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A $1, Linux-Capable, Hand-Solderable Processor (hackaday.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: Over on the EEVblog, someone noticed an interesting chip that's been apparently flying under our radar for a while. This is an ARM processor capable of running Linux. It's hand-solderable in a TQFP package, has a built-in Mali GPU, support for a touch panel, and has support for 512MB of DDR3. If you do it right, this will get you into the territory of a BeagleBone or a Raspberry Pi Zero, on a board that's whatever form factor you can imagine. Here's the best part: you can get this part for $1 USD in large-ish quantities. A cursory glance at the usual online retailers tells me you can get this part in quantity one for under $3. This is interesting, to say the least.
The chip in question, the Allwinner A13, is a 1GHz ARM Cortex-A8 processor. While it's not much, it is a chip that can run Linux in a hand-solderable package. There is no HDMI support, you'll need to add some more chips (that are probably in a BGA package), but, hey, it's only a dollar. If you'd like to prototype with this chip, the best options right now are a few boards from Olimex, and a System on Module from the same company. That SoM is an interesting bit of kit, allowing anyone to connect a power supply, load an SD card, and get this chip doing something. Currently, there aren't really any good solutions for a cheap Linux system you can build at home, with hand-solderable chips.
The chip in question, the Allwinner A13, is a 1GHz ARM Cortex-A8 processor. While it's not much, it is a chip that can run Linux in a hand-solderable package. There is no HDMI support, you'll need to add some more chips (that are probably in a BGA package), but, hey, it's only a dollar. If you'd like to prototype with this chip, the best options right now are a few boards from Olimex, and a System on Module from the same company. That SoM is an interesting bit of kit, allowing anyone to connect a power supply, load an SD card, and get this chip doing something. Currently, there aren't really any good solutions for a cheap Linux system you can build at home, with hand-solderable chips.
I'm waiting for the future of computing: RISC-V.
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Unless you want to do it yourself or you have a project that needs it. 5 dollar will get you a Raspberry Pi Zero with a full system minus storage.
and just get a raspberry pi..
But $1 and solder by hand?
A pencil... A FUCKING PENCIL at a gift shop cost $1.25 now...
A 1 gigahertz CPU with GPU for $1?
Good god.
Compute is now ubiquitous.
We have passed the threshold.
Allwinner is garbage. This is the shit you get in those chinese Raspberry Pi clones. The support and documentation are essentially nonexistant. If you even have a reference linux image to work with, it will break all of the time and never be updated
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
Shouldn't a chip for your hand be implanted? Soldering a chip to your hand sounds painful.
Just because you can hand solder it doesnâ(TM)t mean you are hooking up DDR3 on your bread board. DDR2 and above require careful trace and impedance matching. We (eeâ(TM)s) use very sophisticated design tools to design and tune this. Even then, we often hand tune signal matching and settings in firmware/BSP/BIOS. This is the same kind of bunk as the home 3D printed gun. Can you make it work; maybe but probably will not work well. Can you make it reliable and good? NO!
https://hackaday.com/2018/09/1...
a Beowulf cluster of these?
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
A fundamentally new architecture: The Mill
Ain't worth $0 with the "Code of Conduct"...
Considering it's a Allwinner I guess it's simply best go with the alternatives.
I've used a tablet using one of those in 2010.
so if you daisey chain 50 together you got ur self a darn cheap super computer if you know what your doing
$1 is overpaying
eLQFP176 is considered "hand-solderable"?
Quad Flat Pack with 176 pins? Really?
I suppose everything is 'hand solderable' then.
Is it ....
Is it hand solderable ?
We've got to know !!!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Well, maybe it is if you have $2k+ in SMT soldering equipment like: https://www.weller-tools.com/p... and a reasonable quality microscope: https://www.microscope.com/oma...
A TQFP chip usually has pins on 0.8mm centres or less (down to 0.4mm). In case you don't know what this means, this chip will have 32 to 64 pins per inch that need soldering.
In any case, you need to have a PCB of appropriate quality to solder it on and, if you aren't experienced in working with them, you'll fuck up a lot of PCBs and chips. These chips are meant to be soldered on an appropriately solder pasted PCB and then run through an oven. Single pins can be reworked with the tools noted above or with custom hot gas tools.
I'm sure shortly somebody with the appropriate knowledge, skills and resources will design a Single Board Computer (SBC) around this chip with an appropriate BIOS chip or tools to flash it. If they don't come up with the SBC, then there is a reason why they didn't (or stopped before offering a product) and you will avoid going down a rabbit hole.
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
The at91sam9260 is available in TQFP, albeit more like $9 in quantity
There are other QFP/TQFP packages from cypress and (I think) TI that are hand-solderable.
Using flash and DRAM compatible with these chips you can have a sufficiently usable board with nothing BGA on it.
Just look at the Olimex older designs for these chips. And the documentation and reference Linux implementation are nicer than Allwinner.
The only newsworthy item here is the $1 part, but I thought the Rock-something MIPS chip with stacked ram is similar. Correct me if I'm wrong.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
Have a look at some youtube videos of hand soldering TQFP, there are loads.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... for example
I'm happy hand soldering 0.65mm devices and I have done 0.5mm. It is easy enough to do if you are careful however my preferred method is to get a £30 stencil and use solder paste together with hand placement. I then chuck it in my £30 oven and get results good enough that my customers assume that it has been made on a pick and place machine.
Yes it takes a bit of practise and experience but certainly no expensive equipment.
wot no sig
"Currently, there aren't really any good solutions for a cheap Linux system you can build at home, with hand-solderable chips."
Gee, I can't imagine why...I mean, in a world of $1500 iPhones, who the hell can afford a $35 Raspberry Pi, amirite?
Guess it's best to go cheap(er), and re-invent the wheel. Or at least make a half-assed version of a wheel and pretend that there are millions of Linux DIY fans who just can't wait to hand-solder their computers together (as if "hand-solderable" here implies $50 worth of cheap tools)...
These things aren't soldered pin by pin in the factories, you know?
They add flux, put the chip on top, heat that shit up, until the solder melts together, and done.
Look at Louis Rossmann doing it, in his videos on YouTube.
Granted, a hot air station is expensive. But it’s not like you can’t just hold something from the DIY market at the right distance, to do it. Use some sheet of something to protect the bits that should not be heated. Use your brain!
And 0.4 mm is far from needing a microscope! My mechanical pencil has a lead of that diameter, and with it, holding it at an angle, I can draw two lines inside a 1mm square without touching the square’s borders, just using my eyes and hands.
What should we use instead?
Isn't soldering CPUs evil?
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
How many people out there have ever actually soldered one of these?
It's a 20 mm Ã-- 20 mm eLQFP176 with a 55 nm pin spacing, er, lithography.
pi 3B+ is what, 3 years old? I'm learning what my Plex can and can't play, if I had 2x the CPU I could play everything without "the server hasn't the oomph to transcode this video" errors.
Iâ(TM)m almost serious. Pretty much any compute, clustered right, is âoeinfinitelyâ horizontally scalable.
The more I think about it, once Skynet becomes self-aware, it will need $$. If it manages to convince someone to âoeautomateâ the soldering, weâ(TM)re fucked.
I, for one, welcome...
An electronics engineer was talking about soldering a bunch of basic PCB boards. He said, I hope you can work with 0603's, as if it was difficult. Now I use a microscope for working with 0201's all day, but I don't recall even 0402's as being a problem with the naked eye. Working on 0603's is like standing next to an NBA player.
I didn't actually read the article, but I hope they also have a cordless controller, didn't count the amount of times someone tripped over the damn cord and shit went flying across the room, but it was a LOT.
There are three kinds of falsehood: the first is a 'fib,' the second is a downright lie, and the third is statistics.