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'My Name is C.H.I.P. and I'll Be Your $9 Computer Today' (Video)
Think of C.H.I.P as a tablet computer that runs Linux instead of Android, "without the tablet bits," says interviewee Dave, who gave a talk -- which was mostly live demos -- at OSCON 2015. 50,000 C.H.I.P.s have already sold for $9 through their successful Kickstarter campaign, and Next Thing Co. plans to stick with the $9 price for the foreseeable future -- plus add-on boards (that they call "shields") they hope to sell you, but that won't flatten any but the skinniest wallets; given the projected price scale, you'll have trouble spending as much as $50 for a fully-accessorized C.H.I.P. unit.
"But," you may ask, "is C.H.I.P. Open Source?" You bet! No hedging here, just flat-out Open Source, from the bottom to the top, with all software (and hardware specs) freely available via GitHub. And lastly, the "I'll Be Your $9 Computer Today' statement in the headline above is allegorical, not factual. We've seen projected shipping dates for C.H.I.P ranging from "by the end of 2015" to a simple "2016." Either way, we're waiting with bated breath.
"But," you may ask, "is C.H.I.P. Open Source?" You bet! No hedging here, just flat-out Open Source, from the bottom to the top, with all software (and hardware specs) freely available via GitHub. And lastly, the "I'll Be Your $9 Computer Today' statement in the headline above is allegorical, not factual. We've seen projected shipping dates for C.H.I.P ranging from "by the end of 2015" to a simple "2016." Either way, we're waiting with bated breath.
"50,000 C.H.I.P.s have already sold for $9"
And not a single unit shipped! Remarkable, its all profit when you don't actually sell anything.
>> Android is far more advanced but Linux is still "Android".
Mr. Mooooooooo, is that you?
Raspberry Pi 2 can run Windows 10, so I can play all of my favorite games including Halo and Call of Duty.
CHIPS can't run Windows, only bad and evil command-line Linux.
It's akin to a Raspberry Pi. It has a processor, memory, and storage. It also has composite out and USB on board the main board. If you want VGA or HDMI output, you have to spring extra for the extra shield(s).
What they should have said was it's a low end tablet without the touch screen/display.
Not bad for something that costs the same as an appetizer at an average restaurant.
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
Imagine a beowulf cluster of these!
Imagine a beowulf cluster of retarded slashdot memes and the names of the morons who keep modding them up so they can finally feel like part of the group, scrawled on driftwood and scrap lumber and jammed up your ass hole. Splinters!
I just read the Kickstarter page, and if they actually deliver on what they're saying this thing is, it's actually way more useful and interesting to most people than the raspi. "The world's first $9 computer" sounds idiotic at first, because you know better, but it actually is the world's first $9 "what most people think of when you say 'computer' that is actually end-luser functional out of the box." Describing it as a tablet without the tablet stuff is weird; it's more like a desktop from several years ago, only it goes in your pocket instead of being comparatively stupid huge and ungainly netbook. It's got a bunch of different ways to connect to various input and output, so you pretty much just throw it on a desk wherever you happen to be and just go to town.
Of course, this is massively unlikely to have the impact it deserves. Everyone's already got smartphones, which we already spent way more on and are prettier, even though you have to do all kinds of dumb shit to them to give them functionality as flexible as this thing does. It's mostly interesting if you imagine it as something they pulled out of an alternate history. Like, if things had been just a little more like cyberpunk than they already are, maybe your mom would've given you one of these when you were ten and people on your decker forum would make fun of you for using it.
What are you trying to do on the Pi? I have an original Raspberry Pi (the 512MB model) and while it's not winning any speed contests it is certainly not unusably slow. I even run Chromium on it, most pages take a few seconds to load but work alright after that. I don't try to open lots of tabs though, the Pi is too memory constrained. Mathematica (which comes bundled with later versions of Raspbian) takes forever to start up, but once it is going it does alright.
I'm even making it drive a 1080p display. I did go and use the raspi-config script to overclock it. It's not totally necessary, but it makes a surprisingly large difference. Upping the memory clock is a huge win in particular. At the "Max OC" setting I was able to keep Quake 3's framerate up in the mid-30s or so.
I read the internet for the articles.
L != A
A == L
Does not compute! Error! Error!
You think the Pi2 feels slow? What distro are you using, what's your display resolution, etc. Or are you just used to 12-core Xeon beasts with 64GB of RAM and 2TB of PCIe SSD?
that all you have to do is plug in CHIP and you have a media players ready to go with all connections say HDMI and USB.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
Where's Eric Estrada?
#DeleteChrome
If you're going to make fun of someone's writing you should probably check a dictionary first. Bated means "in great suspense; very anxiously or excitedly" and is used correctly in the summary. You're thinking of "baited."
My Raspberry Pi is not in a box in the basement yet. Though, I am hopeful that I'll be able to get around to working on the project I intend to use it in, and then it will be in a box (an old NES) in the basement (hooked up to my TV).
My to-do list:
1) Mount Raspberry Pi in NES case
2) Build and install cables to power and video ports from RPi to original port locations on case
3) Mount Arduino (Uno R3 because it's cheap) in case and plug it into RPi as a USB device
4) Configure Arduino to be a USB HID for the controller ports
5) Build small PMU and distributor (maybe with a second Arduino) to handle clicky power button and power LED properly (bonus feature, get the "flashing screen of death" working based on a random value, with chances increasing the longer it has been since the system last booted successfully)
6) Finish loading RetroPie or similar controller-friendly front-end
My NES may not be a beowulf cluster, but it'll sure be some kind of cluster.
I, for one, welcome our new C.H.I.P. overlords.
The video make it clear. They said that they are using components designed for tablets in order to take advantage of the economies of scale.
'My Name is C.H.I.P. and I'll Be Your $9 Computer Today'
Was there any point to this headline, or did someone just think it was cute (for some reason)?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Are you using USB Wifi? USB is notoriously CPU hungry and Wifi USB is the worst.
As for the videos, the playback depends. If they are encoded in a format that you can offload to the GPU, then the Pi will be great. I've played plenty of 1080p video on the Pi over the network using the built-in ethernet using omxplayer. The one big caveat is that it only supports a few codecs, and if you try to play a video encoded differently it will go to the CPU and be unwatchable (less than 1 frame per second). It does support the most popular codecs at least (DivX and H.264).
I'm not sure why you're having so much trouble with X. Once it is started I usually get along just fine, although you do have to be careful not to blow the memory budget. If you start to swap the thing will become horrible. You have to use the machine with the same mindset you would have used with a 15 year old Pentium III machine. Don't ask it to do too much at once and be mindful of your memory use. Keeping to the commandline is also a big help.
Seriously though, look at the built-in overclocking options. They make a huge difference, and they don't even void the warranty unless you go whole hog and start editing the boot.conf file by hand and set crazy voltages. It's just like the old Pentium days where overclocking could dramatically improve a machine instead of being some incremental dick measuring contest like it is today.
I read the internet for the articles.
English "is" doesn't correspond exactly to mathematical "=", so commutativity isn't to be expected.
E.g. A pig is a mammal.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Empirically, the "Turbo OC" setting in raspi-config roughly doubles the effective speed of the device. It only bumps the CPU clock from 700Mhz to 1Ghz, but it also increases the memory and GPU clock which has a dramatic improvement on performance. If your Pi becomes crashy in that setting, try scaling back the GPU (Core) clock speed first. The CPU and Memory seem to overclock better than the GPU.
Like I said, the Pi behaves a lot like a late 90s desktop, back when overclocking was worth the effort.
I read the internet for the articles.
In soviet russia C.H.I.P err ... $9's you ...
err
I'll get my coat
It's just a low-end ARM-based computer that happens to run Linux instead of Android. The tablet comment is just marketing drool.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
Well, "with bated breath" means that. "Bated" means "held" or "restrained", though it's practically never used any more except in that expression. It's cognate to "abate".
Optional pedantry: Shakespeare used "bate" in the "restrained" sense, including this from Much Ado: "she will die, if he woo her, rather than she will bate one breath of her accustomed crossness" (Meaning: If he makes a pass at her, she would rather die than cut back even a little bit on her usual insults.)
Indeed.
This is yet another product entering an ever-crowding field. This does not at all seem "new".
And it may not even be "better" or "cheaper" than the alternatives already available for purchase today.
Having said that, I'm more than happy to see this field growing. I find it hilarious we're getting to the point where shipping itself is possibly greater than product price for a "computer".
I'm having all sorts of fun with my Single-Board-Computers. I grabbed a couple (BananaPro) initially to act as simple TFTP servers with a bit of capacity for backup. I am still in an experimental phase to some degree but have started a soaking phase where part of the home network is dependent upon them. I've far surpassed my initial plans. At the moment I have this pair of SBCs working together as a High Availability cluster serving LTSP to clients. I'm typing from one of stations "soaking".
From my phone:
[@MSM8974:/]$ uname -a
Linux localhost 3.4.0-g635b2f7 #1 SMP PREEMPT Thu Aug 13 11:22:15 PDT 2015 armv7l GNU/Linux
Historically, yes. Since it's never used any other way now, the Oxford dictionary has apparently determined your definition is obsolete and the one I gave is correct:
http://www.oxforddictionaries....
1 GHz of what, though? Too many ARM cores on the market now, and some of them are antiquated crap. Your info is virtually useless.
Ezekiel 23:20
For my cheap computing needs, I'd rather get the Raspberry Pi, which is Cortex A9. But what I'm really waiting for is something that implements ARMv8. Probably won't get something in this price range for a while.
'is' in this context (and usually) works more like the 'is a member of' operator. I will denote it by e here.
When we say 'x == 2', in a sense, we are saying that 'x e { 2 }', that is, 'x is a member of the set, the only member of which is the number 2'.
When we say 'Android is Linux', we mean that 'all Android devices are members of the set of devices running Linux'.
When we say 'Linux is not Android', we mean that 'there exist devices running Linux which do not run Android' (or that there could exist devices running Linux which do not run Android).
Thus 'x runs Android' implies 'x runs Linux', but 'x runs Linux' does not imply 'x runs Android'.
(You will note that, in the foundations are nearly all modern mathematics, the fundamental relationship upon which everything else is built is set membership.)
John_Chalisque
For this reason I reencode virtually all my video content to Mp4 h264. The Pi2 plays it wonderfully, and Kodi is great, to the extent that the I only use my PS3 for playing games and accessing things like Amazon Prime video (though for that my Fire TV stick both works better, without updating every fsck'ing week, and also runs Kodi, albeit accessed through the app settings menu). For re-encoding, I tend to use a bigger machine (e.g. 2nd hand Z800 with 12 cores.)
John_Chalisque
Nowadays you don't see nearly as much gain from overclocking. You still get 200Mhz, but that's only 10% more performance instead of 50%.
Benchmarks. Note the memory score as well as the Integer and Floating point scores. Half of the speedup comes from the cpu crunching, and the other half comes from the memory and GPU.
But you don't have to take my word for it. If you has Raspbian installed you can try it yourself in like 60 seconds. Just run raspi-config and go into the overclocking menu. You do have to reboot afterward, but that's pretty quick. You will probably be surprised at how noticeable the difference is, especially when working with memory hungry applications like Chromium.
I read the internet for the articles.
Because they may have lower Total Cost of Operation per peta-op than more conventional CPUs, despite slower speeds. Electric power and cooling are lower.
They shouldn't have included the wifi. I'm pretty sure the RTL8723BS chipset is dependent on proprietary firmware.
https://github.com/hadess/rtl8723bs/blob/master/hal/HalHWImg8723B_FW.c contains:
u1Byte Array_MP_8723B_FW_AP_WoWLAN[] = {
0x01, 0x53, 0x20, 0x00, 0x12, 0x00, 0x02, 0x00, 0x12, 0x02, 0x11, 0x28, 0x4A, 0x3C, 0x00, 0x00,
0x9E, 0x0D, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00,
0x02, 0x45, 0x8D, 0x02, 0x53, 0x49, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00,
0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x02, 0x53, 0xD2, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00,
0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x02, 0x58, 0x6B, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00,
0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x.......
Don't be a homonymophobe, you insensitive clod. :-)
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
No, it's allegorically useless.
Be sure to put that ToDo list in the box with the raspi when you put it in the basement.
Imagine a beowulf cluster of sharks with laser beams on their foreheads!
I see this as being something more like a stick computer. I have one playing a movie right now, an "MK809" that I bought on Amazon for $35.
I see that there's a potentially *huge* market for small, fix-function, programmable, embedded devices that run on a watt or two of power. (My TV stick is powered by the USB port on the side of the TV)
I am thinking about stuff like household A/C controllers that monitor outside weather, inside temperature, and time of day to optimize internal climate control to save money.
Control the traffic lights to minimize the amount of delay as traffic flows through town?
Monitor humidity levels, time of day, weather forecasts, infrared sensor data, and other variables to manage irrigation to keep plants healthy with a minimum of water usage. (California could *really* use tech like this about now) ... and so on ...
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Why are you *still* using Adobe Flash for your videos? Even YouTube knows how to do HTML5 video.
Sincerely,
A Flash Hater
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
Definitely not in the basement. I use the Raspberry pi in an industrial setting all over. Mainly I've been using it for industrial displays and touch screens. It works wonderful and it's far more slick than any Panel View with crappy icons. Cheaper too of course and very easy to replace. It has made R&D fun again in the manufacturing world and try out new ideas and it has allowed a far range of competitors to the big guys with far more features without all the clumsy backdoors.
It's not exactly cheap either. The useful shields and accessories make it astronomically expensive very quickly.
Its important to note that it was really a 29$ computer with shipping included. I remember during the campaign even if you wanted 100 pieces, you would still pay 29$ x 100. And with that price I can already buy a tablet with the tablet stuff for a similar price with shipping included (currently listed as 31$).
So one can't get SteamOS running on this?
that's cool but does it have systemd on it?
Cheap crap but still crap.
I prefer to think of it as a modern alternative to a traditional microcontroller for hobbyists, because that's what it seems to be. Look at the number of people already using the Pi as a microcontroller substitute due to the ease of programming (ubiquitous operating environment and standard programming tools) and ready availability. This is not only cheaper than the Pi, but it comes with battery management built in, making it a heck of a lot more convenient to "makers".
The other big advantage this has is in prototyping embedded systems. People use the Pi in prototype systems, but it means that there's a lot of reworking to do to bring the code to production readiness, as you may well be changing architecture -- the Broadcom SoC in the Pi is only available in massive bulk, whereas Allwinner parts can be bought off the various direct export sites in fairly low numbers, meaning that code prototypes developed on CHIP can be moved to production on the same SoC without the CHIP board with little or no reworking.
And that's what I think drew Allwinner to be so cooperative here -- they can see the potential in the market for all the low-order gadgets coming through Kickstarter, and they want to get that cash.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
Well I read satire into the GP's post. After all, the specs on the computer are kind of 2005 vintage, and about as out-of-date as the "Beowulf cluster" running gag...
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
While the beagleboard line are familiar to many of us linux geeks they don't have anything like the general recognition that tablets or even raspberry pi's do and they have been somewhat uncompetitive for a while (especially since the pi2 and odroid c1 showed up). So they aren't an especially good target for drawing marketing comparisions with.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register