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$9 Open Source Computer Blows Past Crowdfunding Goal
An anonymous reader writes: A team of engineers and artists has launched a Kickstarter campaign for C.H.I.P., a small computer that costs $9. The campaign met and far exceeded its $50,000 goal on the first day. The device runs an R8 ARM CPU clocked at 1 GHz, 512 MB of RAM, and 4GB of storage. It has built-in Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, and runs a version of Debian. The price was enabled by two things: super-cheap Chinese tablets pushing down processor costs, and support from manufacturer Allwinner to make it even cheaper. The team is also building breakout boards for VGA and HDMI connections, as well as one with a tiny LCD screen, keyboard, and battery. Importantly, "all hardware design files schematic, PCB layout and bill of materials are free for you the community to download, modify and use."
$9 is too much. 7's the key number here. Think about it. 7-Elevens. 7 dwarves. 7, man, that's the number. 7 chipmunks twirlin' on a branch, eatin' lots of sunflowers on my uncle's ranch. You know that old children's tale from the sea. It's like you're dreamin' about Gorgonzola cheese when it's clearly Brie time, baby. Step into my office.
This is pretty amazing if they can actually sell those for $9. Definitely one of the better kickstarters I've seen recently, so I am glad to see its successful.
However, once you add the HDMI, it's essentially the same price as a raspberry pi model A.
No 8 minute abs. You can't get abs in 7 minutes. Don't be rediculous.
Does that price include a power adapter, wifi adapter, and case? If so I might buy it an use those parts for my Rasberry Pi. If not then those will cost more than the "computer".
So this thing is basically a cheaper Rasberry PI without all the I/O features?
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
$9 with $20 shipping is an old ebay scam, but evidently still effective
And yet a graphing calculator with a fraction of the power will still run you $109.
Ok you got the parts cheap.
Then you need to put it together.
Then you need to package it.
Then you need to advertise it.
Then you need to ship it.
You have to pay taxes on your profit.
You need to pay for the people managing this process.
If there is a failure rate you will have returns that you need to refund.
All in all you are probably up to $30-$40 for a unit. This is still a good price, but it is comparable to a Raspberry Pi.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
The first thing I thought when I saw this is someone knocked down the price of a tablet .. but when I click through what I see is a mainboard looking like a Raspberry Pii and not much else. .. WooHoo $9 for that? well what does it give you? Not very much. You still need a Keyboard & Mouse, Monitor or TV It doesn't even have video out you have to get an adapter for that.. ...
.
I just picked up three iCraig Android TV Sticks.. they come with 1.5G Ram 4Gig Rom .. they run full android.. they can be rooted and flashed.. they have HDMI Out They have Wifi.. They have a USB Port .. They have a MicroSD Slot to expand to 32Gig for storage. Android is already installed so you can quickly connect to the internet, You can install Office Apps, Games, Utilities You can print over WiFi Bluetooth or USB .. You also have access to TV Content sites like Netflix, Hulu, LiveStreams of TV News from hundreds of Local Stations, Music.. and if thats not enough you can install Kodi.tv and mine came installed with it.. You can connect to Local USB Drives or shares over a network.. You can install a Cloud Storage App or just use Google's...
.
Who needs this garbage mainboard with no features when I can go to the store and buy an android stick for $12.95 and turn all my TVs into Computers without having to deal with garbage daughter boards or OS's that aren't as full featured.. PlugNPlay Ready..
.
And there is no Learning Curve .. its just like your phone but better....
.
NAH... too little too late whoever gives them money could spend $12 on a Android Stick and be farther ahead and up and running in 10 minutes
And when you think how the 747 had its maiden flight in 1969 and planes still look the same, fly the same, use the same fuel, use the same materials, and go the same speed, my mind says no one is going to live on Mars because we can play video games with dirty sand.
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these.
In defense of the calculator - it has an included screen, dedicated custom keyboard, custom slim case, battery life measured in months if not years, etc.
In non-defense of the calculator - most of its cost is not in the above, but in its certification for use in [school / university / industry] - even if not for itself, then its sibling product which is.. and when that product costs $NN, you can't very well start selling this one for $N without people cluing in.
I love the Pocket Chip flavor - already pledget for two piece set. I was looking for something similar for Raspi but couldn't find any decent enclosure with integrated input, display and battery in slick case. Also integated wifi and bluetooth are very nice.
The $9 basic board comes without any display port but the modular aproach in which you can add VGA or HDMI via addon board is IMHO better than all-in-one Raspi - the board is cheaper that way and you can own only one display adapter and use it in multiple headless projects.
OK, so it's a $30 board. The problem is $79 get's you a Windows 8.1 x86 tablet.
You have to be crazy to think a TI-83 is expensive because of its parts and not trade agreements forcing out competition. The TI-83 is well-built. There's nothing that says well-built has to be expensive. It's just more plastic in the right places and proper fasteners--engineers allowed to do their job.
Moreover, any money spent on research has been paid back 15 years ago.
The situation might be different if TI didn't make all of the chips that go into it (dwindling inventories), but it's not. If it was, they would have replaced it with a newer generation model like every other company does on the planet.
It appears to me from the kickstarter that shipping is $5 in the US.
Has wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.
Said it roughly 15 years ago already here on slashdot:
We're smack in the middle of a transition to a post-scarcity cyberpunk society. A throw-away end-user PC for 9$ is basically exactly that.
Computers aren't the deal anymore. Who can operate them, how do I connect x to y to z and how do I migrate data from a to b - that's what this is all about. I can hardly be bothered to replace my 4.5 year old HTC Desire HD Smartphone because it's already basically a supercomputer in my pocket. With a replacable battery - which most of todays smartphones don't have.
The fact that I would like a bigger screen and that the browser with Android 2.3 Gingerbread is starting to have problems with todays website might actually just get me to do it. I would love to have a convergence device though - one that can act as my desktop as soon as I plug it into its cradle. ... Maybe I should really wait for that new Ubuntu phone to come out ...
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
https://linux-sunxi.org/GPL_Violations
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Allwinner-GPL-Violate-Proof
why are we enabling them and encouraging them?
"Importantly, "all hardware design files schematic, PCB layout and bill of materials are free for you the community to download, modify and use."
I guess you people have never heard of Allwinner, a fairly serial GPL violator. They're also pretty hostile towards the OSS community.
No Linux device tree that I can tell, which means no support for shit.
Oh, also - $9 computer with $20 shipping cost? That's the oldest eBay scam in the book. That thing only weighs a couple of ounces at most - $5 maximum even WITH insurance.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Its all about the market. Supply, demand, branding. A good calculator is a tool that has value above its parts. There is value in its specific design and functionality, which has been honed over time to meet a specific need. I am sure the margins on them are quite healthy, but their market is eroded by computers and tablets, which puts them more in a lower volume niche. There evidently isn't enough demand in that niche for low cost calculators for someone to move in to the space and try to compete.
At least that is my quick take on it.
I went to the Kickstarter page with the intent of buying one. But then I found that shipping the $9 board to anywhere except the US starts at $20. So the price just tripled !
So it looks like I'll wait until I can order it directly from china, with no detour through the US, with free shipping.
Yep, $5 for people in the USA, $20 for everyone else. Worse for many people that will likely push the total cost into the band where it is liable for VAT in the EU (at least if they are honest on the customs form) and the carrier will then more than likely charge me for collecting the VAT.
And they don't seem to offer any packs of multiple of the basic board to spread the cost of shipping and customs BS over more units. The only multipacks they seem to offer are of their portable device.
I guess (as a brit) I'll wait until the dust settles after the kickstarter and distributors over here start stocking them. Hopefully at not too much of a markup.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
Let's add it up, shall we?
$9 for the board
$15 for the HDMI board so you can actually hook it up to a monitor
$20 shipping
Total: $44
At that point you're better off getting a Pi. More performance, more support/accessories, more ports, more everything.
Clearly, the cost of computing isn't in the chips or the PCB design. It's in the device enclosures. Tooling costs for nice enclosures are expensive even if you do have them made in China and 3D printing isn't quite mature enough to make short-run production-quality parts.
I might have bitten, except for this. A year in this product space is pretty large. And I'm sure DX will have a clone in their shop by July or August 2016 that's $5-6.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
The Kickstarter has a handheld version with a battery, screen, and keyboard. You can install Wolfram Alpha on it as well (it comes by default with Rasbian now). It has better everything than a TI graphing calculator and costs $49.
I read the internet for the articles.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
TI-83 is a scam run on Schools, Students and Teachers. There are books written on how to do math on THIS calculator. They don't teach math, they teach math on this Calculator.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Yeah, which is a good chunk more than $9 - showing that a lot of cost in a device is not really in the innards; and it still doesn't certify it for use on tests and all that jazz, where the true cost of graphing calculators normally referred to lies.
( There's certainly cheap graphing calculators as well - just can't use those in those situations. )
The fact that you have to interact with something before seeing such basic information is a failure.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
That's okay, SystemD will integrate your house in the next version.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
Tell me about it. A few months ago I bought a cheap USB drive that was so bad, I lost my data before copying it to the drive.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
runs a version of Debian.
What does that mean? From the official Debian wiki:
Porting to new platforms
Unlike x86, each and every arm platform boots in a slightly different way. Thus, most of work of getting Debian running will involve dealing with bootloader and Kernel. Which is not really debian-specific work. After that, people can start working porting debian-installer for the system in question.
Something tells me that we have another weirdo ARM board with its own "Debian" distro, joining the disarray ranks of dozen others: poorly supported, barely maintained, and soon forgotten.
Considering the total amount of effort invested (and wasted) by developers into building the custom distros, I'm surprised (and disappointed) that nobody has actually stepped up, organized and standardized booting/etc on the ARM SoC yet. (IMO ARM Ltd itself should have done that a decade ago, since IMO it is one of the major roadblocks to the broader adoption of the ARM.)
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
actually no
7 were for dwarf lords in their halls of stone
this $9 is for mortal men doomed to die
in the land of silicon where transistors lie
In defense of the calculator - it has an included screen, dedicated custom keyboard, custom slim case, battery life measured in months if not years, etc.
In non-defense of the calculator - most of its cost is not in the above, but in its certification for use in [school / university / industry] - even if not for itself, then its sibling product which is.. and when that product costs $NN, you can't very well start selling this one for $N without people cluing in.
down with the calculators of defense! it's time we end the mathematical industrial complex! they've been selling children-- children! overpriced calculators running on gameboy processors for 20 years! why can't the children just have a happy childhood? why do we have to repackage the gameboy into a torture device?
the PocketCHIP has a screen and keyboard.
You could probably go for a few days if you were careful about sleep states and the display and used a big battery. If you chose to run on alkaline batteries instead of rechargeable you can go longer (realize that AA is about 2000mAh, while a LiPO of a similar volume is rarely more than 500mAh). eInk display instead of backlit LCD/TFT is going to make it into a pretty effective Calculator platform, but that's a fairly involved DIY project because the PocketCHIP is not eInk.
ps - the above is a wild guess, but I was one of the original Kindle developers.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
I'll soon be creating a Kickstarter to fund the creation of a crowd-sourced funding system. Stay tuned!
Chip is near reality. There is a working prototype
I'll believe the $9 price tag after they actually go to market.
If this had a cell reciever/transmitter I'd be sold. Of course, it'd then be $400 for no apparently logical reason.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
To be fair, the stated reason that schools / standardized tests allow you to use a TI calculator but not a tablet or other form of computer actually does make a lot of sense: no internet connection. They want you to be able to graph and calculate, but not search on Google.
I worked as a NASA contractor for a good while - it is widely stated at the various NASA centers that computers are why we are not in space (for a variety of reasons).
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
Why wasn't my HP 12C allowed? Oh right, because the books didn't know RPN.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Texas Instruments has gotten cozy with textbook publishers and that is why you can find the TI-x line of calculators at places like Target, not because of any technical superiority.
Basically, it looks like they didn't do any research on how much shipping would cost to other countries, and just wanted to make sure they didn't end up in the red. The problem with this is that there's places like Canada and Europe where you can most likely ship for way less that $20. I'm in Canada, and I've ordered bicycle parts from the US that weigh quite a bit more than this tiny computer, and the box would be much bigger, and still the shipping cost was $10 or less. Spending an afternoon at the post office, or talking to somebody on the phone could probably give you a pretty reasonable idea of what the shipping costs would be to most popular countries where people would order this thing.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
So you're telling me it has a whole $20 worth of components?
I mean, including your very own plastic case. Impressive!
That part of the niche market is captive doesn't negate any of my point. I never said they had any technical superiority either, I said they were a tool that we well developed for the purpose. That point is somewhat backed up by the insistence of experienced folks who demanded you use it, they feel it is the right tool.
I'll just leave this here.
When I think about how much more power this has than my old Commodore 64, and how much cheaper it is (whether you take inflation into account or not!), it is just awesome. Mind blown.
Commodore 64s were free! Thanks Mom!
"For every expert, there is an equal and opposite expert"
And it’s because we want to have a tool that kids can use in a classroom, on their way home, at home when they’re doing homework and also a tool they can bring in during their most important exam.”
hence the 'tool' part I spoke of.
The fact that you have to interact with something before seeing such basic information is a failure.
And would be illegal under consumer protection laws in most civilised countries....
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
What's more, copyrights and licenses have very little relevance in the Chinese culture, it's regarded as "a western thing".
Their target market is very much a "western thing" too.
We still benefit from it though, because it's their lack of such preoccupations that gives us such cheap gear.
The guy who lacks preoccupations about ripping off delivery trucks sells cheap gear down the pub.
They might even be acting more sensibly about this "imaginary property" stuff than we are, who knows. History will tell.
...aaaaaaand now we get to the point: you don't believe in protecting the copyrights that created the industries that invented the cheap stuff in the first place. There will be no new stuff if the people who put the time and energy into making it don't have their rights respected.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
That's truly all over Arduino's territory price-wise, it's hard to knock off even a chipduino cheaper than that. If you need more horsepower and/or wireless with your GPIO, it seems kind of a no-brainer.
How much hardware is on the VGA breakout? Does it actually have caps and whatnot on it or could you replicate it with just some jumper wires and a through-hole VGA connector?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I'd love a portable little OpenBSD machine. I wonder how standard the hardware will be?
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
You might not even need a power adapter. The price on this compares favorably to an Arduino, so I might use it where I would have previously used and Arduino. My Arduino projects have never needed a power adapter because they've always borrowed power from whatever they were connected to.
Are you all nuts? This is an incredible price performance point. Yet all I see is nit picking: it can't do this, it doesn't run that, the "real' price is X (what about SHIPPING!!!), the Raspberry Pi is the same only better, etc. What the hell do you expect for $9? A cold six pack and a back massage?
Speaking of the R Pi, if you go back and look at the responses to those announcements, you see the same kind of mindless bitching. The complaints are similar: t doesn't do enough, It's overpriced for what it does, it should be cheaper, more things should be optional, etc. Pretty much the same crap. Yet here the R Pi is the gold standard, and this board sucks. Make up you damned minds.
No matter what anybody comes up with, it's wrong. Have any of the legions of critics done anything even remotely like this? Of course not. They're all just sitting in their parents basement sniping at people who get stuff done. It sounds bunch of pathetic losers who knock everyone else down so they can try and feel superior. It's a disgusting display.
Why is Snark Required?
Do not diss The Flat, you clutter-loving philistine!
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
TI-83 is a scam run on Schools, Students and Teachers. There are books written on how to do math on THIS calculator. They don't teach math, they teach math on this Calculator.
True.
Here in France a huge effort was made to break the TI monopoly, and now we are allowed to use one crappy, expensive Casio as an alternative to the crappy, expensive TI.
Meanwhile all kids have a phone with more compute power than a Cray-1.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
*COUGH* Bullshit. They've been using these TI calcs for over 20-25 years.... WAY, WAY before people could use a device to "Google" solutions. The fact that they have contracts and books, and lord knows what else is what keeps their devices in play and permitted for testing. If nothing else, at least the cost was driven down because of the fact that their parts are dirt cheap compared to my day (early 90's) when you couldn't get a TI for under a few hundred bucks. I don't know if the new color models with crazy interfaces are allowed in schools now, but please know that the internet had no bearing on the original decision to allow these calcs to be used in testing.
Ah, so you equate copyright infringement with stealing things off trucks. In other words you don't know the first thing about law, nor are you able to separate logically different concepts.
You are overinterpreting quite harshly there. I did not say copyright infringement was the same as stealing -- you were implying that because a particular illegal practice makes things cheaper for the consumer, it is better. I gave an example of a different illegal practice that makes things cheaper for the consumer.
I could have instead used the example of child labour, or slave labour, or unsafe working practices. I could have mentioned industrial espionage. Each of those means that you or I get cheaper things, but it is still not a just practice.
Unless you remedy that, nothing you say on this subject can ever have any meaning. Making crap up because you think it sounds right might work on Slashdot, but don't try it in a court of law unless you're looking for laughter.
You are the one needing remedy -- you were far too quick to assume that the only reason I disagree with you is because of ignorance. You should learn to accept that other people can be equally well-informed as you and still come to different conclusions.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'