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VIA Unveils $79 Rock and $99 Paper ARM PCs
Don't yet have one of those million Raspberry Pis, but you're in the market for a tiny, cheap ARM computer? An anonymous reader writes with this snippet from geek.com: "VIA has decided it's time to update the APC (ARM PC) board with new components and the choice of two configurations. The new systems are called APC Rock and APC Paper. The hardware spec for both boards is exactly the same except for the fact the Rock ships with a VGA port whereas the Paper doesn't. The Rock also costs $20 less at $79, whereas the Paper is $99. The reason for the price difference is the fact that the Paper ships with a rather novel case whereas the Rock is a bare board. The Paper's case is made from recycled cardboard attached to an aluminum chassis to help with strength, meaning it will keep the dust off the components and make it easier to carry while keeping weight to a minimum."
scissors?
When does Scissors come out?
think about it...
scissors??
this seems a far better product.
There is a big ceramic capacitor hanging off the end of a pair of twisted wires on that bare board. That's weird.
Kind of nice if it ever leaks and you need to replace it, i guess...
And the Scissors model comes out WHEN???
I'm holding out for APC Scissors, which will be priced above the APC Paper's cost of $99 because it is superior, but below Rock's cost of $79 because it is inferior.
So this is better Raspberry Pi at three times the price? They just added a twice-as-powerful CPU and 4 GB of flash. Or am I missing something?
when 60% or more of the posts so far attempt to make an extremely obvious joke about scissors? This article even says its from the what-no-scissors? department, so the joke isn't even that inventive.
For crying out loud... you guys call yourselves nerds?
What I want to know is what about the lizard and spock PC's.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Oh hai. I'm posting this from an EEE PC netbook, about 4 years old, running Mint... something. I dunno, it Just Works. I ruse it regularly for intardtubes, watching things and also stuff, and even some casual programmorzing. Pew, pew.
Small, cheap general purpose devices - especially with real keyboards - do have a point, and that point is to make it easy to debunk your "spunked from my iPad" chucklehead rant, kthnxbye.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
In the computer business, VIA is the ultimate living humiliation. As a company, it always seeks to give the punter as little as possible (for the money), and always miscalculates, ensuring that one is better off buying from someone else.
512MB of RAM and a single grotty core. This time last year, and these specs would have been adequate (the reign of the Allwinner A10 SoC). A year later, and desirable bottom of the barrel is Rockchip's RK3066- 2 core (1.2+ GHZ) with quad MALI graphics.
VIA's graphics and x86 CPUs suffered from exactly the same issue- rubbishy specs and relatively high prices.
For less than VIA wants for this rubbish, you could buy AMD's micro motherboard with attached Brazos x86 APU, a proper x86 dual core system with modern ATI graphics built-in. Sure, you need to add the RAM, but that's cheap enough these days.
It is lucky for VIA's employees that this dreadful company is a pimple on a very much larger industrial group, so VIA's market failures (and financial losses) never seem to matter.
PS potential purchasers, with an interest in video playback, may well want to ensure that the 'theoretical' support of 1080P is matched by available drivers that prove this ability. Video playback on ARM SoC parts tends to be through 'binary blobs', so you either have proper support from the company making the MB, or you are stuffed UNLESS the CPU has enough grunt for software decoding, and one A9 core won't (for HD).
Gee...I guess my RaspberryPi in my kitchen linked up to an old touchscreen and custom recipe software is trash and pointless. Or the RaspberryPi in my truck hooked up to a bumper-cam and 1TB hard drive is something my safety conscious family doesn't care about. Just because you lack the creativity and imagination to put these amazing contraptions to good use doesn't mean that there aren't people out there who don't. Idiot.
"Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right" - Salvor Hardin
Have they fixed the memory controller yet?
The biggest performance bottleneck for graphics on ARM systems has not been the GPU; I've used Mali-400 systems (like this one is supposed to be), and I've used the nVidia system. Graphics performance sucked on both.
Part of this has to do with the fact that the graphics architecture in standard Linux penalizes you for not GPL'ing your drivers, but the Android graphics stack gets around this by duplicating some kernel interfaces with slightly non-GPL'ed versions - yet the performance is still terrible.
The blame rests squarely on the memory copy speeds, which comes down to the memory controller. Apple has completely addressed this in their ARM chips (but are not sharing), and Samsung has partially addressed this in their ARM chips (and are also not sharing). Has VIA addressed the memory controller bandwidth issues in the WonderMedia, or does "WonderMedia" actually mean "I wonder when they will get media support in their ARM chips"?
Oh hai. I'm posting this from an EEE PC netbook...
Whatever, you're also getting trolled... easily.
6-digit types should know better.
I wouldn't bother mentioning this when you have the MK802 for $40. Twice the ram, mind you.
Wow, I haven't read so much focused hate in a single post in a while on Slashdot. Did a netbook run over your kitten or something?
"Or the RaspberryPi in my truck hooked up to a bumper-cam and 1TB hard drive is something my safety conscious family doesn't care about."
yikes, a safety system cobbled together by a hobbyist running on a platform that was designed by people who seemed to learn a EDA during the pi's development all running open source software?
sign me up
Your forgetting the over 30 something PhD's from a top US universities who recall their 16-32 bit games from the mid 1990's. :)
With skill, many years of coding and open source software they will get that old game up on a 1080p TV in all its 2.5D shader and fader glory.
Irc is has a few tiny groups of people with the code, skill and cult like leader who will get their pointless project up on that big TV.
ppc, arm, intel - no real gpu - just makes them code more for boasting rights after their day jobs at telcos, engineering companies, or US gov crypto work.
What amazed me about a handful of nerds on irc was the time spent with their inner game group every night, weekends - while married
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
I bought a CGCOLORMAX (a mostly-built version of Geoff Graham's excellent Color Maximite from one of the electronics magazines I frequent) for $49US (I actually bought two just in case).
Had to solder on the power connector (no big deal) and source an Aussie power supply, VGA monitor, and PS/2 keyboard (all of which I (and no doubt many others) have lying around in the man-cave). Also bought a 4G SD card for minimal dollars for storage and I have a full blown machine running BASIC (with boot times around about ... literally no time at all) just like the ones I grew up with (TRS80/Apple/etc).
The 8yo son has already started programming (12-times table) and understands the basics (sequence, selection, iteration, variables and so on), so well worth the money in terms of educating the kids.
And the CGCOLORMAX also has a breadboard for playing around, interfacing with other devices, so look soon for my guided missiles streaking across your airspace :-)
Which OS are they running on it? Chromium? Any other Linux? Windows 8? PC-BSD? Minix? Which one? Unless they can put together a box that has at least a proper Office suite on top of the usual browser & e-mail, I doubt this will go far.
Custom recipe software? Puhlease.
Look up recipe online.
Read recipe.
Cook recipe.
If you want a gadget to hold your hand through that process get a DS / 3DS and the Americas Test Kitchen software. Infinitely superior to whatever you've cobbled together.
I see Osgeld has already covered your camera system. Your solution is bulkier, more of a hassle than, and less reliable than dozens of different off-the-shelf products. But I guess if your time is worth nothing and you don't care how your truck looks it could be worth it since you maybe saved tens of dollars.
I keep seeing on eBay these days you can get an Android tablet for about $40. And it has a screen, a touch screen at that. Presumably internally it is some kind of ARM PC with storage and everything. So why is a bare bones ARM PC, especially at these prices good? And what can you realistically do with the damned thing anyway?
Well, I don't know if I'd go that far. This is a bit roundabout but ... I have a white macbook connected to my TV for watching netflix or iTunes movies/TV. It's getting pretty tired, stutters with high def content etc. Last time I wanted to watch a movie netflix didn't have, I rented it through iTunes and downloaded it to my macbook pro because I wanted to watch the hidef version. But it refused to play on my TV because I'm connecting via DVI -- it would only play on the laptop's built in monitor. Then, because it was a rental, I couldn't move it to my old stuttering macbook, or at least by a straightforward method. I was pissed. So I "pirated" it, guilt free mind you as I did pay my $4 to see it, and watched it full screen with VLC.
Anyway, if you could rent movies/vids through google play, and it would play them in hidef over the VGA output, I could definitely see a use for this as a basic TV "tuner" (i.e., great for streaming content -- basically the only way I get TV except for the occasional DVD).
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
The VIA Paper is the computer world's Trabant!
If it blows a constant cloud of blue smoke doing mobile computing, I will have to have one.
Do companies really have to design these project platforms when there are android cell phones that can be had for under $50? They come built in with a small touchscreen, wifi, a low res camera, battery, accelerometer, vibrator, mic, a weak speaker, and possibly a small physical keyboard. Virgin Mobile almost always has a no contract phone for $30-$50.
There is also an overabundance of bad ESN phones on ebay for $15-$30. While there are issues with supporting thievery, not all bad ESN phones have been stolen, some are really just lost and found by others. Either way, the phones have been branded bad and unless re-purposed, represent a waste on society. Do companies really need to design/build these platforms when there are so many used phones that already litter the world?
These boards don't seem to be worried about emitting radio frequency interference (RFI). That "paper" system case is slick but I don't think it effectively shields RFI.
Is RFI somehow not a problem with these? Is it because they are very low-power, or is it because they are somehow not regulated by the FCC for RFI, or what?
Would operating one of these make the amateur radio enthusiasts down the block from you curse you?
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
Gee...I guess my RaspberryPi in my kitchen linked up to an old touchscreen and custom recipe software is trash and pointless. Or the RaspberryPi in my truck hooked up to a bumper-cam and 1TB hard drive is something my safety conscious family doesn't care about. Just because you lack the creativity and imagination to put these amazing contraptions to good use doesn't mean that there aren't people out there who don't. Idiot.
How do you handle gracefully shutting down when you turn your truck off? How do you interface your camera to the Pi?
I've been thinking about building a Pi based "dash cam" since I haven't been impressed with the existing dash cams. Though I'd probably write my video to an SD card or USB Memory stick rather than hard drive. I'm just not sure how to get a graceful shutdown after I turn off the car - maybe a supercapacitor with enough stored power to let it shut down when it senses loss of 12V power?
Custom recipe software? Puhlease.
Look up recipe online.
Read recipe.
Cook recipe.
If you want a gadget to hold your hand through that process get a DS / 3DS and the Americas Test Kitchen software. Infinitely superior to whatever you've cobbled together.
I see Osgeld has already covered your camera system. Your solution is bulkier, more of a hassle than, and less reliable than dozens of different off-the-shelf products. But I guess if your time is worth nothing and you don't care how your truck looks it could be worth it since you maybe saved tens of dollars.
Many of the cheap off-the-shelf products that are in the price range of a Pi + cheap camera have a habit of temporarily freezing or losing video while they switch files and/or when they lose power. So it's entirely possible that his solution works better than others in the price range. And given that he's added a 1TB drive to it, his solution probably meets his needs better than other solutions out there since few have the ability to add a hard drive.
Sometimes less is more. I have a tablet hooked up to a monitor, but Android constantly gets confused about the two screens and their resolutions. That means you keep having to fiddle with the touch screen. A dedicated device like this always uses the connected monitor for its output, and the mouse and keyboard for its input. Also, this has better specs than low-end tablets; in different words, at the same price, you get better performance for not paying for a screen.
You're kidding, right? Are you actually trying to imply a mere bumper-cam can't be cobbled together by a hobbyist?
I guess you're the reason we need to warn everyone that pencils are sharp, coffee is hot, and every building contains chemicals known to the state of California to cause cancer.
By all means, fellow consumerist. Don't ever bother doing anything yourself even if it may happen to be a hobby of yours. It's always better to buy everything premade. Otherwise you might not have the very best products in every category of your life! We wouldn't want that now would we?
The Rock and Paper offer a nice spec bump over the original APC, which shipped with Android 2.3, an ARM 11 processor, only 2GB RAM, and was only 720p capable in the graphics department.
*looks at Rock/Paper specs*
"512MB DDR3 RAM"
Huh?
Thats not it at all, its a combination of poor everything that honestly can be accomplished with a composite video signal and a monitor, but knock yourself out, just hope grandpa or whatever mistakes a frozen image for live and backs over the dog
I have complied with your request.
Considering the 1TB hard drive, I'm pretty sure he's talking about the equivalent of a dash cam (only mounted to the bumper instead of dash) not a back up camera.
Why shut it down? it draws ~1amp surely your car battery can supply that for several days without issue
"Or the RaspberryPi in my truck hooked up to a bumper-cam and 1TB hard drive is something my safety conscious family doesn't care about."
yikes, a safety system cobbled together by a hobbyist running on a platform that was designed by people who seemed to learn a EDA during the pi's development all running open source software?
sign me up
Would be more reliable than most of the commercial dash cams and even if you paid someone to build it, cheaper than buying a Blackvue.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
What is it still the 90's. I haven't used a VGA cable, for personal uses, for a few years now. Not even sure if my TV even has a VGA port. Do people use these device for Media PC's? I can't imagine they can run 720p content let alone 1080p. My apologies for sounding like I am a troll, but I just don't see any use for these devices.
My RasPi cost me a total of $35. Has HDMI and Composite. It's designed to work with a television set.
I had a 25MHz, x486 netbook with about 100MBytes of HDD, built by compaq in the mid 90s. I upgraded it to 20MBytes of RAM and a big fast hard drive in the early 2000s, and added a PCMCIA WiFi card along-side my 100BaseTx card.
It ran quite nicely with Linux or FreeBSD. Of course I would put the HDD in a modern computer to install the OS, mainly because I had nothing else to boot from in there. I didn't keep it as a paperweight, either... It had serial ports, which made it perfect for console connections to Cisco routers, switches, Unix servers, and whatnot. SSH was cpu-hungry, but plenty fast enough, which was how the netBook got most of its use. Links was pretty good for web browsing, before the world switched to CSS and nobody told Links how to render it (like Dillo as well). It could run X, even old Gnome from Slackware 3.3, but that was painful. X was to low-res to be particularly useful to me, and screen was a fine substitute.
It was a great system because of its size, alone. So easy to carry around, a perfectly good keyboard, and so worthless I never feared dropping it, or leaving it out where it might be stolen. And in some ways better than anything you can buy today, at any price... Namely, it had a trackball for the pointer, which is vastly superior to the pointing devices found on any laptop today. Not to mention built-in RS-232 port that worked with devices that won't talk to USB converters.
In the mid 00's I bought a real laptop from Sotec/Averatec. It was heavy, hot, un-ergonomic, trackpads are a nightmare, and had no end of trouble with it. Not worth jack, yet set me back a grand. I actually threw the nice new laptop in a drawer, and went back to using the 486!
Around the same time I was experimenting with PDAs. Psion's 5MX with full keyboard had an amazing form-factor, and let me write-up entire documents with full formatting and embedded graphs, and print directly with IRDA to a nearby laserjet. I so wanted it to be a workable replacement, but the screen resolution was a bit too low, the terminal emulators weren't good enough, the CPU was on the slow side even for text, no good SSH clients existed for the platform, and they never sold ethernet or wifi adapters for the device, so it was a non-starter. Still, the month of life on 2xAAs, servicable keyboard, and pocket-size were very compelling.
My 486 netbook didn't stop being used until Asus repeated history, and gave me something cheap, with a decent keyboard, ethernet, wifi, light weight and compact size. I have two of them, so I'm set for quite a while.
Tablets aren't going to cut it, nor are smartphones. They don't have the basic expansion ports I've needed for the past two decades, and getting the basic utils going is more effort than it should be.
However, I'd really like to see ARM netBooks... Longer battery life, lower weight, cost, etc., so long as they have basic expansion options. Since Linux/BSD is open source, compiling for different CPUs is pretty easy... I just have to wait for a worthwhile device to come along.
Netbooks aren't a fad... they just outgrew their target market, and then crashed on the glut of supply with minimal demand. I'll keep buying, as will many others, if any company out there keeps making them, with reasonable specs.
That said... BRING BACK THE TRACKBALL ON NETBOOKS!!!
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
M0d -5 retard
Not to mention the 40 somethings who grew up on the 6502 based machines and Heathkits, or the 50 somethings who built their own homebrew machines by soldering chips together.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
oh we all know its for the legal music and dvd collection cause the kids cant survive a trip to the supermarket without "ice age 9, the quest for more cash grab"
Why shut it down? it draws ~1amp surely your car battery can supply that for several days without issue
Here's specs from an Optima car battery (an AGM battery that handles deep discharge much better than standard lead plate batteries):
http://jci_media.s3.amazonaws.com/9613/4583/5078/REDTOP_Full_Specs_Sheet.pdf .0030 ohms
Open Circuit Voltage (Fully charged): 12.8 volts
Internal Resistance (Fully charged):
Capacity: 44 Ah (C/20)
Reserve Capacity: BCI: 90 minutes
So it can supply one amp for 44 hours...so in less than 2 days, the battery will be dead. My car often sits for 2 days or longer without starting it.
Even if I could keep the power consumption below 0.5 amps, that's still enough power draw to drain the battery in less than a week and I don't want to have to remember to switch the camera off when I leave the car at the airport for 5 days.
No, think it serves 3 purposes quite nicely: ...
1. Having the license plate of the guy that rear ended him and drove off.
2. A second rear view mirror to see kids when you are backing up.
3. The fun of creating such a contraption.
4.
5. Profit
Well, I might have a way, but it only works on a semi spherical planet in a vacuum.
"Real 1.4Hhz (will be upgraded to 1.5Ghz) clock speed"
Bah, you had chips to solder together? We used separate transistors. Lemme tell you wiring 3,510 transistors together by hand is a lot of work. And don't think we could get that 2MHz, either. We were happy to get 100 khz, and that was only reached by the best of us.
[/yorkshire accent]
I'm posting this from a 1.5 year old EEE PC, which replaced my previous EEE PC of 4 years ago (which met an unfortunate end).
I say this to highlight that not only are we netbook users still happily out here, but they're still available in the shops and we're still buying them. I have a Kindle Fire tablet, and I barely use it compared to my trusty netbook; there's no contest between a flippy laptop form factor with real buttons and a little slate which I need to jab at the screen with my finger. I also have "real" full-sized laptops, and my netbook still comfortably fills the niche it was bought for- light, portable, long battery life, low cost so I don't worry about it being lost or broken.
for $99 id expect a dual-core A9, 1GB of RAM, Gigabit ethernet, a FPGA and a well documented 16core coprocessor. http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/adapteva/parallella-a-supercomputer-for-everyone
If cpu power was not an issue i'd just use a raspberry pi.
That aluminum-cardboard fusion is kind of silly. If you made the sides of aluminum, why not throw a top and bottom cover from aluminum too. Or, then make the whole box out of cardboard.
However I think the use of cardboard is possibly quite smart idea (ecologically). I assume this is much harder cardboard than what you would find from typical cardboard boxes. Computers have relatively short use age anyway and do not get beaten much, so they do not need cases that last forever.
Actually, I am using a netbook to post this as well. It works quite well.
www.wavefront-av.com
Does anyone remember netbooks? I don't. Because they were trash and pointless.
I've got an EEE 701SD, an Acer Aspire One, and a Gateway LT. I use the former and the latter on a regular basis, and my lady uses the middle machine when traveling. I took the 701 and she took the Aspire when we went to Panama. We made a fairly hilarious picture in cafes and such with her using the full-size keys and me pecking out on the mini keyboard but I actually managed to upgrade my website and such while we were out, upload images and so on, on a machine that will fit in the pocket of some cargo pants. And it had *gasp* a keyboard on it!
MOD ME DOWN AND MOD DOWN THE TRUTH
It was the truth, from a certain point of view. Unfortunately, that point of view involves rectal-cranial inversion.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Bah, you had chips to solder together?
Hey! It was because of these people's discoveries that we now have the Pringles CAN antenna.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
There's the Cubox and the Cubieboard. I have the former running as NAS and (XBMC) media center with a couple of HDDs attached.
One reason I am pro-Raspberry Pi is that is has a huge user base. When you are dealing with trying to get Linux stuff to run on ARM and the lower system capabilities of an embedded system, it is nice to have 100,000 friends who are messing with the same system and already worked out the issues.
What is responsible for h.264 support? (it's not the mali gpu)