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Update: Raspberry Pi-Compatible Development Board Cancelled
An anonymous reader writes "Anyone who might have been interested in the miniature Raspberry Pi compatible board mentioned here a month ago should know the board has been cancelled due to problems sourcing the Broadcom SoC. Given the less than welcoming response from the rpi community to the board's release, there is speculation as to why Hardkernel is having trouble buying the chip.
There's a wide and robust SoC community out there. You people who keep pushing the Pi in our faces are doing a disservice to the larger progressive community.
I used to work at Sun Microsystems and had to deal with Broadcom chips in the servers. In order to get access to Hardware Reference Manuals, I almost was compelled to sign away rights to my 1st *and* 2nd born. Broadcom does not want anyone to be able to write drivers to their hardware ever, unless you pay them a huge royalty.
I've worked with Broadcom chips in some circumstances in my job as an embedded software engineer. It's seldom been pleasant.
They won't even talk to a little player, or anyone else who is unlikely to place an order for large numbers of chips. I know of tier-2 telecommunications equipment companies - well-known names - who were turned down by Broadcom. Even if you are a big player, technical support is even harder to get. They make you sign NDAs for every little thing. I saw this becoming an issue with the Raspberry Pi when it came out a few years ago as there was no documentation for the graphics hardware.
It's just the way they do business. I think they're about volume rather than margin. They're not even vaguely interested in enthusiasts or small scale jobs.
My favourite supplier is Freescale. They make almost all their documentation and software public, and you can buy their chips singly in the channel if you want. I have a suspicion that Intel (who are showing in interest in this market) and Atmel would probably also be very helpful.
Best advice to a small project like this is very much as follows : don't bother with Broadcom. They don't want your business.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Eben Christopher Upton is a Technical Director and ASIC architect for Broadcom. He is also a founder and former trustee of the Raspberry Pi Foundation, and now CEO of the Raspberry PI trading company.[4] He is also responsible for the overall software and hardware architecture of the Raspberry Pi device.[5][6]
a) The response in the linked thread was quite welcoming, most hoping for some competition.
b) The most likely answer is that ogdroid couldnt muster up a large enough order for SoCs so broadcom said 'nah'. The only way RPI got around this was having a broadcom employee on their team.
c) The *rumor* is that RPI pressured broadcom into not selling the chips, which was started by someone on a competitor's blog.
Here's what one person said about it:
What I don't like about this project is that they simply use all the work (software development) of the foundation and the RPi community to sell their product. They call it "compatibility" but in fact it means: let other people do all the work and we make money from it.
Someone is new to open source/designs I see. Arduino has a bazillion knockoffs that are compatible yet they still seem to be doing okay. Unless RPi isn't an open architecture - in which case, why do we advocate its use?
Indeed. The choice by the RPi-team was utterly stupid and can only be attributed to incompetence. I mean, a computer aimed at education, and then you cannot publish the full datasheet? That is just insane!
Personally, I also found the official forum overrun with people with big egos and small skills and a lot more techno-mysticism than actual engineering. It is no surprise that the RPi is such a badly designed device. Basically all competitors are significantly superior.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
No, the linked article says they are better known for their Exynos based products, this board was supposed to have the broadcom chip.
"none of them have made use of the same Broadcom BCM2835 SoC as the Pi, so none of them (until now) have been software compatible."
And the labeling on the picture shows the chip to be used.
To round up comments so far:
"Nasty Nasty Broadcom"
"Pi is bad because it uses Broadcom"
"You can't use it for "education" because you can't get the graphics datasheet and the works are encased in a blob."
Yet the Pi IS a cheap and flexible general purpose computer and depending on your educational perspective you don't NEED access to low-level information. Its also important to remember that the Pi originated as Eben Uptons home project consisting of a wire-wrapped board containing an Arduino processor to create a simple programmable study computer before the move was made to the Broadcom chip to improve performance and flexibility. There's no need to invoke charges of conspiracy or even cronyism.
All we see here is the typical slashdot kneejerk response to all things Broadcom. There may be cases where this might be valid, but not as far as the pi is concerned.
Other small computing modules exist. Use one of those if it fits your particular need and quit whining!
It was chosen because the brains behind the project works for Broadcom and got a sweetheart deal with some great licensing. Its called working with the resources you have. There would BE no competitors if Pi hadnt come out. They even moved INTEL to get into the micro space with Galileo.
Good-bye
Pretty sure the Arduino market is what pulled Intel in. http://arduino.cc/en/ArduinoCe...
And you know... You may be right. There was no embedded SBC market before the Pi came out.
The Pi competed on one front, and one front only. Price. And no one really competed with it. The boards of similar (but still higher) price that destroyed the Pi in functionality were around before the Pi was.
Well, Eben Upton's job working for Broadcom was probably a factor there... Personally, I'd trace the idea back before he had that job - I recall a discussion about the Gameboy Advance developer kit in the summer of 2002, and the lack of affordable programmable devices at the time. I suspect he'd have had a real struggle getting anywhere close to the Pi's target price without getting discounted access to the Broadcom SoC he used, though. I haven't spoken to him recently, but my impression was that far from "RPi Foundation pressed Broadcom to stop selling BCM2835 to competing projects" as claimed, it was more "Eben twisted arms and got Broadcom to give RPF a special cut-price deal so they could afford it".
If anyone were to bring out a rival device from a "significantly superior" competitor, I'd be delighted to see it - and I suspect most if not all of the RPF people would too, since it wasn't about making money by selling lots of systems. (Of course, Broadcom didn't buy up the remains of ARM's parent company for nothing, so I'd be surprised to see something much better from a rival!) I was happy to see the Pi being ARM based, as a fan of ARM as far back as the ARM2 I first programmed, but I'm also happy to see rivals like the MIPS32 one mentioned recently: I like ARM, but I also like having a choice of platform, both hardware and software!
Get a Beagle Bone Black. It is about $10 more, but you get a good design, the full specs and nobody is lying to you and you have none of the reliability issues the RPi suffers from.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
I have a couple RPis and they are fun for out-of-the-box projects like RetroPi, but it's a BBB that I trust to run my 3.25hp router around my CNC table at 200in/min. Though, recently with the work going into MachineKit that's pretty much an out-of-the-box project too.
RPi had quite a bit of energy in the community to begin with and that momentum still persists and give a bit of an advantage to them in project development, but that will only go on so long with the arrogance displayed in that thread. Don't venture into the OSS space and start complaining about derivatives of your work. Especially when the project is mainly sponsored and developed by employees of the company that is selling the bloody chips that are nowhere near open or documented while all the function of your system is dependent on an OS you did not develop or pay for.
MOS made the 6502, not Motorola.
More reality-distorted Apple "History".
As good as the BBB is, the layout sucks. My beef is the micro HDMI port is so close to the only USB port that thumb drives or fat USB plus interfere with the HDMI plug. If you have a previous gen BBB with the 2GB eMMC, the new Debian distro leaves you with 60 MB free space. The Angstrom distro is dead. So you have to boot from the SD card.
But the biggest benefit is the external memory bus for FPGA connectivity. But that disables the HDMI port as the ports are shared on the SoC.
I wish they would add more USB ports, move the HDMI port and if possible, move to an SoC that does not sacrifice the HDMI for the external memory bus. Overall it blows away the RPI.