (major electronics retailer)
- http://www.mouser.com/ (major electronics retailer)
- http://www.tubesandmore.com/ (components for vintage electronics)

Getting stuff made:
- http://www.olimex.com/ (cheap PCBs)

For electronic parts, you just can't possibly leave out the Electronic Goldmine. They've been around a long time, and in my experience offer the best surplus stuff you can find while charging the least they can get away with. Their bagged assortments are good, and their Electronic Surprise box is actually a good deal if you don't mind sorting through a box of jumbled parts. They also carry many standard components to round out whatever project you're doing.

If you ever want to build a CNC machine, check out TurboCNC. It's "shareware" in the sense that you are free to download and use the fully-functional, nagless program...and what a program it is. TurboCNC 3 has been used by thousands of hobby CNC'ers, and just recently TurboCNC 4 was released with lots of rewritten code, vastly improved user interface, and better stepping rates. This program will pulse stepper motors up to 30KHz on a junker 486 computer with parallel port, depending on the timer hardware. Version 4 adds Pentium timer support, resulting in pulse rates beyond 100,000Hz. The price rose from $20 to $60 with the release of the new version, but that price is if you feel like supporting Dave and his team, and will get you the full sourcecode to the program.

For cheap PCBs: nobody can beat Olimex. Yeah, they're based out of Bulgaria, and the first setup of payment can be a little tricky. But you'll get a double-sided board with plated holes, solder mask, and silkscreen...about $25 for 6" x 4" board. What's even better is that you can send them a number of files, then give them a sketch of how you want the boards arranged and repeated in the 6"x4" area...and they will panelize and cut them out for you, free. That's impressive if you've ever checked out the costs of doing something similar with other PCB houses. Many of them give the impression that it's like cheating to try to get more than one board out of the standard board size, even if your design only requires a few square inches. With Olimex I've gotten up to ten boards for that cheap price. It kind of makes you wonder what other ways you can use outsourcing, instead of whining about it and trying to make the government give your old job back.

By the way, this list has a long way to go before it's the most exhaustive I've seen. For the ultimate in DIY electronics articles and links, try ePanorama, it's been around a long time.

Yeah, acid-etching is great for simple designs, but anything requiring really small traces is out of the question. Double-sided boards and SMDs can be a bit of a trick, too, especially when you do both double-sided and surface mount.

There are tons of great, cheap PCB manufacturers out there, though. This Pad2Pad service is really only good (IMHO) if you have a lot (i.e. hundreds or thousands) of boards being made, and you can get them to assemble the majority of each board.

Olimex is a decent place to order from. 4PCB is also good, even more so if you're a student.

Also, if the board is small, you can possibly panel it to save some money (depends on how many you're making, etc.).

I prefer to fire up Eagle's Cadsoft (under Linux!) and generate my own gerber and excellon files. I can then send these files to ANY board house I choose.

When creating 2 layer boards and when I don't need super fine spacing I use Olimex (the lowest cost 2 layer with silk screen and solder mask pcb house I have EVER seen!). When I need 4 more or layers I go with the more expensive PCB Express.

Although I think emachine shop sounds great, you can get much cheaper smaller runs of aluminum panels from Front Panel Express. Their prices are very low and their quality is amazing!

- Rod

Where loved ones are remembered: Memoriam.org

I'll second that! The MSP430 is a really fun MCU and easy(fast) to get started with.
You'll get a devkit (with JTAG programmer) from Olimex for cheap (~20$).
And it works fine with MSPGCC.
This page holds your hand during your first gdb session.

I've used this setup in several projects with no real problems.

Ah yes. That's based on LinuxDA. That has been around for a while. Essentially it's a very old port of uCLinux designed for systems with an MMU. The hardware is on par with an old PalmIIIx or PalmV.

There was an emulator for LinuxDA floating around, what's funny about LinuxDA is that it's not Open Source at all. And the software, when I tried it a couple years ago, was quite buggy. Perhaps they have fixed it up. But the hardware for it is almost the same as it was a couple years ago. I'm surprised the company is still in business.

If anyone is interested in the specs the PowerPlay Vs can be had for $100 US ($130 CA). It has a voice recorder, stereo headset, SD/MMC slot(used as part of the mp3 player and voice recorder function), really old ass 16MHz DragonBall processor (the one with 4 shade grayscale, not the newer one with 16 shade). 2Mb flash for the OS and 8MB of ram.

You can essentially get the same hardware as a refurb from PalmOne for about $50-$60 as PalmIIIx or PalmV. And since the Linux on it is "funny" and nothing about it is open sourced, it doesn't really offer any advantages over a PalmOS based device. It's too bad really. :(

The reason I was excited about this Zire is that I know for certain that the Intel ARM (PXA) in it has a good MMU and there are known linux ports for that processor. If you just want to play with the processor Gumstix is a possible choice. Of course the Gumstix board, as cheap as it is for a dev board is actually more expensive than this Zire. Also the Gumstix has no useful I/O ports beyond two serial ports and a USB slave.

Another option for Linux PDA might be a Sony Clie. They are using Motorola ARMs in them, but I do not know if Linux has been ported to this processor and if this processor has a full MMU. (There are ARMs that don't have an MMU, like ARM thumb).

If you're looking for very small quantities, overseas vendors (relative to the USA) are the only way to go. I have used both of these, with excellent results:

Olimex - Bulgaria
MyroPCB - China

Some others that I haven't used personally:
CustomPCB - Malaysia
PCB Pool - Ireland

The only downside to these is the rather long shipping times.