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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)...
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
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.
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.