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Fully Open A13-OLinuXino Single-Board Linux Computer
Penurious Penguin writes "Via LXer, an article from PCWorld describes the A13-OLinuXino, produced by OLIMEX. Similar, but distinct from the Raspberry Pi, the Linux-powered OLinuXino is touted as 'fully open,' with all CAD files and source-code freely available for both personal and commercial reuse. Its specs include an Allwinner A13 Cortex A8 1GHz processor, 3D Maili400 GPU, 512MB RAM, all packed into a nano-ITX form and fit for operation in industrial environments between -25C and 85C. The device comes with Android 4.0, but is capable of running other Linux distros, e.g., ArchlinuxARM."
freely available for both personal and commercial reuse
Well, unfortunately that comes with the danger of abuse: MegaCorp ripping it off, bloating it with crapware and selling it for x5 the price- but let's see.
The three laws of thermodynamics:(1) You can't win. (2) You can't break even. (3) You can't even quit.
Really? No ethernet?
On forking, however.
To elaborate on why open-source hardware is hard.
Why open-source software works is:
Widely available repository of code.
Many people able to review it, or sections of it, and understand it.
Ease of submitting tested patches.
Hardware has problems that don't really fit well with this.
The open schematic is the trivially easy part, and not really a problem.
(though in practice, you need a schematic with copious links to design documents, which isn't well solved by open tools).
The number of people who can review it is rather smaller - as you can't
open up a c file, and see a clear error or awkwardness in code that can be edited.
For all but the most basic errors, you are going to have to sit down and
read several hundred pages of hardware documentation about how the chips in question work, in addition to having in-depth knowledge about the circuit design, and costings of likely changes.
Now, you've done this, and generated a patch that you think (for example) lowers the supply current by 1%.
Compile - test.
On a PC, this takes a couple of minutes.
For something of a smartphone class, a one-off PCB may cost several hundred dollars. Then the parts will cost another several hundred dollars in small quantities, as well as being difficult to obtain.
Now, you have to solder the parts onto the board, which is a decidedly nontrivial thing - and if you decide you want someone else to do this, it's probably another several hundred dollars.
So, you're at the thick end of a thousand dollars for a 'compile'.
Now, you boot the device, and it exhibits random hangs.
Neglecting the fact that you are going to need several hundred to several thousand dollars of test equipment, you now have to find
the bug.
Is it:
A) The fact that unlabled 0.5*1mm component C38 is in fact 20% over the designed value, as the assembly company put the wrong one in.
B) C38 has a tiny bridge of solder underneath it that is making intermittent contact.
C) The chipmaker for the main chip hasn't noticed that their chip doesn't quite do what they say it will do, and the datasheet is wrong.
D) You missed a tangential reference on page 384 of the datasheet to proper setup of the RAM chip, and it is pure coincidence that all models up till now have booted.
E) Because you're ordering small quantities, you had to resort to getting the chips from a distributor who diddn't watch their supply chain really carefully, and your main chip has in fact been desoldered from a broken cellphone.
F) Though the design of the circuit is correct, and the board you made matches that design, and all the parts are correct and work properly, the inherent undesired elements introduced by real life physics means it doesn't work.
G) A completely random failure of a part that could occur with even the best design, and best manufacture.
G - may mean that it's worthwhile making two or more of each revision - which of course boosts costs.
Hardware is nasty.
This gets a lot less painful of course for lower end hardware. For very limited circuits, which can be done on simple inexpensive PCBs, and be easily soldered at home - costs of a 'compile' can be in the tens of dollars, or even lower.
Or you could just get the completeAndroid Mini PC package for $36.
It's complete, smaller, cheaper, been available for a year or two...
Does that mean Allwinner finally opened the code to the Mali 400 GPU?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
From the 'fully open' link -
HARDWARE
The Hardware project is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
This is where you misunderstand what is 'open'. If you had the technical know-how and equipment, you could do this and release it into the public domain. When that happens, it has a 'mature ecosystem'.
You're free to fork it now and do what you will.
Are you suggesting it would be impossible for a product to be 'fully open' unless there exists a 3D printer advanced enough to produce it?
You are allowed to do that. It's up to you to come up with a printer capable of doing it, of course.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
You can fork the software and hardware designs. Depending on how incredibly advanced your 3D printer is, you could in theory print it too...
As soon as you come up with a printer that can actually print working circuits, including microchips, then the rest will be trivial.
Comparing it with the RPi, this one has more memory, a faster processor, a lot of GPIO pins, etc. But the lack of an Ethernet port, an HDMI output, an internal and an internal flash makes it less attractive for me.
Until we have an open source printer that can be forked to print another printer which can be used to print the chip and the board, we won't be truly open.
Would the printer spec qualify for GPL or LGPL?
Found this relatively interesting board in rpi price range.
Official site: http://cubieboard.org/
They sold small numbers last month and are now trying to fund a 1k+ run via indiegogo: http://www.indiegogo.com/cubieboard
Some difference highlights from specs:
1G ARMv7 cortex-A8 processor (2x as fast per clock), NEON, VFPv3, 256KB L2 cache vs 700MHz ARMv6
Mali400, OpenGL ES GPU (lima reverse-engineered drivers) vs VideoCoreIV (free "shim")
1GB DDR3 @480MHz vs 512MB DDR2
10/100M Ethernet MAC built in the SoC vs USB 10/100M ethernet
4GB Nand Flash vs nothing
SATA2 port vs none
2 USB Host vs 2 USB + ethernet from 1 USB via builtin hub
MicroSD vs SD
Costs $59, shipping included.
I suspect that you'd be stepping on the mask works rights of a number of outfits, and probably some ARM patents, if you were actually capable of printing the entire thing.
Because low-volume production of most components is so wildly impractical, "Open Hardware" doesn't generally require any particular openness inside the bits that you solder together, just openness about how you solder them together and openness on the part of the software running on top of them.
http://cubieboard.org/ and also on http://www.indiegogo.com/cubieboard
It uses the A10 and has more features. The A10 is a full featured version of the A13
1G ARM cortex-A8 processor, NEON, VFPv3, 256KB L2 cache
Mali400, OpenGL ES GPU
512M/1GB DDR3 @480MHz
HDMI 1080p Output
10/100M Ethernet
4Gb Nand Flash
2 USB Host, 1 micro SD slot, 1 SATA, 1 ir
96 extend pin including I2C, SPI, RGB/LVDS, CSI/TS, FM-IN, ADC, CVBS, VGA, SPDIF-OUT, R-TP..
Android, Ubuntu and other Linux distributions
Quidquid latine dictum sit altum viditur
No ARM system can be truly "open", because no one who produces these SoCs is releasing full specifications. The GPUs are a particular problem, since almost all of them rely upon binary blobs. With more and more functionality being moved to GPU hardware, this is an area where Open Source is really falling behind.
Having Linux or Android running on a cheap ARM board is nice, but if all you get is non-accelerated 2D graphics, you won't be able to be competitive with closed commercial products.
Come January I was going to use a Raspberry Pi as a personal ( sorry can't remember the name now ) mail server.
Now I'm confused about what board to use.
I'll just hop on my 'Back to the future' skateboard, and go fetch a printer. This shouldn't take long . . . .
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
I'll have to plead guilty to associating any outfit labeled 'A'nything as somehow connected to the A7 people, who let dozens of small kitchen table folks design products around their bluetooth offerings, shipping a dozen or more of the finished product, only to have them lock the door, disconnect the phones and disappear forever without notice to anyone, leaving the producers of the finished product who had paid the one time costs for the PCB's etc hung out to dry. Some paid in advance, and are still due refunds or product.
Neither will ever happen, those A7 guys covered seem to have covered their exit tracks quite well.
I believe the operative phrase is Caveat Emptor?
Cheers, Gene
Of all the "in the future..." technologies such as immortality or teleportation, I'd actually first put my bets on a 3D electronics printer. Really hard, but not necessarily impossible to do. PCBs and microchips are synthetically-made already, and 3D printing probably yet has to see many advancements.
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
This is admirable, but I'll know a product is "fully open" when I can fork the project, modify the designs, and then print the thing on my home 3D printer.
Unfortunately for you, the real world makes things out of more materials than the ABS/PLA your bargain bin Reprap uses. Namely copper and silicon. That being said, this meets all of your criteria besides the random 3D printer hardon. You would just have to have your fork made by a PCB fab house because something this complex doesn't exactly lend itself to hobbyist PCB fabrication methods.
not $49 , its $59 now and has been for some time .
when the indiegogo started, it costed only $19
Higuita
I only clicked the comments to check on XBMC support. This too makes it a non-starter for me.
An endorsement from the FSF can't hurt. It would convince a lot more people that this is absolutely "fully open" (that claim is thrown around a lot today).
Show me the ARM core thats public domain please. There isn't one, ARM kinda makes it that way on purpose.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
I'm not sure what use a 3D printer would be in all this, but the board is very straightforward. I have at least a dozen Olimex development boards and they design really excellent stuff. I have the tools and experience to make a board like the A13, and they've supplied everything I'd need.
In the Bruce Perens sense, the Olimex folk totally "get it." And in fact from my dealings with them, I'm sure they'd sell me a blank board cheap so I could change components or muck about in some other way. They have a long history of actually-innovative electronic gadgetry and no resentment toward honest competition.
The serious question though is "Why would you?" This board goes for $68 at Mouser ($57 elsewhere?), talks to your spare non-HDMI monitor, and has lots of expansion I/O. If you make s great peripheral for it, send them one and they might just add it to the next version of the board. They're just that kind of folk.
I guess you may be looking for "fully" open in the mathematical sense, which is generally unachievable.
You can go over to OpenCores right now and download the spiffy OR1200 OpenRisc design and run it on the OpenRISC development board, but that board uses Altera FPGAs. Which themselves aren't open. Opencores.org had a failed kickstarter that they ran themselves (probably should have used Kickstarter), which raised about half the money needed to make a comminity sponsored chip of it.
http://opencores.org/or1k/OR1200_OpenRISC_Processor
Since that was not successful, you're stuck buying someone's processor, for which they'll have some ownership. Once you accept that and realize there are enormous numbers of processors out there (not really a lock in), then the question of open is about your ability to redesign the board and exert complete control of all the peripheral chips.
The A13 will let you do that. At release time the RPi would not, due to some documentation restrictions and video binaries, but they are making progress in this vein.
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/10/all-code-on-raspberry-pis-arm-chip-now-open-source/
So if you want fully open, (and I certainly do), we need to convince the OpenCores people to run a kickstarter for the remaining funds needed, and contribute. Until then the A13 is as close as we get.
Well, since you were asking.... ...
1) 16 bit ALU in Minecraft
2) 3D printing of Minecraft models
3)
4) 3D profit
Some experience http://forum.doozan.com/read.php?6,10012
Again, another "open hardware" project using Eagle, which is definitely not free for commercial use - so if I want to modify the board and use this commercially, I have to buy a (quite expensive) Eagle license. Please, why can't they use any of the open-source EDA tools available?
There are only Android drivers for it. The Android graphics stack is not reusable in Linux. Stay away.
The linux drivers that are for mali-400 are rudimentary. That is to say, they don't work in general. You can get them to work under very limited functions, but you can't just run OpenGl on it and expect it to work. They won't.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
You seem to care about some of the same things I do, do you know if there's anything out there with 1080p, XBMC, and properly-working Netflix? I personally want it to run Android, but anything Linux-based would be OK.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Comes stock with Android, but they have a pure XBMC build. The company sponsors developers to work on XMBC for Android.
It's in what I would call beta stage at this point. Not perfect, but pretty decent. It is supposed to run Netflix, but I haven't actually tried yet.
I use it mostly for watching TV shows and movies stored on my NAS, and my wife/kids watch streaming video from websites via an addon.
It's important to remember that A13 is actually cut down ($5 cheaper) A10 present in Cubbieboard. Most interestingly Cubbieboard offers double the RAM and SATA port for the same price.
There is XBMC support with hardware decoding for Allwinner, its been around for a month or so. Check the tail end of this forum http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=126995. This is the github with the source https://github.com/empatzero/xbmca10. Here are some build instructions http://linux-sunxi.org/XBMC. And there is this project that plans to put everything like this into a distribution for Allwinner devices http://www.indiegogo.com/pengpod.
The allwinner A10 currently ranks as one of the most hackable and open platforms, thanks to the freenode #arm-netbook and http://linux-sunxi.org communities, communities where Olimex has actually contributed.
As the developer of the lima driver, i have finally found a Mali based SoC with a proper linux, one that is affordable and hackable. Heck, i even have Q3A running on ARM Mali binaries (check my the linux-sunxi and my github if you do not buy it).
How can everybody here just be spewing baseless bullshit about the RPi being better and freer, while it clearly is not.
-- libv
So, you take an A10/A13 dev board / MK802 rip-off (depending on the company) and label it open platform. Congrats...
Well, that *is* the rub. The OpenCores folk wanted to raise $50k to make an ASIC of it. That's out of the typical Raspberry Pi purchaser's reach who wants a "fully" open implementation.
So these people who want a 'fully open cpu' expect someone to put up large amounts of money to design, fabricate and mass-produce - enough production to drive down the per-unit costs to hobbyist-attainable levels - while exposing themselves to almost guaranteed direct competition against them using their own IP, all out of their own pocket so the hobbyist doesn't have to pay? How is that ever going to work? If you can't afford to fabricate a design *anyway* what point is there to having the design 'fully open' in the first place? I'd much prefer a refined, *well documented* core I can easily use wherever I want cheaply than having hdl to something I can never turn into tangible silicon. I'm not saying these recent ARM applications processors are well documented by the way. There's plenty of room for improvement there. Specially with the GPU interfaces. I just think people need to take a step back and realize 'fully open' isn't anywhere near as useful as 'well documented and production-grade'
I bought one of these and just received it last night.
Unfortunately, the Olimex people have no clue about how to package for shipping. I received a touch screen overlay that was cracked in half. The PCB had two ferrite core in the power supply broken apart since they loosely packaged other components on top of the PCB!.
I ordered a "preloaded" SD card which arrived... blank.
I've noted several "bugs" in the design although this is a rev. 'c' board and am now questioning this whole model of "ultra" cheap.
I glad there are those out there such as Olimex that are willing to advance the open source community though it's not worth it really... I'd rather pay more for a better design with a more "professional" vibe.
The extra $10 is for shipping. The cheaper options were a special for those who got in early.
I got the $59 option and am looking forward to using it as a headless torrent box.
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