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For the people who are reading these comments and this story, I think a lot of you might be interested in this "discovery" I made (an off-hand HN reference) tha

For the people who are reading these comments and this story, I think a lot of you might be interested in this "discovery" I made (an off-hand HN reference) that I haven't understood in all the time since: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17902043 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17902043 When you look at what was done, they got Firefox and x-window forwarding working on it. It's super fast. I don't understand why it isn't just fantastic for running all sorts of things on the embedded Linux level. Why isn't something based on this just super popular? I'm really missing something here. It's not 512 MB, but 32 MB RAM is (easily) enough to run Go programs. I don't understand why such a cheap and tiny computer doesn't make it super useful for everything. At that price and form factor, you could put it in a toothbrush. I just can't believe there is no application for this or something like it. I didn't get a clear answer the last time I asked - do any of you know? What's the big missing piece, what am I missing here? This is an SD card form factor! It's $30! It has 16 GB filesytem! And wifi, wifi, wifi. And weighs less than two pennies. according to here: https://elinux.org/Wifi_SD https://elinux.org/Wifi_SD it draws 50 mA idle. That means it would run for 2 days on an AA battery (idling). I Googled the processor the above elinux.org page mentions, and got an exact match on the processor revision here: http://club.dx.com/forums/forums.dx/threadid.626327?page=3 http://club.dx.com/forums/forums.dx/threadid.626327?page=3 implying it runs 175 Mhz. More than enough to do anything you want, really. Running a Python script you develop on a desktop should be a breeze. I don't understand why this isn't driving...anything. Nobody has this thing in anything. And the remarkable achievement of this device is 4 years old (all the links are 4 years old.) So.... .... can you all help me understand why this isn't being used and hacked into anything?

tomcam 8y ago
Ditto. I’ve been wondering what happened to this as well.
- Tor3 8y ago
  I bought one of those Transcend cards. In the end I didn't use it for anything - it's just so much easier to grab a Pi from my stack of Pi boards, plug in an SD card and connect it to do whatever needs doing. Printer, TV, whatever.
metildaa 8y ago
For around the same price you can get an Orangepi PC+ with 8GB of fairly speedy eMMC. Need smaller? The ESP series and OrangePi Zero (if more grunt is needed) are popular.
bennofs 8y ago
What would you use this for? If it runs some service via wifi, the sd-card size isn't necessary and you can geht cheaper boards with more features. Small size is needed if you want to embed this into something but for that use case it lacks easy access to io ports and other peripherals.
dvfjsdhgfv 8y ago
My guess is the price. $30 is a lot of money. ESP8266 costs 10 times less. And for $30 you can get a much more powerful machine.

tomcam 8y ago

Ditto. I’ve been wondering what happened to this as well.

Tor3 8y ago
I bought one of those Transcend cards. In the end I didn't use it for anything - it's just so much easier to grab a Pi from my stack of Pi boards, plug in an SD card and connect it to do whatever needs doing. Printer, TV, whatever.

metildaa 8y ago

For around the same price you can get an Orangepi PC+ with 8GB of fairly speedy eMMC. Need smaller? The ESP series and OrangePi Zero (if more grunt is needed) are popular.

bennofs 8y ago

What would you use this for? If it runs some service via wifi, the sd-card size isn't necessary and you can geht cheaper boards with more features. Small size is needed if you want to embed this into something but for that use case it lacks easy access to io ports and other peripherals.

dvfjsdhgfv 8y ago

My guess is the price. $30 is a lot of money. ESP8266 costs 10 times less. And for $30 you can get a much more powerful machine.