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New Single Board Computer Lets You Swap Out the CPU and Memory

Posted by Unknown on from the until-the-pinout-changes dept.

ganjadude (952775) writes "I stumbled upon this little scoop and thought the Slashdot crowd would be interested in. The new kid on the block, known as the HummingBoard can handle faster processors, more RAM and will fit the same cases for the Pi. Also, you can expand the memory and the CPU is replaceable! The low end model starts at $45 and the high end costs $100. So tell me guys, what are you going to do with yours?" $45 model is a single core iMX6 (an ARMv7) with 512M of RAM, the $100 model has a dual core i.MX6 with 1G of RAM. Full specs.

19 of 122 comments (clear)

  1. So you can reuse the PC board? by Animats · · Score: 2, Insightful

    PC boards aren't that expensive. What's the point?

    I'd rather have fewer connectors. Fewer points of failure.

    1. Re: So you can reuse the PC board? by fustakrakich · · Score: 5, Funny

      Yes, you are wrong. All sorts of nasty stuff grows between connectors like barnacles.

      --
      “He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
    2. Re:So you can reuse the PC board? by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 2

      The use case for swapping the CPU/RAM module yourself looks pretty weak; but it would appear to make sense for the manufacturer: This 'hummingboard' appears to be their existing 'MicroSOM' product attached to a fairly rPi-like breakout board.

      If they already make and sell those, they'd likely have to churn out a lot of hummingboards before the savings on connectors makes it worthwhile to integrate the CPU directly with the board.

    3. Re: So you can reuse the PC board? by Big_Breaker · · Score: 4, Informative

      I built a baytrail server and its amazing for the cost and power budget. The Intel HD graphics aren't for gaming but it can serve and render media on a sip of power. The HDDs are by far the biggest power hog. I struggled with these ARM chips and their custom distros enough. The ability to be on x86 with well supported peripherals is well worth it - gpu especially. Need to run some wintel stuff now and again? Virtualbox works fine. On the other hand ARM chips always have their issues with proprietary gpus and their binary blob drivers rife with kernel compatibility problems. And you find yourself stuck in a back alley of "mostly" compatible software and patches.

      You might hate sucking up to Intel but at least the drivers work. I might be burning 7 watts instead of 5 but that's nothing in the overall power budget. And baytrail is much much faster than IMX6.

  2. Just think of what you can do with this! by kamapuaa · · Score: 5, Funny

    A bunch of nerds could order one, then wait six months for it to arrive. They could install a version of Linux on it, play around with it for about 20 minutes, and then talk about how maybe they'll use it for XMBC. Then they could just let it gather dust on some shelf until it gets thrown away in a few years.

    --
    Slashdot: providing anti-social weirdos a soapbox, since 1997.
    1. Re:Just think of what you can do with this! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

      I have 3 pis:
      One is a git repo and my personal web site.
      One is in a robot my daughter can control from her mums.
      The last is waiting to be put into a robot my daughter can have at her mums to I can play games while my daughter is away.

      Just because you are an unimaginative turnip does not mean we all are.

    2. Re:Just think of what you can do with this! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Sure - I'm using a Dagu Magician 2WD Robot Chassis as the base. The motors are connected to a L298N which is in turn is connected to the Pi and a 5v mobile phone battery pack. This allows the low powered (3.3v) Pi to power the more demanding (5v) motors.

      The Pis power comes from a second mobile phone battery pack, it gets it connectivity from a USB Wifi dongle and finally vision from a Microsoft LifeCam VX-5000. The bendy bit keeps the camera snuggly in the chassis without need to screws.

      Software - I'm using mjpg-streamer to stream content over HTTP and a small home made Python application to provide a REST-like web API to control the motors. This is not perfect as the streaming is not designed for real time, so if it falls behind it does not easily catch up without hitting refresh.

      It was a fun project, cost ~£100 in total and took less than a day to build and put the basic software together for.

      The second project I want to do is attach a Robotic Arm and a bunch of cameras to a Pi as well as a small in car TV screen. Then using a better video conferencing solution than mjpg-streamer have a static robot at my daughters house which will allow me to be able to play basic board games over The Internet.

      Hope that helps, good luck with your project.

    3. Re:Just think of what you can do with this! by AmiMoJo · · Score: 2

      They actually make good NAS boxes if you can find a board with some SATA ports. I also use one as a server for gathering weather data from my weather station and GPS for a local stratum 1 NTP server. Not as useful as the NAS but an interesting weekend project.

      --
      const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
      SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
    4. Re:Just think of what you can do with this! by TheRaven64 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      The power consumption of the RPi (especially if you're not using the GPU) is tiny in comparison to anything with motors in it. I'd rather trade a slight reduction in battery life for being able to use a rich programming environment than save a few mW and be forced into a constrained microcontroller development environment. It might be different if I were planning on mass producing a few thousand and needed to save costs, but for a hobby project or even a prototype I'd happily overprovision on CPU power.

      --
      I am TheRaven on Soylent News
    5. Re:Just think of what you can do with this! by CastrTroy · · Score: 4, Informative

      You can actually run the RPi quite well on batteries. I was able to get 4 hours, 23 minutes running the Quake 3 demo loop. the battery life wasn't much better when sitting idle, about 5 and a half hours. I used a pair of 18650s in a USB charger/power supply. That's plenty of battery life for a toy robot.

      --

      Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
    6. Re:Just think of what you can do with this! by jellomizer · · Score: 2

      It's funny because it is true.
      Perhaps if I worked for a company that allows some time for me to tinker on my own project for a while, like google, then I may get some use out of it. But for the most part by the end of the day I don't even bother using a computer.

      --
      If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
    7. Re:Just think of what you can do with this! by caseih · · Score: 2

      Very much this. While a few people are doing cool things with robotics, remote sensing, or UAVs with these small SBCs, most sit and gather dust.

      Those actually putting their SBCs to use are by far in the minority. I have plans for my Pi to do some remote sensing work, but so far they are stalled. So it's in a drawer until I find time.

      My drawer is full of these devices including Pis, GuruPlugs, and SheevaPlugs. Theoretically useful, but never quite panned out. Could make nice file servers, but honestly a hackable NAS box that also runs linux is probably a better buy. If I need a web server facing the internet, I'm better off hosting it somewhere. If I need a local web development server, a virtual machine or my existing desktop machine fits the bill much better. Tried to use a Pi for XBMC, but it would crash during video playback every 20 minutes or so. Not very encouraging.

      I'm also tired of messing with the various and sundry ARM boot loaders, since ARM is such an non-standardized platform.

    8. Re:Just think of what you can do with this! by abroun_dawnrobotics · · Score: 5, Informative

      Hi there, First of all. Thanks for posting a link to our website (Dawn Robotics). We're a small company so notice a traffic spike even with just a Slashdot comment. :) Secondly, for people who are interested in building Raspberry Pi robots, we sell a Raspberry Pi camera robot kit that doesn't require any soldering and which you can drive around using a web interface on a tablet, smartphone or PC. We also have blog site with lots of robotic and Raspberry Pi tutorials. Cheers Alan

    9. Re:Just think of what you can do with this! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

      I have 3 pis:
      One is a git repo and my personal web site.
      One is in a robot my daughter can control from her mums.
      The last is waiting to be put into a robot my daughter can have at her mums to I can play games while my daughter is away.

      Just because you are an unimaginative turnip does not mean we all are.

      So your wife left you because you spent all of your time playing with electronics?

  3. Not impressed by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Considering you pay $135 for this UDOO Quad why would this be at all interesting?

  4. Nothing New, not relevant by dutchwhizzman · · Score: 2

    There are plenty of development boards that come as a base board with several CPU/RAM options on a daughter card. Just the fact that it fits in a raspberry pi case may make it a bit more interesting for some people. However, if you're truly into developing, you're either going to stick with the pi or get the board with the hardware specs you need and not worry about the form factor. If you're into the Pi as a consumer, it's most likely because of it's media playing capabilities. Unless this board will support XBMC with proper hardware acceleration, it's not going to be relevant for those folks either.

    --
    I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
  5. i would rather pay more for.... by arbiter1 · · Score: 2

    I would rather get one the tiny boards from company like AAEON you can drop a super low power i3 or i5 intel haswell cpu in to. Yea cost more then this but it will play anything I throw at it. Before anyone says that this will to, well since relies on a hardware decoder for most its work, problem I have is I have a lot of media that is 10bit color space which likely that hardware decoder will be useless with. example: http://www.aaeon.com/en/p/3-an...

  6. Re:Where's the cheap board with gigabit ethernet? by kwardroid · · Score: 2

    Get an OpenWRT supported router for this task (you don't need to actually use it as a router though)

  7. Re:Where's the cheap board with gigabit ethernet? by CastrTroy · · Score: 2

    I don't think a faster Ethernet connector would help. Even on my 20 mbit connection, using bittorrent on the Pi causes crashes because the SD card can't keep up with the I/O load. Didn't crash when I used a USB drive, but the performance was still terrible. Downloads were much slower than on my computer.

    --

    Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.