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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.
just wondering...
Finally, the year of the Linux Cointop computers
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
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'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.
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.
Also the VoCore2 Ultimate, which actually has USB & microSD ports like a RPi sells for $44.99
The "normal" VoCore2 is just a PCB with a chip on it.
http://vocore.io/v2u.html
One more detail: All product pages on store say:
Sources
Update at Nov.30
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Not particularly, considering that it runs a customized version of OpenWRT Chaos Calmer, with sources available at https://github.com/Vonger/open...