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Meet VoCore2 Lite, a $4 Coin-Sized, Open Source Linux Computer (zdnet.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report on ZDNet:Four bucks buys a lot of hardware these days, and nothing highlights this more than a project like the VoCore2 Lite. VoCore2 is an open source Linux computer and a fully-functional wireless router that is smaller than a coin. It can also act as a VPN gateway for a network, an AirPlay station to play lossless music, a private cloud to store your photos, video, and code, and much more. The Lite version of the VoCore2 features a 580MHz MT7688AN MediaTek system on chip (SoC), 64MB of DDR2 RAM, 8MB of NOR storage, and a single antenna slot for Wi-Fi that supports 150Mbps. Spend $12 and go for the full VoCore2 option and you get the same SoC, but you get 128MB of DDR2 RAM, 16MB of NOR storage, two antenna slots supporting 300Mbps, an on-board antenna, and PCIe 1.1 support.
Yay!
A $4 coin ... I call BS! :)
just wondering...
Finally, the year of the Linux Cointop computers
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
... still a better read than the article above.
Introducing CowardCore - the revolutionary $0.01 computer smaller than a pin head! It totally exists and is available for purchase (shipping $99.99 - no refunds if you lose it / can't find it).
Oh, so it doesn't actually exist. I'm sure Qin Wei from Taiyuan, China will certainly send me one and not fuck off with my money.
How locked down is this thing?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rai_stones
Why the hell do people insist on calling an on-prem NAS a "private cloud"?
"Can I have a glass of water, please?" "Sure, would you like to see our menu of premium bottled rain, or is water from our private indoor river okay?"
please, end this. I come from a dark future to warn you of dire consequences. In my time, we have invented the tiniest VoCore the size of an eyelash to compete with the tiniest Raspberry Pi the size of a pepper flake. A beagleboard exists thats no larger than a cheerio. The last conference I attended ended in disaster when the presenter accidentally inhaled her RPi cluster and choked to death on a router the size of a matchbook. Things are very grim indeed.
Except for windows 15 users who operate tablets the size of billboards and Mac users who appear to be operating $800 dinner plates full of USB D ports and no screen this year...
Good people go to bed earlier.
There are no $4 coins!
There's so much hardware out there... you got Arduino's, lots of clones, Raspberry Pi's, C.H.I.P, etc.
What they don't tell you is how the software is. Is it up to date, or does it still run Linux 3.x? What Linux distros does it run? Can you run stock Ubuntu, or do you need some guy's custom build that's two years old and you can't apt-get upgrade?
My specific beef: It looks like the VoCore2 rans OpenWrt. Which version? Custom build that's updated every six months?
And, thanks to Indiegogo, you can't post a comment (to ask a question) without contributing. What a bunch of bull.
Why isn't there a SCAA - Straight Crackers Association of America?
I feel unrepresented.
The specs are pretty tiny. It needs outside storage, antenna (on the $4 one), and power supply. This is hardly equivalent to raspberry. It is more like slapping a media chip on a board, adding a crystal, and connecting the chip to some castellated pins. OK, that is exactly what they did. It is a great way to test that chip to make new boards using it. Hardly a Linux computer.
Not available for sale yet
http://vocore.io/#store
And the $12 VoCore2 from the article will be available in 2 weeks for $14.99.
I'll take my chances with a RPi zero at MicroCenter
1% APY, No fees, Online Bank https://captl1.co/2uIErYq Don't let your $$$ sit in a no-interest acct.
The original VoCore has been out for 2-3 years now, and other than maybe like 5 projects that various people have come up with in those intervening 2-3 years, the community surrounding it is dead as a door-nail, and it's going to be just as dead for the VoCore II.
The VoCore and VoCore II are made by some shitty Chinese company just trying to make a buck off the cheap embedded board market. Just look at the poor excuse for "documentation" that comes with the VoCore, rife with Chinglish and light on details. Their "How to develop for the VoCore on Windows" guide is what I'm assuming is the Chinese equivalent of a joke, with the first two steps being "Install VMware" and "Install Ubuntu as a VM via VMware", which is not exactly what I call "developing for the VoCore on Windows".
Just like these fly-by-night hacks did last time, they're shopping their advertisements around to just about every geek website that's out there, and just like they did last time, the moment the campaign is over they'll release their hardware, release a ridiculous excuse for "documentation", and then pretty much disappear into the night.
Moving beyond the company making it, the lack of a community, and lack of documentation, the hardware itself is also fragile as glass. On a whim I bought two VoCores some months ago, and managed to brick one within an hour. How? By having the temerity to try to set it up so that it used the wired ethernet interface on the dock board, rather than using its default, useless, functionality of a wireless bridge. I somehow managed to fuck up configuring it thanks to the scant documentation on exactly how to configure the damn thing, and now it doesn't so much as pull an IP from my router, so I can't actually shell into it to see what's wrong. The kicker? Despite having a micro-USB port on the dock, they didn't bother including a USB-TTL bridge chip on the dock, so I can't even try to unbrick the fucking thing that way without investing in a USB serial cable. Fuck that.
Fuck the VoCore, and fuck the VoCore II.
Who is going to waste a coin-sized computer by tethering it to a storage device and power brick?
There's definitely applications for tiny devices like this and I think the design is nifty, but using it in situations where its size (and price) is going to be dwarfed by its peripherals is a bit of a waste.
Log in or piss off.
Does it run Linux?
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these in Natalie Portman's pants!
Hmm... Front or back pocket?
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
This is the same SoC as the M1 3g/4g wifi router (a similiarly cool 6-12 dollar device that is a full fledged router the size of a bic lighter.)
In contrast the M1 only has 32 megs of ram and 4 megs of spi flash, but has the USB and ethernet stock, and a microusb connector for power.
This sound like a pretty cool device, but I haven't seen any actual mention of the PCIe 1.1 support: Does it have a desktop/laptop PCIe x1 connector board available? Can it handle REAL PCIe x1 devices? Can it be used with the usb port/ethernet so you could make it into a real system? (There are mini-PCIe to desktop PCIe x16 slot adapters available! Also 2-4 slot PCIe/PCI bridge boards which would allow a device like this to be a desktop replacement peripheral-wise.)
The biggest holdup on PC replacement boards is the lack of any form of PCIe, SATA, and (less so compared to modern laptops) socketed memory. Those three items and any one of these cheapo boards could become a desktop replacement. Get one with 4-8 gigs of ram, and it IS desktop replacement. Get it 32,64, or 128 gigs and it could run pretty much whatever you would want, so long as its io bus could keep up.
wtf is wrong with slashdot that this trash can't be removed, even automatically ?
"Place stack of fresh hotcakes here"?
"This chip is a pile of steaming poo"?
(Yes I know it means "hot, don't touch").
Ah, forget it.
It can, don't view posts below score 0.
Or you can try not being a little sensitive snowflake.
Just ignore it.
But we're all smart here and know it's all just heavily reprocessed dinosaur piss.
Joke's on them, HAH HAH HAH
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Tell me how to construct it myself, then I'd be impressed.
No really, tell me how to construct it myself. If something is that cheap, then maybe it's time it should become public domain where anybody can get involved in creating and modifying a design - that is, open source hardware as opposed to closed source hardware. Especially the microchips, I've heard that they're in the domain of a small set of companies.
When you filter out zeros, most of the best insults are hidden. This should be spam/advertisement and should be categorized as such, with a filter for spam. Slashdot is still 10 years behind most posting boards.
"Again?! Did you check the couch cushions?"
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
There is a kickstarter for a similar project called Onion2, it comes with a 32MB flash, which I think is the minimal usable size.
I have a few images of openwrt for the Linkit Smart 7688 (uses the same SoC) and it takes about 20MB for the kernel + root filesystem.
An anonymous source indeed... This reads just like the advertisement...
Trump 2016!
With the claim of suitability as a private cloud to store your photos, video, and code all in a maximum of 16 MB of flash storage, the compression tools they provide must be impressive, indeed.
Eric is smiling at you, don't look! It's like looking at the Sun, no human being can resist the charm and easy smile of an Estrada!
Where can I find one of these elusive $4 coin?
What's even more interesting than the chip is that apparently there are small 9800 mAh battery packs? Where can I get one of these beasts? My multirotor could fly for over an hour on a pack like that. Currently a 2500 mAh pack is about 350g and I wouldn't consider it small at all so there must be some sort of alien technology I don't know about. I want it!
This is the Scientology College in England.
The problem with this is that it successfully manages to degrade the value of all the sensible stuff in any thread. I think that is probably the intention. Also, I'm reluctant, for example, to tweet any thread that contains this trash. Again, a win for 'them'.
Personally I'm not bothered, there are stupid and/or hate-filled people in the world everywhere. I love the quote from the sidekick in Rambo 3, 'God must love idiots. he created so many of them'. Before something kicks off about that, no, I'm not religious either. just like the quote. But, yes, I believe they should just be removed.
On y va, qui mal y pense!
Cloud is a fairly well defined term that doesn't relate to any of the above. NIST Definition is pretty good definition of it. Source: http://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpu... Cloud computing is a model for enabling ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction. This cloud model is composed of five essential characteristics, three service models, and four deployment models.
There is no such thing like a $4 coin.
> When you filter out zeros, most of the best insults are hidden.
I know users here are barely literate, but he said "don't view posts below score 0."
It doesn't even have one port. They are much more courageous than Apple.
its called free speech im afraid, look at it differently : if everyone can speak their mind freely its easier to point out the clowns.
i vote no moderation on slashdot, its been working fine like that all the fucking time
free speech for the dumb ! (off-topic yea but i couldnt help but notice your reaction , this is not a hippie board im afraid)
i WAS wondering where i can get those things, i was thinking of making them into buttons and have them sewn onto a jacket for one thing (dam, i dont have money to patent, here we go again, another million lost, you OWE ME PRECIOUS)
Free speech was meant to be free for all... how can anyone grow up in a nanny state ?
yes can i add something to myself here ? ...
on the website i see nothing under $14 btw
still a nice price for intelligent buttons lol
Free speech was meant to be free for all... how can anyone grow up in a nanny state ?