12 ms·

PocketBeagle – A $25 open-source USB-key-fob computer

508 points by jarmitage 9y ago

est 9y ago
paired with Proxmark3 or ChameleonMini you can make your rfid cards N in 1
Xeoncross 9y ago
> Openness and flexibility tear-down limits on your imagination I'll take ten. In all seriousness, how do developers feel about this compared to larger communities around products like the Raspberry Pi? I've learned to follow the crowd when I'm using products for the best support.
- Jorslu 9y ago
  +1 Another thing I am curious about is why is there such a price difference? RPiZ - $5 PB - $25 https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/raspberry-pi-zero/ https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/raspberry-pi-zero/
  - jarmitage 9y ago
    As far as I can suppose (although I don't actually have a source), RPiZ is sold at a loss and is made in much larger quantities than its competitors. I would be surprised if PocketBeagle isn't also sold at a loss, although at a different scale. Anyone else got thoughts/evidence on this?
    - pjc50 9y ago
      Neither company is large enough to sell at a loss (where would they get the money?), although the Pi is very close to selling at marginal cost.
      - jdkticom 9y ago
        Lots of discussion about that here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10631668 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10631668
    - jdkticom 9y ago
      It is definitely not sold at a loss. No maximum to the order quantity, just lead time if it is more than inventory.
  - dbcurtis 9y ago
    I think the RPi CPU's are significantly less costly, and of course have higher volume production runs. Traditionally, the chips used in RPi have difficult-to-obtain low level documentation and therefore binary blobs for drivers. RPi foundation is willing to make that trade-off in favor of cost. The Beagle ecosystem has from the beginning been more of a traditional reference design "please buy our chips for your personalized version" sort of board.
    - agumonkey 9y ago
      yeah rpis are leftovers from old massproduced chips.. plus they lack lots of features
  - leggomylibro 9y ago
    The Pi Zero can be extremely hard to find at $5 depending on where you live, though. Ditto for the Zero W at $10. They're pretty awesome, but every time I go looking for one it takes a few days. Still, it is sort of fun. Like hunting for a newly-launched console.
    - VectorLock 9y ago
      Microcenter but they were doing a '1 per customer' thing for a while.
      - khedoros1 9y ago
        There aren't many MicroCenters around, and they still do an escalating price scale. $10 for 1, $15 apiece for 2-5, $20 apiece after that.
        mdip 9y ago
        I wonder if these are sold at Microcenter. They're about 15-20 miles from one here in Michigan, although it's not like that particular store is their Headquarters or anything. It is a shame there aren't more MicroCenter stores around, although I'm not sure really how they stay in business. It was logical that computing equipment would make the switch to being purchased primarily online[0]. Somehow MicroCenter competes well on price and very well on selection. That place is like a retail NewEgg, carrying all kinds of very specialized things. They've got everything from water cooling rigs (multiple brands), to oddities like shrink tubing, development boards, 3D printing supplies and every kind of upgrade for PCs you can think of. It's a place I avoid when I don't have an hour to sit around and a reasonable budget because I always leave there with more than I intended on purchasing but it's so nice that when I need an adapter to plug my one power supply cord into my two ports on my new graphics adapter, I can drive up the road. Small tangent, yeah, but this product would fit really well over there. [0] While I'm sure Apple stores do OK and full PCs probably sell OK in larger electronics chains, none of those chains carry anything resembling a reasonable selection of pieces/parts.
- reaperducer 9y ago
  I got burned pretty badly (in time, not money since it was ultra cheap) on the Onion Omega2 fiasco. The thing was released when it was alphaware, and all the support documentation was for the previous machine. It's matured a lot in the last few months, but that first half year was very rough. It took two or three firmware releases to even make it stable, and it's still a bugfest. (Can the support web site even work on iPhones yet? It used to be Windows+Chrome only.) Because of that, my next foray into ultra-low-cost computing will be Raspberry Pi. At least I know it's an established product and because of that it probably has a good community and documentation.
  - seabird 9y ago
    "Good documentation" might be a bit of an overstatement. The second you get off the beaten path with a Raspberry Pi, things can get pretty hellish. Try bare metal C on just the second rendition, and weep before the non-existent documentation for the SoC they used. The official response to this issue (to paraphrase) was "it's fairly close to the previous version; you can figure it out." I don't want to know what sort of suffering you would have to go through trying to do bare-metal programming on an RPi 3.
    - khedoros1 9y ago
      There's at least a forum section dedicated to it, with a few posts containing collections of resources: https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewforum.php?f=72 https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewforum.php?f=72
      - seabird 9y ago
        That doesn't change the fact that the documentation you need isn't there, and that they have no plans to provide it. Can you figure it out? Sure. Am I going to pull my hair out doing trial and error trying to figure out the GPIO pinout for an SoC that they have no interest in providing documentation for when I can just buy a product with better documentation? Of course not.
  - carussell 9y ago
- matheweis 9y ago
  I’ve become a huge fan of the NanoPi Neo series. The lower end models are < $10 and still moderately powerful, besides being quite a lot smaller than the Raspberry Pi’s
  - Xeoncross 9y ago
    Looks pretty stable too: http://wiki.friendlyarm.com/wiki/index.php/NanoPi_NEO http://wiki.friendlyarm.com/wiki/index.php/NanoPi_NEO
    - agumonkey 9y ago
      Slightly more recent, smaller (pi zero like form) http://wiki.friendlyarm.com/wiki/index.php/NanoPi_Duo http://wiki.friendlyarm.com/wiki/index.php/NanoPi_Duo something like 9$ (shipping included)
      - iancarroll 9y ago
        I just got my NanoPi Duo and it’s pretty cool. With WiFi and its form factor it’s very useful. Though I kind of wish it used an H5; I can’t imagine it costs much more but it’s a much better SoC.
  - subway 9y ago
    Check out the OrangePi Zero series too. They're comparable to the NanoPi Neo and NanoPi Neo Air in size and features, but seem to land in mainline u-boot and Linux a bit more quickly.
- tyingq 9y ago
  The Beaglebones, including this one, use the AM335X chip, which includes two PRU units on die. These are microcontrollers that have access to the same memory as the main ARM cores, and an API to share data. This allows for real-time-ish use cases that the Raspberry PI can't handle well. Low latency audio, driving large LED matrix boards, high speed input sampling, etc. So it's not quite the same market. $25 in this space is rock bottom pricing.
  - lima 9y ago
    CNC machining and 3D printing is one use case where Beaglebones are very common. This LinuxCNC fork supports it natively: http://www.machinekit.io/ http://www.machinekit.io/
  - j_s 9y ago
    > jarmitage: if you're interested in making ultra low latency (as low as 80us) embedded musical instruments, check out Bela http://bela.io http://bela.io > tyingq: The pair of PRUs in the Beaglebone black is a large part of it. source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15121720 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15121720 (Aug 2017)
- xienze 9y ago
  I started using the BB Black when it was first introduced and am quite surprised it didn't become more popular. At the time, the alternative was the RPi, and the BBB was way faster and had dedicated Ethernet (something the RPi still doesn't have -- its Ethernet controller hangs off the USB bus). To answer the question though, honestly I'm not sure how you can go wrong with it being a smaller community. You can largely take advice about the RPi and apply it to the BBB (or the PB, in this case). The hardware and software is all roughly similar, after all.
  - khedoros1 9y ago
    It was more expensive and less heavily marketed as an educational device. And the BBB is much less focused on graphics; a huge part of the Pi community is focused solely on media centers and retro gaming emulation.
- stuntkite 9y ago
  Beagle has a pretty large community. They've been around longer than the Raspberry Pi. The RPi because of it's super low cost has proliferated greatly and enabled people to get in and try out stuff they wouldn't be able to before. Which has always been their goal, to build an educational tool. If you are just fiddling around and mostly are looking to have something that's a lot like your linux experience. Either will work and it might be easier to find a specific github project for what you're doing on the RPi, but that is barely my usual experience. Even something like running a MAME cab on an RPi3, you'll get set up quick with RetroPi, but some things you might want to play won't hack it on the little CPU in there. Any one of these is a great entry point, but it is definitely advisable to jump into your new project by seeing what people are using and picking the board. If your idea is even slightly left of mainstream you'll probably test out quite a few. More than likely, if you didn't have EE skills before you start, you'll hit some hard walls with esoteric choices like SPI vs I2C, or the best way to do wireless communication and not gobble your battery. Long and short, embedded projects don't quite silo like software. You might start out thinking about your Pi like buying a netbook, then four years later you're doing embedded C on a 16-bit proc to get where you're going. Even just a few years ago this would be totally inaccessible to anyone without very specific experience (usually a degree). Now for a dollar, anyone can fiddle and grow an idea and the tools have become amazing! But just because it runs an ubuntu flavor and has a familiar window manager, doesn't mean people didn't make real specific choices to get it into that tiny package and you'll have to figure out what you really need as you go.
VikingCoder 9y ago
I saw an Android that was like this at one point. It acted like a drive for the host computer, and had on it VNC software. So you installed the VNC software on the host computer, and then you ran it, and you were seeing the Android running in the fob. I thought that was super clever. Anyone have any links to devices like that? I'd think a Chromebox or an Android like this might be very nice. I suppose Chromebits are pretty dang close.
- jdkticom 9y ago
  Using VNC is a legitimate way to develop for this, but mostly it is done through web browsers (Cloud9 IDE) and direct ssh.
fnj 9y ago
Does it have an HDMI connector? The description is extremely poor.
- jdkticom 9y ago
  It does not have HDMI. Displays would typically be done with SPI breakout boards like from Sparkfun and Adafruit. You could also do a display via USB to VGA/HDMI.
  - leggomylibro 9y ago
    Sort of tangential, but why does everyone prefer the SPI interfaces on those little TFT screens? They support parallel ones with 8 and 16-bit buses.
    - tonyarkles 9y ago
      I'd guess pin-count and driver availability. SPI has pretty well-established kernel drivers with usermode access. Using the parallel busses is either going to involve driving a ton of GPIOs or trying to map some kind of parallel peripheral into driving each screen.
      - leggomylibro 9y ago
        I guess that's a good point; I've been looking into some small TFTs with hand-solderable MCUs that fall short of application processors like this, but still run at ~50-200MHz. Not quite the same ballpark. Still, on those, it's still only 13 pins for an 8-bit parallel bus (which I think can still do 16-bit color,) rd/wr/dat-cmd/chip_en/reset, and the chip_en/reset pins are probably optional. And while they do tend to have a few hardware SPI peripherals, some of them also have flexible memory controllers which can rapidly pipeline data over a customizable interface designed for use with a variety of RAM/storage/etc banks. But I think it will probably work since TFT interfaces are essentially writing to a framebuffer. And BGA packages usually have like twice as many 'pins,' but to be fair 'real computers' do also require a lot more I/O than microcontrollers. See [pdf]: http://www.st.com/content/ccc/resource/technical/document/application_note/85/ad/ef/0f/a3/a6/49/9a/CD00201397.pdf/files/CD00201397.pdf/jcr:content/translations/en.CD00201397.pdf http://www.st.com/content/ccc/resource/technical/document/ap...
snaky 9y ago
> open source > 3D accelerator > SGX > precompiled libraries providing OpenGL/OpenVG functionality
bjt2n3904 9y ago
Interesting, looks like there's no ethernet pinout on the headers. But there is a USB connector!
- jdkticom 9y ago
  And USB on the headers, making it easy to build a board with a hub or whatever, including USB WiFi modules.
  - bjt2n3904 9y ago
    Yeah. Through hole is gonna be a bit of a pain still, which makes me sad... but it would be too difficult to market to smaller players if it was card edge, for example.
jtomschroeder 9y ago
PDF with more info here: https://github.com/beagleboard/pocketbeagle/blob/master/docs/PocketBeagle_Short_Spec.pdf https://github.com/beagleboard/pocketbeagle/blob/master/docs...
nmolo 9y ago
This reminds me of the USB Armory. https://inversepath.com/usbarmory https://inversepath.com/usbarmory
- agumonkey 9y ago
  cute one
it_learnses 9y ago
as a software dev, what kind of stuff can I do with this?
- jarmitage 9y ago
  You can do hobbyist, IoT, industrial, robotics... Some links: https://beagleboard.org/project https://beagleboard.org/project https://beagleboard.org/gsoc https://beagleboard.org/gsoc https://www.hackster.io/beagleboard/ https://www.hackster.io/beagleboard/ https://github.com/search?q=beagleboard&ref=opensearch https://github.com/search?q=beagleboard&ref=opensearch https://hackaday.com/tag/beagleboard/ https://hackaday.com/tag/beagleboard/ https://learn.adafruit.com/search?q=beagleboard& https://learn.adafruit.com/search?q=beagleboard& https://www.google.com/search?q=beagleboard+projects https://www.google.com/search?q=beagleboard+projects
- bjt2n3904 9y ago
  Same things you can do with an RPi and/or BeagleBone black -- though without HDMI it's focused on more embedded / headless / wireless things. Think IOT.
  - it_learnses 9y ago
    pardon my ignorance, but despite their website, specs, and a list of their projects, I haven't been able to figure out whether this would easily connect to my laptop via USB, and I could deploy some code on it for starters. Do I need any additional pluggable hardware?
    - m_t 9y ago
      http://beagleboard.org/Support/BoneScript/updates/ http://beagleboard.org/Support/BoneScript/updates/ It seems that the easiest way to get started is to use a microSD card.
      - jdkticom 9y ago
        Etcher is a bit easier than the old 7-zip + win32diskimager solution: https://beagleboard.org/getting-started#update https://beagleboard.org/getting-started#update
limpkin 9y ago
Last time I looked into this AM335X chip and its PRUs, the information required to use and program them was very scarce. The SOC as a whole is not exactly developer friendly...
- jarmitage 9y ago
  There's this framework for the PRUs that came out recently but haven't tried it https://github.com/nesl/Cyclops-PRU https://github.com/nesl/Cyclops-PRU
  - jdkticom 9y ago
    That looks pretty neat and I'll have to try it out. Personally, this is my bare skeleton for working with the PRU: https://gist.github.com/jadonk/2ecf864e1b3f250bad82c0eae12b7b64 https://gist.github.com/jadonk/2ecf864e1b3f250bad82c0eae12b7....
- hwillis 9y ago
  My senior project as an undergrad used them. Working on the PRUs was easy and all the information you need is in the datasheet. Working with the linux to talk to the PRUs... that was another matter entirely. There were like 3 different ways to talk to them, none of which I understood, and they all seemed to have arbitrary limits and I couldn't figure out which one was the most modern. It was a huge clusterfuck. I ran into massive memory update problems on the linux side because I was trying to funnel way too much data to handle without knowing what I was doing.
Arubis 9y ago
Beautiful. Can’t wait to get Nerves running on one (or several)!
- jarmitage 9y ago
  Looks interesting thanks http://nerves-project.org/ http://nerves-project.org/ https://github.com/nerves-project/nerves https://github.com/nerves-project/nerves
carussell 9y ago
> Octavo Systems OSD3358 1GHz ARM® Cortex-A8 Hey, that's interesting. Never heard of this chip (or Octavo[1]) before! Is anyone from Octavo around? If so, are you guys involved with PocketBeagle? Is it your vehicle to show off the OSD335x? Are you involved with this board at all? What're the plans? It looks like this is still using the AM335x under the covers (in-package). How does that work? You're sourcing the unpackaged silicon from TI and packaging everything up yourselves, or you have a deal with TI where that's happening at their facilities, or...? Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662508 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662508 1. https://octavosystems.com/about/octavo/ https://octavosystems.com/about/octavo/
- welsh 9y ago
  Yes. We are also used in BeagleBone Black Wireless (https://beagleboard.org/black-wireless https://beagleboard.org/black-wireless) and BeagleBone Blue (https://beagleboard.org/blue https://beagleboard.org/blue). A lot of us are ex-TIers and have been working with BeagleBoard.org for a long time. This is one of the vehicles to show of the OSD335x-SM, but we also have our own development board that we just released (https://octavosystems.com/octavo_products/osd3358-sm-red/ https://octavosystems.com/octavo_products/osd3358-sm-red/). Our company does "System-In-Package" which means we integrate bare die, packaged parts and passives on a substrate and then package it up so that it looks like a single BGA from a design / manufacturing standpoint. We source wafers from TI and package everything ourselves. Please feel free to visit the website and look around and let us know if you have any other questions.
  - nickpsecurity 9y ago
    I've been doing research on such things for purposes of addressing hardware subversion in supply chain. What kind of equipment and vendor do you use for packaging bare dies? And what's the current cost of such equipment? Thanks ahead of time.
    - welsh 9y ago
      Please contact us directly (https://octavosystems.com/contact/ https://octavosystems.com/contact/) if you would like to discuss this more.
welsh 9y ago
Hey, Erik Welsh from Octavo Systems here. We make the chip in the PocketBeagle (https://octavosystems.com/octavo_products/osd335x-sm/ https://octavosystems.com/octavo_products/osd335x-sm/). Ask me anything.
- flachsechs 9y ago
  > board for beginners professionals alike. might want to notify your customer they have a typo in the first paragraph of their website
- f1notformula1 9y ago
  What are the primary uses you see for this device? Any interesting projects out there already that you're aware of?
  - welsh 9y ago
    Home / Building / Industrial automation, IoT, Motor control, i.e. anything that would use an AM335x processor / BeagleBone Black. There are a number of cool projects that have been done with BeagleBone Blue (https://beagleboard.org/blue https://beagleboard.org/blue) that uses another of our products and there will be a lot of interesting projects coming around this device and PocketBeagle.
- bjt2n3904 9y ago
  What's the deets on the Cortex-M3? Is that accessible to the end user, or is that blackboxed and NDA'd? (Cough cough, IPM... >_>!) How's this stock up to the BBB as far as power usage goes? What's the supply chain look like for your silicon? Planning to maintain stock at the distributors? Any plans for a non/through hole? Exposing the ethernet and MDIO pin headers for another SD card would be awesome. (Props for putting USB on the headers, and keeping the underside empty!) Edit: Looks like you're planning more on using this as a demo-board for your chip. Does powering the chip from the LiPo handle the RTC, so I can stop dropping a DS1307 onboard? ;)
  - welsh 9y ago
rjromero 9y ago
Can someone please just hook up something like this to a portable monitor and keyboard, put it in a nice sleek chassis, and add a massive battery? Something running at a low clock speed with a modern build good enough to run emacs, ssh, but with the added benefit of being light and having 20+ hours battery.
- j7ake 9y ago
  I would like one of these. I spend most of my time on ssh and maybe one or two webpages.
- maxerickson 9y ago
  Chromebooks?
  - striking 9y ago
    Yeah! You could buy a discarded shell from some existing device, like a broken Chromebook.
  - inetknght 9y ago
    IMO chromebooks are far too tiny
    - jdkticom 9y ago
      Many are, but some have reasonable sized keyboards. I prefer some of the older models.
    - mark-r 9y ago
      I just bought an Acer Chromebook 14, haven't used it much yet but it seems just large enough. At least it has full 1920x1080 resolution.
  - jdkticom 9y ago
    Yes, that's how I typically do workshops is with Chromebooks.
- 9y ago
swamp40 9y ago
It's the same processor as used in the BeagleBone, circa 2011. Just shrunken down incredibly by Octavo. 6 years is a long time in processor years, though. The AM335x is becoming middle aged...
- hwillis 9y ago
  The core is 12 years old. The reason it has stuck around so long is that it's the only really single-core *TI processor left. That means it's dead cheap for the amount of performance you can pull out of it, not unlike 4-core computer processors. It is indeed on its way out but I'm going to miss it.
  - zokier 9y ago
    > it's the only really single-core processor left Huh? What about i.MX 8M Solo processor?
    - hwillis 9y ago
      Whoops, meant to specify TI.
- joezydeco 9y ago
  Embedded guy here. I love old cores. All the quirks are known, and the price continues to drop year-after-year which is great for my BOM and thus my margins. I'm still shipping HCS09 cores from 20-30 years ago. NXP will be making these until the Sun explodes. So what's your beef about a part being "old"?
Z1515M8147 9y ago
Can anyone share good sites or resources for a frequent 'technology-watch' of the latest embedded hardware platforms and platform developers such as this? I do a quick scan of the various embedded hardware brand websites (RPi, BB, Gumstix, etc.) every few months but I'd like to be more ahead of the curve.
- peteey 9y ago
  Filter for single board computers on Digi-Key's new product page: https://www.digikey.com/en/product-highlight?f=1832277859 https://www.digikey.com/en/product-highlight?f=1832277859
- jburgess777 9y ago
  Some interesting products appear on CNXSoft: https://www.cnx-software.com/ https://www.cnx-software.com/
- wmat 9y ago
  http://linuxgizmos.com/ http://linuxgizmos.com/ is usually pretty good.
Retr0spectrum 9y ago
What's the cheapest way to buy one including UK shipping? Edit: It looks like Arrow is doing free shipping
errantspark 9y ago
I just wish they'd stuck an ESP8266 on there as well. They're dirt cheap and having built in wifi would be killer.
- Pxtl 9y ago
  Oh god with Wifi this thing would be terrifying for hackers - just add a wallwart and shove it into an available electrical socket at an office building and you've got something that can sniff forever.
  - joemi 9y ago
    Can't a RPi Zero W already be used like that? And it's cheaper than this.
    - jerf 9y ago
      Yes, anyone interested in doing that already has oodles of options today. Adding one more wouldn't be a meaningful change.
- ausjke 9y ago
  exactly, not sure why it is missed, if there is network i will get one for sure, without network, no plan to buy it.
- craftyguy 9y ago
  Wow, I didn't realize that there was no wifi on this thing.. that's a deal breaker for me.
  - joezydeco 9y ago
    Then go with the Beaglebone Black Wireless https://beagleboard.org/black-wireless https://beagleboard.org/black-wireless
- jdkticom 9y ago
  Pinout compatible with something like https://shop.mikroe.com/wifi-esp-click https://shop.mikroe.com/wifi-esp-click
digi_owl 9y ago
Really wish the Beaglebone products had as much attention as the RPi stuff has.
Animats 9y ago
It's nice that it's tiny, but you have to attach it to something else to do anything. I'd suggest providing the connectors, not just the holes, and providing mounting holes. Why make the Arduino crowd solder?
Fej 9y ago
What makes this better than an RPi Zero W at $10?
- jdkticom 9y ago
  Faster, newer generation CPU (Zero moved back to ARMv6). Additional microcontrollers (2x PRU, 1x M3). ADC. More I/O capability. Open hardware with a (yet to be proven, but I'm very confident) much higher availability for use in projects, etc.---and also simple to clone/extend if you want to make your own. Also, better processor documentation.
- noonespecial 9y ago
  RPi Zero W's seem to only be available one at time with hefty shipping costs for something so small. The last 2 I bought were more than $18 each all in. Getting a few PocketBeagles and combining the shipping makes them very close to the same cost per unit. At that point you're simply deciding between the wifi of the RPi and the vastly superior IO of th PB.
wiremine 9y ago
Here's a direct link to the FAQ to save some clicks: https://github.com/beagleboard/pocketbeagle/wiki/FAQ https://github.com/beagleboard/pocketbeagle/wiki/FAQ
feelin_googley 9y ago
Anyone have comments on this one? http://elinux.org/MIPS_Creator_CI20 http://elinux.org/MIPS_Creator_CI20 Wireless looks to be Linux-only?
TazeTSchnitzel 9y ago
I still want a Java Ring.
timsayshey 9y ago
New to cryptocurrencies but could this be used a wallet with the right software? Also, are there any open source wallets that integrate with apps like Mycellium the same way as Ledger Nano S or Trezor?
deleted 9y ago
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raimue 9y ago
Yay, another cheap mini computer I could buy to eventually put it in the drawer to the others! More seriously, it's amazing to see Linux running on such small devices. I wonder what its niche is, though. What can you solve with this PocketBeagle where an Arduino would not suffice, while causing less support overhead later? Keeping a Linux distribution/installation up-to-date and free of security holes requires regular maintenance, while a standalone microcontroller program has the minimal attack surface.
- stuntkite 9y ago
  Arduino is great for artists and hobbyists or just testing out something simple. It does this by having a great IDE and library collection that maintains awesome compatibility across the board. They can be a big problem if you intend to produce a final embedded product though. Nothing you build will translate. Something like the Beagle is going to give you a much better toolset to expand on as you grow. Also with the power in the PocketBeagle situations where you'd need near real time, like management of audio. Is actually available. Not that you can't get Arduino compatible systems that can provide the tooling (STM32 or Teensy), you need to really know where you're going to end up and your level of commitment. You are 100% right about the drawer thing though. I've got several drawers. But the thing with embedded is there isn't a magic bullet, so you gotta stock the drawer if you want to fiddle. Either that or KiCAD/Altium and plan your bespoke system from the get go. My tactic with hardware projects is to never pretend like it's going to be a money maker. It's always play. People loose fortunes on hardware. But man, I've got crap to build my own shitty LTE cell phone in a drawer right now. It'll be terrible and a fire hazard but the future we live in is awesome thanks to the inexpensive dev board proliferation.
cozzyd 9y ago
I don't know if the software distribution on this will be anything like the beagle bone black , but if it is, be careful plugging into a public network! Besides the default password, arbitrary programs may be executed via a web client. At least new versions of the beagle bone software distribution no longer allow remote root login without password...
alexnewman 9y ago
How much power do you use
rtpg 9y ago
This reminds me: I really wish the Pebble Core happened. A computer on a keychain sounds pretty entertaining to say the least.
snthpy 9y ago
Could one use this to make an open-source cryptocurrency hardware wallet? I haven't looked into the requirements or the specs on either side so I'm just asking very naively. The $25 price point just seems better than the $100+ for the typical cryptoasset hardware wallet.
- timsayshey 9y ago
  I asked the same question here when this went up but I haven't heard anything from anyone. I have a feeling as Bitcoin goes more and more mainstream wallets will get cheaper. It's pretty ridiculous to expect people to pay $50-100 for a single wallet that could easily be lost. Especially when hardware is getting so cheap, there is no excuse for the prices. Either an open source alternative will bring the price down or competition but right now I think the answer to our question is unfortunately, no.
  - walls 9y ago
    The source and schematics for are available for Trezors.
deleted 9y ago
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508 points by jarmitage 9y ago

est 9y ago

paired with Proxmark3 or ChameleonMini you can make your rfid cards N in 1

> Openness and flexibility tear-down limits on your imagination I'll take ten. In all seriousness, how do developers feel about this compared to larger communities around products like the Raspberry Pi? I've learned to follow the crowd when I'm using products for the best support.

Jorslu 9y ago
+1 Another thing I am curious about is why is there such a price difference? RPiZ - $5 PB - $25 https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/raspberry-pi-zero/ https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/raspberry-pi-zero/
- jarmitage 9y ago
  As far as I can suppose (although I don't actually have a source), RPiZ is sold at a loss and is made in much larger quantities than its competitors. I would be surprised if PocketBeagle isn't also sold at a loss, although at a different scale. Anyone else got thoughts/evidence on this?
  - pjc50 9y ago
    Neither company is large enough to sell at a loss (where would they get the money?), although the Pi is very close to selling at marginal cost.
    - jdkticom 9y ago
      Lots of discussion about that here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10631668 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10631668
  - jdkticom 9y ago
    It is definitely not sold at a loss. No maximum to the order quantity, just lead time if it is more than inventory.
- dbcurtis 9y ago
  I think the RPi CPU's are significantly less costly, and of course have higher volume production runs. Traditionally, the chips used in RPi have difficult-to-obtain low level documentation and therefore binary blobs for drivers. RPi foundation is willing to make that trade-off in favor of cost. The Beagle ecosystem has from the beginning been more of a traditional reference design "please buy our chips for your personalized version" sort of board.
  - agumonkey 9y ago
    yeah rpis are leftovers from old massproduced chips.. plus they lack lots of features
- leggomylibro 9y ago
  The Pi Zero can be extremely hard to find at $5 depending on where you live, though. Ditto for the Zero W at $10. They're pretty awesome, but every time I go looking for one it takes a few days. Still, it is sort of fun. Like hunting for a newly-launched console.
  - VectorLock 9y ago
    Microcenter but they were doing a '1 per customer' thing for a while.
    - khedoros1 9y ago
      There aren't many MicroCenters around, and they still do an escalating price scale. $10 for 1, $15 apiece for 2-5, $20 apiece after that.
      - mdip 9y ago
        I wonder if these are sold at Microcenter. They're about 15-20 miles from one here in Michigan, although it's not like that particular store is their Headquarters or anything. It is a shame there aren't more MicroCenter stores around, although I'm not sure really how they stay in business. It was logical that computing equipment would make the switch to being purchased primarily online[0]. Somehow MicroCenter competes well on price and very well on selection. That place is like a retail NewEgg, carrying all kinds of very specialized things. They've got everything from water cooling rigs (multiple brands), to oddities like shrink tubing, development boards, 3D printing supplies and every kind of upgrade for PCs you can think of. It's a place I avoid when I don't have an hour to sit around and a reasonable budget because I always leave there with more than I intended on purchasing but it's so nice that when I need an adapter to plug my one power supply cord into my two ports on my new graphics adapter, I can drive up the road. Small tangent, yeah, but this product would fit really well over there. [0] While I'm sure Apple stores do OK and full PCs probably sell OK in larger electronics chains, none of those chains carry anything resembling a reasonable selection of pieces/parts.
reaperducer 9y ago
I got burned pretty badly (in time, not money since it was ultra cheap) on the Onion Omega2 fiasco. The thing was released when it was alphaware, and all the support documentation was for the previous machine. It's matured a lot in the last few months, but that first half year was very rough. It took two or three firmware releases to even make it stable, and it's still a bugfest. (Can the support web site even work on iPhones yet? It used to be Windows+Chrome only.) Because of that, my next foray into ultra-low-cost computing will be Raspberry Pi. At least I know it's an established product and because of that it probably has a good community and documentation.
- seabird 9y ago
  "Good documentation" might be a bit of an overstatement. The second you get off the beaten path with a Raspberry Pi, things can get pretty hellish. Try bare metal C on just the second rendition, and weep before the non-existent documentation for the SoC they used. The official response to this issue (to paraphrase) was "it's fairly close to the previous version; you can figure it out." I don't want to know what sort of suffering you would have to go through trying to do bare-metal programming on an RPi 3.
  - khedoros1 9y ago
    There's at least a forum section dedicated to it, with a few posts containing collections of resources: https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewforum.php?f=72 https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewforum.php?f=72
    - seabird 9y ago
      That doesn't change the fact that the documentation you need isn't there, and that they have no plans to provide it. Can you figure it out? Sure. Am I going to pull my hair out doing trial and error trying to figure out the GPIO pinout for an SoC that they have no interest in providing documentation for when I can just buy a product with better documentation? Of course not.
- carussell 9y ago
matheweis 9y ago
I’ve become a huge fan of the NanoPi Neo series. The lower end models are < $10 and still moderately powerful, besides being quite a lot smaller than the Raspberry Pi’s
- Xeoncross 9y ago
  Looks pretty stable too: http://wiki.friendlyarm.com/wiki/index.php/NanoPi_NEO http://wiki.friendlyarm.com/wiki/index.php/NanoPi_NEO
  - agumonkey 9y ago
    Slightly more recent, smaller (pi zero like form) http://wiki.friendlyarm.com/wiki/index.php/NanoPi_Duo http://wiki.friendlyarm.com/wiki/index.php/NanoPi_Duo something like 9$ (shipping included)
    - iancarroll 9y ago
      I just got my NanoPi Duo and it’s pretty cool. With WiFi and its form factor it’s very useful. Though I kind of wish it used an H5; I can’t imagine it costs much more but it’s a much better SoC.
- subway 9y ago
  Check out the OrangePi Zero series too. They're comparable to the NanoPi Neo and NanoPi Neo Air in size and features, but seem to land in mainline u-boot and Linux a bit more quickly.
tyingq 9y ago
The Beaglebones, including this one, use the AM335X chip, which includes two PRU units on die. These are microcontrollers that have access to the same memory as the main ARM cores, and an API to share data. This allows for real-time-ish use cases that the Raspberry PI can't handle well. Low latency audio, driving large LED matrix boards, high speed input sampling, etc. So it's not quite the same market. $25 in this space is rock bottom pricing.
- lima 9y ago
  CNC machining and 3D printing is one use case where Beaglebones are very common. This LinuxCNC fork supports it natively: http://www.machinekit.io/ http://www.machinekit.io/
- j_s 9y ago
  > jarmitage: if you're interested in making ultra low latency (as low as 80us) embedded musical instruments, check out Bela http://bela.io http://bela.io > tyingq: The pair of PRUs in the Beaglebone black is a large part of it. source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15121720 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15121720 (Aug 2017)
xienze 9y ago
I started using the BB Black when it was first introduced and am quite surprised it didn't become more popular. At the time, the alternative was the RPi, and the BBB was way faster and had dedicated Ethernet (something the RPi still doesn't have -- its Ethernet controller hangs off the USB bus). To answer the question though, honestly I'm not sure how you can go wrong with it being a smaller community. You can largely take advice about the RPi and apply it to the BBB (or the PB, in this case). The hardware and software is all roughly similar, after all.
- khedoros1 9y ago
  It was more expensive and less heavily marketed as an educational device. And the BBB is much less focused on graphics; a huge part of the Pi community is focused solely on media centers and retro gaming emulation.
stuntkite 9y ago
Beagle has a pretty large community. They've been around longer than the Raspberry Pi. The RPi because of it's super low cost has proliferated greatly and enabled people to get in and try out stuff they wouldn't be able to before. Which has always been their goal, to build an educational tool. If you are just fiddling around and mostly are looking to have something that's a lot like your linux experience. Either will work and it might be easier to find a specific github project for what you're doing on the RPi, but that is barely my usual experience. Even something like running a MAME cab on an RPi3, you'll get set up quick with RetroPi, but some things you might want to play won't hack it on the little CPU in there. Any one of these is a great entry point, but it is definitely advisable to jump into your new project by seeing what people are using and picking the board. If your idea is even slightly left of mainstream you'll probably test out quite a few. More than likely, if you didn't have EE skills before you start, you'll hit some hard walls with esoteric choices like SPI vs I2C, or the best way to do wireless communication and not gobble your battery. Long and short, embedded projects don't quite silo like software. You might start out thinking about your Pi like buying a netbook, then four years later you're doing embedded C on a 16-bit proc to get where you're going. Even just a few years ago this would be totally inaccessible to anyone without very specific experience (usually a degree). Now for a dollar, anyone can fiddle and grow an idea and the tools have become amazing! But just because it runs an ubuntu flavor and has a familiar window manager, doesn't mean people didn't make real specific choices to get it into that tiny package and you'll have to figure out what you really need as you go.

VikingCoder 9y ago

I saw an Android that was like this at one point. It acted like a drive for the host computer, and had on it VNC software. So you installed the VNC software on the host computer, and then you ran it, and you were seeing the Android running in the fob. I thought that was super clever. Anyone have any links to devices like that? I'd think a Chromebox or an Android like this might be very nice. I suppose Chromebits are pretty dang close.

jdkticom 9y ago
Using VNC is a legitimate way to develop for this, but mostly it is done through web browsers (Cloud9 IDE) and direct ssh.

fnj 9y ago

Does it have an HDMI connector? The description is extremely poor.

jdkticom 9y ago
It does not have HDMI. Displays would typically be done with SPI breakout boards like from Sparkfun and Adafruit. You could also do a display via USB to VGA/HDMI.
- leggomylibro 9y ago
  Sort of tangential, but why does everyone prefer the SPI interfaces on those little TFT screens? They support parallel ones with 8 and 16-bit buses.
  - tonyarkles 9y ago
    I'd guess pin-count and driver availability. SPI has pretty well-established kernel drivers with usermode access. Using the parallel busses is either going to involve driving a ton of GPIOs or trying to map some kind of parallel peripheral into driving each screen.
    - leggomylibro 9y ago
      I guess that's a good point; I've been looking into some small TFTs with hand-solderable MCUs that fall short of application processors like this, but still run at ~50-200MHz. Not quite the same ballpark. Still, on those, it's still only 13 pins for an 8-bit parallel bus (which I think can still do 16-bit color,) rd/wr/dat-cmd/chip_en/reset, and the chip_en/reset pins are probably optional. And while they do tend to have a few hardware SPI peripherals, some of them also have flexible memory controllers which can rapidly pipeline data over a customizable interface designed for use with a variety of RAM/storage/etc banks. But I think it will probably work since TFT interfaces are essentially writing to a framebuffer. And BGA packages usually have like twice as many 'pins,' but to be fair 'real computers' do also require a lot more I/O than microcontrollers. See [pdf]: http://www.st.com/content/ccc/resource/technical/document/application_note/85/ad/ef/0f/a3/a6/49/9a/CD00201397.pdf/files/CD00201397.pdf/jcr:content/translations/en.CD00201397.pdf http://www.st.com/content/ccc/resource/technical/document/ap...

snaky 9y ago

> open source > 3D accelerator > SGX > precompiled libraries providing OpenGL/OpenVG functionality

bjt2n3904 9y ago

Interesting, looks like there's no ethernet pinout on the headers. But there is a USB connector!

jdkticom 9y ago
And USB on the headers, making it easy to build a board with a hub or whatever, including USB WiFi modules.
- bjt2n3904 9y ago
  Yeah. Through hole is gonna be a bit of a pain still, which makes me sad... but it would be too difficult to market to smaller players if it was card edge, for example.

jtomschroeder 9y ago

PDF with more info here: https://github.com/beagleboard/pocketbeagle/blob/master/docs/PocketBeagle_Short_Spec.pdf https://github.com/beagleboard/pocketbeagle/blob/master/docs...

nmolo 9y ago

This reminds me of the USB Armory. https://inversepath.com/usbarmory https://inversepath.com/usbarmory

agumonkey 9y ago
cute one

it_learnses 9y ago

as a software dev, what kind of stuff can I do with this?

jarmitage 9y ago
You can do hobbyist, IoT, industrial, robotics... Some links: https://beagleboard.org/project https://beagleboard.org/project https://beagleboard.org/gsoc https://beagleboard.org/gsoc https://www.hackster.io/beagleboard/ https://www.hackster.io/beagleboard/ https://github.com/search?q=beagleboard&ref=opensearch https://github.com/search?q=beagleboard&ref=opensearch https://hackaday.com/tag/beagleboard/ https://hackaday.com/tag/beagleboard/ https://learn.adafruit.com/search?q=beagleboard& https://learn.adafruit.com/search?q=beagleboard& https://www.google.com/search?q=beagleboard+projects https://www.google.com/search?q=beagleboard+projects
bjt2n3904 9y ago
Same things you can do with an RPi and/or BeagleBone black -- though without HDMI it's focused on more embedded / headless / wireless things. Think IOT.
- it_learnses 9y ago
  pardon my ignorance, but despite their website, specs, and a list of their projects, I haven't been able to figure out whether this would easily connect to my laptop via USB, and I could deploy some code on it for starters. Do I need any additional pluggable hardware?
  - m_t 9y ago
    http://beagleboard.org/Support/BoneScript/updates/ http://beagleboard.org/Support/BoneScript/updates/ It seems that the easiest way to get started is to use a microSD card.
    - jdkticom 9y ago
      Etcher is a bit easier than the old 7-zip + win32diskimager solution: https://beagleboard.org/getting-started#update https://beagleboard.org/getting-started#update

limpkin 9y ago

Last time I looked into this AM335X chip and its PRUs, the information required to use and program them was very scarce. The SOC as a whole is not exactly developer friendly...

jarmitage 9y ago
There's this framework for the PRUs that came out recently but haven't tried it https://github.com/nesl/Cyclops-PRU https://github.com/nesl/Cyclops-PRU
- jdkticom 9y ago
  That looks pretty neat and I'll have to try it out. Personally, this is my bare skeleton for working with the PRU: https://gist.github.com/jadonk/2ecf864e1b3f250bad82c0eae12b7b64 https://gist.github.com/jadonk/2ecf864e1b3f250bad82c0eae12b7....
hwillis 9y ago
My senior project as an undergrad used them. Working on the PRUs was easy and all the information you need is in the datasheet. Working with the linux to talk to the PRUs... that was another matter entirely. There were like 3 different ways to talk to them, none of which I understood, and they all seemed to have arbitrary limits and I couldn't figure out which one was the most modern. It was a huge clusterfuck. I ran into massive memory update problems on the linux side because I was trying to funnel way too much data to handle without knowing what I was doing.

Arubis 9y ago

Beautiful. Can’t wait to get Nerves running on one (or several)!

jarmitage 9y ago
Looks interesting thanks http://nerves-project.org/ http://nerves-project.org/ https://github.com/nerves-project/nerves https://github.com/nerves-project/nerves

carussell 9y ago

> Octavo Systems OSD3358 1GHz ARM® Cortex-A8 Hey, that's interesting. Never heard of this chip (or Octavo[1]) before! Is anyone from Octavo around? If so, are you guys involved with PocketBeagle? Is it your vehicle to show off the OSD335x? Are you involved with this board at all? What're the plans? It looks like this is still using the AM335x under the covers (in-package). How does that work? You're sourcing the unpackaged silicon from TI and packaging everything up yourselves, or you have a deal with TI where that's happening at their facilities, or...? Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662508 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662508 1. https://octavosystems.com/about/octavo/ https://octavosystems.com/about/octavo/

welsh 9y ago
Yes. We are also used in BeagleBone Black Wireless (https://beagleboard.org/black-wireless https://beagleboard.org/black-wireless) and BeagleBone Blue (https://beagleboard.org/blue https://beagleboard.org/blue). A lot of us are ex-TIers and have been working with BeagleBoard.org for a long time. This is one of the vehicles to show of the OSD335x-SM, but we also have our own development board that we just released (https://octavosystems.com/octavo_products/osd3358-sm-red/ https://octavosystems.com/octavo_products/osd3358-sm-red/). Our company does "System-In-Package" which means we integrate bare die, packaged parts and passives on a substrate and then package it up so that it looks like a single BGA from a design / manufacturing standpoint. We source wafers from TI and package everything ourselves. Please feel free to visit the website and look around and let us know if you have any other questions.
- nickpsecurity 9y ago
  I've been doing research on such things for purposes of addressing hardware subversion in supply chain. What kind of equipment and vendor do you use for packaging bare dies? And what's the current cost of such equipment? Thanks ahead of time.
  - welsh 9y ago
    Please contact us directly (https://octavosystems.com/contact/ https://octavosystems.com/contact/) if you would like to discuss this more.

welsh 9y ago

Hey, Erik Welsh from Octavo Systems here. We make the chip in the PocketBeagle (https://octavosystems.com/octavo_products/osd335x-sm/ https://octavosystems.com/octavo_products/osd335x-sm/). Ask me anything.

flachsechs 9y ago
> board for beginners professionals alike. might want to notify your customer they have a typo in the first paragraph of their website
f1notformula1 9y ago
What are the primary uses you see for this device? Any interesting projects out there already that you're aware of?
- welsh 9y ago
  Home / Building / Industrial automation, IoT, Motor control, i.e. anything that would use an AM335x processor / BeagleBone Black. There are a number of cool projects that have been done with BeagleBone Blue (https://beagleboard.org/blue https://beagleboard.org/blue) that uses another of our products and there will be a lot of interesting projects coming around this device and PocketBeagle.
bjt2n3904 9y ago
What's the deets on the Cortex-M3? Is that accessible to the end user, or is that blackboxed and NDA'd? (Cough cough, IPM... >_>!) How's this stock up to the BBB as far as power usage goes? What's the supply chain look like for your silicon? Planning to maintain stock at the distributors? Any plans for a non/through hole? Exposing the ethernet and MDIO pin headers for another SD card would be awesome. (Props for putting USB on the headers, and keeping the underside empty!) Edit: Looks like you're planning more on using this as a demo-board for your chip. Does powering the chip from the LiPo handle the RTC, so I can stop dropping a DS1307 onboard? ;)
- welsh 9y ago

rjromero 9y ago

Can someone please just hook up something like this to a portable monitor and keyboard, put it in a nice sleek chassis, and add a massive battery? Something running at a low clock speed with a modern build good enough to run emacs, ssh, but with the added benefit of being light and having 20+ hours battery.

j7ake 9y ago
I would like one of these. I spend most of my time on ssh and maybe one or two webpages.
maxerickson 9y ago
Chromebooks?
- striking 9y ago
  Yeah! You could buy a discarded shell from some existing device, like a broken Chromebook.
- inetknght 9y ago
  IMO chromebooks are far too tiny
  - jdkticom 9y ago
    Many are, but some have reasonable sized keyboards. I prefer some of the older models.
  - mark-r 9y ago
    I just bought an Acer Chromebook 14, haven't used it much yet but it seems just large enough. At least it has full 1920x1080 resolution.
- jdkticom 9y ago
  Yes, that's how I typically do workshops is with Chromebooks.
9y ago

swamp40 9y ago

It's the same processor as used in the BeagleBone, circa 2011. Just shrunken down incredibly by Octavo. 6 years is a long time in processor years, though. The AM335x is becoming middle aged...

hwillis 9y ago
The core is 12 years old. The reason it has stuck around so long is that it's the only really single-core *TI processor left. That means it's dead cheap for the amount of performance you can pull out of it, not unlike 4-core computer processors. It is indeed on its way out but I'm going to miss it.
- zokier 9y ago
  > it's the only really single-core processor left Huh? What about i.MX 8M Solo processor?
  - hwillis 9y ago
    Whoops, meant to specify TI.
joezydeco 9y ago
Embedded guy here. I love old cores. All the quirks are known, and the price continues to drop year-after-year which is great for my BOM and thus my margins. I'm still shipping HCS09 cores from 20-30 years ago. NXP will be making these until the Sun explodes. So what's your beef about a part being "old"?

Z1515M8147 9y ago

Can anyone share good sites or resources for a frequent 'technology-watch' of the latest embedded hardware platforms and platform developers such as this? I do a quick scan of the various embedded hardware brand websites (RPi, BB, Gumstix, etc.) every few months but I'd like to be more ahead of the curve.

peteey 9y ago
Filter for single board computers on Digi-Key's new product page: https://www.digikey.com/en/product-highlight?f=1832277859 https://www.digikey.com/en/product-highlight?f=1832277859
jburgess777 9y ago
Some interesting products appear on CNXSoft: https://www.cnx-software.com/ https://www.cnx-software.com/
wmat 9y ago
http://linuxgizmos.com/ http://linuxgizmos.com/ is usually pretty good.

Retr0spectrum 9y ago

What's the cheapest way to buy one including UK shipping? Edit: It looks like Arrow is doing free shipping

errantspark 9y ago

I just wish they'd stuck an ESP8266 on there as well. They're dirt cheap and having built in wifi would be killer.

Pxtl 9y ago
Oh god with Wifi this thing would be terrifying for hackers - just add a wallwart and shove it into an available electrical socket at an office building and you've got something that can sniff forever.
- joemi 9y ago
  Can't a RPi Zero W already be used like that? And it's cheaper than this.
  - jerf 9y ago
    Yes, anyone interested in doing that already has oodles of options today. Adding one more wouldn't be a meaningful change.
ausjke 9y ago
exactly, not sure why it is missed, if there is network i will get one for sure, without network, no plan to buy it.
craftyguy 9y ago
Wow, I didn't realize that there was no wifi on this thing.. that's a deal breaker for me.
- joezydeco 9y ago
  Then go with the Beaglebone Black Wireless https://beagleboard.org/black-wireless https://beagleboard.org/black-wireless
jdkticom 9y ago
Pinout compatible with something like https://shop.mikroe.com/wifi-esp-click https://shop.mikroe.com/wifi-esp-click

digi_owl 9y ago

Really wish the Beaglebone products had as much attention as the RPi stuff has.

Animats 9y ago

It's nice that it's tiny, but you have to attach it to something else to do anything. I'd suggest providing the connectors, not just the holes, and providing mounting holes. Why make the Arduino crowd solder?

Fej 9y ago

What makes this better than an RPi Zero W at $10?

jdkticom 9y ago
Faster, newer generation CPU (Zero moved back to ARMv6). Additional microcontrollers (2x PRU, 1x M3). ADC. More I/O capability. Open hardware with a (yet to be proven, but I'm very confident) much higher availability for use in projects, etc.---and also simple to clone/extend if you want to make your own. Also, better processor documentation.
noonespecial 9y ago
RPi Zero W's seem to only be available one at time with hefty shipping costs for something so small. The last 2 I bought were more than $18 each all in. Getting a few PocketBeagles and combining the shipping makes them very close to the same cost per unit. At that point you're simply deciding between the wifi of the RPi and the vastly superior IO of th PB.

wiremine 9y ago

Here's a direct link to the FAQ to save some clicks: https://github.com/beagleboard/pocketbeagle/wiki/FAQ https://github.com/beagleboard/pocketbeagle/wiki/FAQ

feelin_googley 9y ago

Anyone have comments on this one? http://elinux.org/MIPS_Creator_CI20 http://elinux.org/MIPS_Creator_CI20 Wireless looks to be Linux-only?

TazeTSchnitzel 9y ago

I still want a Java Ring.

timsayshey 9y ago

New to cryptocurrencies but could this be used a wallet with the right software? Also, are there any open source wallets that integrate with apps like Mycellium the same way as Ledger Nano S or Trezor?

deleted 9y ago

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raimue 9y ago

Yay, another cheap mini computer I could buy to eventually put it in the drawer to the others! More seriously, it's amazing to see Linux running on such small devices. I wonder what its niche is, though. What can you solve with this PocketBeagle where an Arduino would not suffice, while causing less support overhead later? Keeping a Linux distribution/installation up-to-date and free of security holes requires regular maintenance, while a standalone microcontroller program has the minimal attack surface.

stuntkite 9y ago
Arduino is great for artists and hobbyists or just testing out something simple. It does this by having a great IDE and library collection that maintains awesome compatibility across the board. They can be a big problem if you intend to produce a final embedded product though. Nothing you build will translate. Something like the Beagle is going to give you a much better toolset to expand on as you grow. Also with the power in the PocketBeagle situations where you'd need near real time, like management of audio. Is actually available. Not that you can't get Arduino compatible systems that can provide the tooling (STM32 or Teensy), you need to really know where you're going to end up and your level of commitment. You are 100% right about the drawer thing though. I've got several drawers. But the thing with embedded is there isn't a magic bullet, so you gotta stock the drawer if you want to fiddle. Either that or KiCAD/Altium and plan your bespoke system from the get go. My tactic with hardware projects is to never pretend like it's going to be a money maker. It's always play. People loose fortunes on hardware. But man, I've got crap to build my own shitty LTE cell phone in a drawer right now. It'll be terrible and a fire hazard but the future we live in is awesome thanks to the inexpensive dev board proliferation.

cozzyd 9y ago

I don't know if the software distribution on this will be anything like the beagle bone black , but if it is, be careful plugging into a public network! Besides the default password, arbitrary programs may be executed via a web client. At least new versions of the beagle bone software distribution no longer allow remote root login without password...

alexnewman 9y ago

How much power do you use

rtpg 9y ago

This reminds me: I really wish the Pebble Core happened. A computer on a keychain sounds pretty entertaining to say the least.

snthpy 9y ago

Could one use this to make an open-source cryptocurrency hardware wallet? I haven't looked into the requirements or the specs on either side so I'm just asking very naively. The $25 price point just seems better than the $100+ for the typical cryptoasset hardware wallet.

timsayshey 9y ago
I asked the same question here when this went up but I haven't heard anything from anyone. I have a feeling as Bitcoin goes more and more mainstream wallets will get cheaper. It's pretty ridiculous to expect people to pay $50-100 for a single wallet that could easily be lost. Especially when hardware is getting so cheap, there is no excuse for the prices. Either an open source alternative will bring the price down or competition but right now I think the answer to our question is unfortunately, no.
- walls 9y ago
  The source and schematics for are available for Trezors.

deleted 9y ago

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