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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.

10 of 122 comments (clear)

  1. 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 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
    4. 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.
    5. 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

    6. 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?

  2. 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!”
  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. 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.