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A $25 PC On a USB Stick
KPexEA writes with this excerpt from geek.com:
"[Game developer David] Braben has developed a tiny USB stick PC that has an HDMI port on one end and a USB port on the other. You plug it into an HDMI socket and then connect a keyboard via the USB port, giving you a fully functioning machine running a version of Linux. The cost? $25. The hardware being offered is no slouch either. It uses a 700MHz ARM11 processor coupled with 128MB of RAM and runs OpenGL ES 2.0, allowing for decent graphics performance with 1080p output confirmed. ... We can expect it to run a range of Linux distributions, but it looks like Ubuntu may be the distro it ships with. That means it will handle web browsing, run office applications, and give the user a fully functional computer to play with as soon as it's plugged in. All that and it can be carried in your pocket or on a key chain."
Eat your heart out, OLPC. This is 10 PC's per pocket.
If the HDMI is on one end, and the USB is on the other, is this thing battery powered?
"His name was James Damore."
I'd love one of these if it had networking as well. It would be a great thing to have a portable computer that could fill in for a emergency terminal, not just a dedicated machine with no connectivity, I guess I could carry a hub and such too but then the usefulness of having it on my keychain is gone.
Not quite as capable, in certain respects, as the Gumstix line of similarly sized ARM boards; but, on the other hand, you'll be lucky to walk away with change from $200 after getting your main board and an I/O expander if needed if you go that route. I wonder where the cost delta comes from?
One minor nit, this system doesn't appear to have any onboard networking(aside from the USB port which, from the picture of it connected to the B port of a hub, would appear to be one of those 'OTG' master or slave jobbies, which could easily enough act as a USB CDC or RNDIS connection to a host PC(which is kind of a waste for a single user; but a basic cheapy desktop loaded with USB cards could easily act as a gateway/fileserver/host for CPU intensive or x86 only programs over an X tunnel for a classroom full of the things)). I have to wonder if a "Flash drive sized" computer that basically doesn't work unless connected to a powered USB hub and a USB network adapter or CDC host PC might be rather less useful than would be a "pack of playing cards sized" computer that actually has a NIC and at least enough USB ports to support a mouse and keyboard(and ideally one extra for miscellaneous purposes)...
froody...
throw in a network interface, and I'll buy enough for a beowulf cluster.
~men are from earth. women are from earth. deal with it.~
If the idea is to plug in a keyboard, then why does it have a male USB plug, and not a female ?
Actually the article says something slightly different.
You plug it into a HDMI socket and then connect a keyboard via the USB port giving you a fully functioning machine running a version of Linux.
The writer specifically distinguishes between the HDMI port, which is plugged in, and the USB port, which is connected.
In the picture it looks like the device is connected to some sort of powered hub. The keyboard is also connected to the same hub. This is also likely where the device gets its power. What I can't tell from the picture is whether that is a simple powered hub or something more complex.
'The tyrant will always find pretext for his tyranny.' - Aesop's Fables
Stop procrastinating and gives us our damn Elite 4 already.
If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
The HDMI spec requires a 55mA supply at 5V. This seems to be enough to power this little computer.
It might not work with a lot of usb devices without a hub that has external power but a keyboard should be possible.
Maybe he developed this hardware so everyone can play Elite 4 when it comes out? (Elite 4 is proving to be the next Duke Nukem....)
Agrajag: "Oh no, not again!"
Doesn't this have the possibility of replacing the computers in the computer lab? A PC for every kid that is their own person machine. All they do is plug it in when they go into the lab. Of course, troubleshooting problems on these things might be a nightmare, but you'll have that.
Hopefully it will include a C64 emulator and Elite
By the time you've added a keyboard, mouse, display, a decent sized SD card for storage and/or WiFi connectivity so you can actually get data in or out you're probably closer to the cost of a netbook or OLPC, but have lost the benefit of portability.
I guess that a school could provide fixed monitors/keyboards in classrooms, so kids could sit down and plug in their £25 dongle, rather than entrust them with a £150 netbook (and suffer the inevitable loss and damage) - but then (a) the computers could only be used in suitably equipped classrooms and (b) you might as well fix the computers and give kids an even cheaper USB drive to carry around.
Yes, the kids could use their dongle computers at home but its going to be a while before you can assume that everybody has an HDMI TV, and unless kids have a HDMI-equipped TV in their own room (If they do, its good odds that they already have a PC anyway) they'd still have to persuade the rest of the family to miss The X Factor so that they could work on their project.
Nothing wrong with cheap-as-chips single board PCs, but I do wonder why people are so obsessed with building them into wall-warts and USB dongles, when t something slightly bigger (with more room for connectors and space for a couple internal USB devices or a micro HD) would be far more flexible and portable.
Also from TFA:
Braben argues that education since we entered the 2000s has turned towards ICT which teaches useful skills such as writing documents in a word processor, how to create presentations, and basic computer use skills. But that has replaced more computer science-like skills such as basic programming and understanding the architecture and hardware contained in a computer.
Strongly agree - but there's a second string to that, in that ICT has not only supplanted "proper" computer science (which did, once upon a time, exist as an optional high school subject in the UK) but has also tended to pull computers out of maths and science. I've encountered maths teachers who thought, for example, that kids "did" spreadsheets in ICT (they did, but only to turn out pie charts for the annual cat & dog survey - when faced with a fairly trivial modelling exercise they used calculators to fill in the spreadsheet). "ICT" was responsible for many BBC micros being ripped out of subject classrooms and thrown into skips to be replaced by the new ICT (PC) suites. Heck, I'm not advocating it, but even today you could make good use of a good old Beeb (bristling with inputs and outputs and easy to program) in a science classroom!
Overall, I'd welcome the demise of "ICT*" as a curriculum subject (about as sensible as having "handwriting" as a separate subject) on the two conditions that the other subjects were given the necessary time and support to teach IT skills in context, and there was a CS option at age 16-18 (with some sort of "teaser" in the compulsory maths curriculum).
Seems to me that these micro-PCs would be good for the latter, but effectively tied to the computer lab.
(*Note - the 'C' stands for "Communications" and was mandated by the UK Department of Redundancy Department in the UK, who, presumably, didn't think that 'Communication' had anything to do with 'Information' . Figures.)
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
lose the webcam and add a nic. then tape that thing to the back of a monitor, boom, thin client.
lose != loose
It already claims to do 1080p30 H.264.
You may need to use PS3MediaServer (or similar) to deliver high-bitrate non-H.264, though, because the processor is somewhat anemic for video decoding...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Here is some more info I got from a mail list I follow:
> > 1) How long do you think it will be before the boards become
> > available?
>
> I'd say three or four months. As you can see from the screenshots, we
> have usable Linux, but we're waiting to get final versions of the the
> chip from our supplier.
>
> > 2) Are there any plans for a version with onboard ethernet?
>
> I don't think we're likely to do onboard Ethernet; we will have an
> onboard 3-port USB hub so people can add an external adapter.
>
> > 3) Are there any plans for a version with onboard wifi?
>
> Yes. The final version (though maybe not the first distributables)
> will have onboard WiFi (probably 802.11n) in the price point.
>
> > 4) What are the power requirements, both under load and at rest?
>
> At rest I'd say 50mW (we could trim this if it was really important,
> but it gets a bit fiddly below this point), under serious load
> (original XBox class graphics or 1080p30 H.264), 700mW.
I apologize if I didn't make it clear: Because of the enthusiasm for televised entertainment, penetration of basic CRT TVs with composite or RF ins has reached(at least on the neighborhood level) down to people who live in shacks and have highly intermittent access to electricity siphoned off the nearest utility pole and no running water.
Now that flat panels have gotten cheap(and a combination of shipping costs, consumer tastes, and environmental concerns have largely eliminated the CRT TV from the first world retail channel), you will find that many low income households have a TV(almost definitely capable of composite in, if purchased in the last couple of years, or going forward, probably a cheap and nasty LCD with an HDMI port). They've already gone out and purchased one. It's a sunk cost. This hypothetical board would be capable of exploiting the money already spent. I do think that they pared it down a bit too far in terms of I/O; but between composite and HDMI/DVI, video output doesn't seem too serious an issue(the only issue would be lack of VGA-HDMI is electrically compatible with DVI-D; but does not include the analog signals broken out by a full DVI connector).
...than designing cheap low-end computers ? Like releasing freaking Elite IV already ???
get your ass back to work !
How is this thing different than a Gumstix? Perhaps the price which is about 10% less, but on the other hand it is has yet to be sold so we don't know the price. And as for fitting a beowulf into a shoebox, well Gumstix was there first
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
I told people years ago that some day we'd walk into a drugstore and buy PCs next to the cigarette lighters and cheapo fans.
It just seems like a logical conclusion to the "cheaper, faster" trend. I started thinking this way in the late 90s. Prior to that, it was always $2000 for a PC. They just kept getting faster. Once they got fast enough to do video it seemed like there was not much more need for speed. It seems like price competition really heated up after that.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
It has a micro-SD slot.
Put identity in the browser.
There are many little ARM boards, some of which are priced as low as $39 in quantity 1. These are useful for applications where the ATMega in an Arduno is too limiting.
The choice of peripherals these guys made is unusual. With a USB port and an HDMI port, you can build a game machine, which is probably what they had in mind. Most such boards are more suited to embedded applications, and have I/O - digital TTL ports, Ethernet, LCD drive, etc.
A problem with these minimal machines is deciding what to put on them. The lowest-price devices tend to have too little of some resource and too much of something you don't need. This leads to a proliferation of little embedded boards with slightly different options, which runs the cost back up.
For hobbyists, the Leaflands Maple may be interesting. It's an ARM board in the Arduno form factor. It's compatible with Arduno daughter boards ("shields"), and has some commonality with the Arduno development environment. Not enough memory to run Linux, though.
The $25 price is a vaporware price - they're not actually shipping. NXP is shipping LPCExpresso for "under $30", and that includes the entire tool chain (Eclipse, GCC, JTAG debugger, etc.)
Doesn't this have the possibility of replacing the computers in the computer lab?
Depends. Is David Braben going to give school administrators better kick-backs than Microsoft?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
I'm using a MegaSquirt DIY electronic engine control unit. Currently, to get a full engine instrument cluster, I need to keep a full fledged laptop in the cockpit. (The tuning / engine gauge software is a program running on Linux.) Unless making updates to the tuning, no keyboard is required.
This device would be an INCREDIBLE advancement for me. I could hide it anywhere behind the panel, run a USB-to-Serial converter over to the MegaSquirt, and then run the HDMI to a 7" remote display.
I'm sure there could be a lot of other embedded applications where a nice GUI and portability to desktop systems would make a world of improvement.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba