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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.
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.