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The sd card is the biggest weakness of all SBCs. EMMC, wireless and some way to connect a camera (usb or CSI) would be perfect.
by emilfihlman 8y ago
The sd card is the biggest weakness of all SBCs.
EMMC, wireless and some way to connect a camera (usb or CSI) would be perfect.
- FactolSarin 8y agoThis. I wonder how much it'd cost for them to just add a bit of on-board storage.
- harperlee 8y agoThe now defunct CHIP computer costed 9$ and had on-board storage, so there you have a cap.
- makomk 8y agoThat used raw NAND flash, which is kind of nasty. I'm not sure they ever quite got it working right before they went under.
- mattthebaker 8y agoRaw NAND is highly preferable to SD or USB drives. You can at least have wear leveling in the OS/FS. SD/USB are bad because most have dumb controllers and just rewrite a page when it changes. Raw NAND is also consistent and meets datasheet specs, whereas SD you never know what you are getting.
- harperlee 8y agoWhat do you mean? I have two of them which work flawlessly...
- nickpsecurity 8y agoQuick glance at Microchip shows, all in quantities of 5k units, $1.02-$2.28 per unit for 1Mb ROM, $0.36 for 1Mb flash, (if aiming for $1) $0.96-$1.10 per unit for 16Mb flash, and highest is 64Mbit at $1.95-$2.18 per unit. Memory is cheap if your product is popular or can share a big order with someone(s) else. Since not a hardware guy, I don't know if PCB design or packaging cost goes up significantly for adding a 1Mb ROM or flash. I doubt it, though, given these kind of memory chips get used in dirt-cheap boards. Albeit with lower amounts of storage usually given those board try to minimize costs.
- mattthebaker 8y agoWhat do you do with 8MB when the OS is 512MB+? Adding NOR Flash is normally pretty simple -- No bad blocks and a standard SPI interfaces most embedded devices have controllers for. The high end controllers can typically map NOR flash directly into the system address space.
- nickpsecurity 8y agoI was thinking it might be good for RTOS alternatives, a tiny Linux, or (relevant here) something to deal with SDcard problem. Tell users about it with suggested action. And you said 8MB. I just named off a range at different price points to help answer parent's question. I dont know embedded enough to assess what's needed here. Thanks for tip about NOR flash.
- imtringued 8y agoNowadays one can buy 128GB SSDs for 20€ + 10€ external case with USB 3.0. Having 8 or 16GB of internal storage shouldn't add more than 10€ to the overall price.
- binomialxenon 8y agoYeah, I'd be happy with a board that's identical to the RPi3 but with eMMC rather than SD. Not only is SD less than reliable, it's slow.
- l1k 8y agoThe Raspberry Pi Compute Module 3 is just that, the SoC of the RPi3 with 1 GByte memory and 4 GByte eMMC on a SO-DIMM module. You need a baseboard though to plug it in. Either the Eval Board offered by the Foundation, or a Revolution Pi if you aim for industrial use, or some other baseboard.
- Technetium_Hat 8y agoI had no idea that the slot it used was literally just a SODIMM- I thought it was some other strange slot. That is really interesting.