5 ms·

Tiny open source computer made from six ICs (hardware startup)

63 points by toni 18y ago

weegee 18y ago
wow! can I run Photoshop CS3 on this?
- weegee 18y ago
  boy, you HN people have absolutely NO sense of humor!!!
  - whacked_new 18y ago
    I for one welcome our new humorless hackerlords. Sure, it's humorous, but unsophisticated and shows little effort. I didn't downmod you, by the way, but I didn't find it funny.
    - tjr 18y ago
      I for one don't welcome them. I thought the comment was reasonably amusing -- a Slashdot-esque quip here and there surely does no real harm -- but even if it were deemed unfunny, is -17 really appropriate? Would not a 0 suffice?
      - whacked_new 18y ago
        My /. joke was written in jest. I read funny comments here now and then, but you have to admit that template jokes get old really fast, and the lack of thought involved adds a displeasing element to them. I do agree that -17 is unnecessary though, and I don't understand why it happens.
maximilian 18y ago
The beagleboard (.org) is way cooler than this thing. Its $149 and has a much more powerful ARM processor with a built-in DSP and 3d accelerator (probably similar to the chip powering the iPhone). It already has an HDMI/DVI output and can also output S-Video. Probably similar in size as well. It has linux running on it already as well.
- pmorici 18y ago
  I agree, the only advantage I see in this product is as a potential teaching tool. There isn't a lot of opensource hardware out there to go with all that software. This board looses in all categories I would consider important when choosing an embedded linux board. Those being speed, size, and price. As you mentioned for a comparable price Beagle Board is much faster with cooler i/o features. If you are going for price and size the lowest cost Gumstix (gumstix.com) is like a third the size, slightly more powerful and only costs 100 bucks.
  - maximilian 18y ago
    Even as a teaching tool it would suck because it's all surface mount. Sure you could just buy all the parts, but it'd be near impossible to get surface mount working reliably in a classroom environment. My buddies built a robot controller using a gumstix board running linux, so for doing robots like the article said its pretty shitty for being bigger and probably having higher power draw.
    - pmorici 18y ago
      Most things are SMT these days. You can still solder SMT by hand w/o much trouble. People are just intimidated by it. It's a lot easier than it looks. There are some great video tutorials on youTube as well as at sparkfun.com and http://www.curiousinventor.com/guides/Surface_Mount_Soldering/101 http://www.curiousinventor.com/guides/Surface_Mount_Solderin...
      - mhb 18y ago
        Sure. But unless it's a board assembly class, the students will spend an inordinate amount of time becoming proficient at soldering, removing solder bridges and replacing burned out chips.
  - stcredzero 18y ago
    loses
- 18y ago
jrockway 18y ago
This is cool and all, but if it's called a "linux stamp" it should at least have some I/O capability other than a serial port. (I am thinking of "turn on the LED" type things.) The basic stamp does really well here, despite being proprietary, horribly limited computationally, and locked-in to one of the worst programming languages ever designed (PBASIC). I remember it offending my sensibilities even when I was in middle school :) Programming I/O in Haskell would be fun. What would you call the "turn on the LED" monad? :)
- ralph 18y ago
  Have a closer look at the photo. There's rows of holes for connectors along the top and bottom of the board. I see one set is labelled JTAG. It looks like the tracks and holes are there for soldering on other I/O connectors if you wish. Oh, and there's a LED in each of the bottom corners. ;-)
- ajross 18y ago
  It has a USB host port, which at least means that the universe of USB devices is available. You can get USB RS-232 devices, parallel I/O ("printer ports"), cheap ADCs ("joystick ports") etc... But I agree. A tiny microcontroller board is really only useful for what you can control with it, and out of the box this doesn't do much. Would it have killed them to toss a dozen bidirectional TTL ports on the thing?

63 points by toni 18y ago

weegee 18y ago

wow! can I run Photoshop CS3 on this?

weegee 18y ago
boy, you HN people have absolutely NO sense of humor!!!
- whacked_new 18y ago
  I for one welcome our new humorless hackerlords. Sure, it's humorous, but unsophisticated and shows little effort. I didn't downmod you, by the way, but I didn't find it funny.
  - tjr 18y ago
    I for one don't welcome them. I thought the comment was reasonably amusing -- a Slashdot-esque quip here and there surely does no real harm -- but even if it were deemed unfunny, is -17 really appropriate? Would not a 0 suffice?
    - whacked_new 18y ago
      My /. joke was written in jest. I read funny comments here now and then, but you have to admit that template jokes get old really fast, and the lack of thought involved adds a displeasing element to them. I do agree that -17 is unnecessary though, and I don't understand why it happens.

maximilian 18y ago

The beagleboard (.org) is way cooler than this thing. Its $149 and has a much more powerful ARM processor with a built-in DSP and 3d accelerator (probably similar to the chip powering the iPhone). It already has an HDMI/DVI output and can also output S-Video. Probably similar in size as well. It has linux running on it already as well.

pmorici 18y ago
I agree, the only advantage I see in this product is as a potential teaching tool. There isn't a lot of opensource hardware out there to go with all that software. This board looses in all categories I would consider important when choosing an embedded linux board. Those being speed, size, and price. As you mentioned for a comparable price Beagle Board is much faster with cooler i/o features. If you are going for price and size the lowest cost Gumstix (gumstix.com) is like a third the size, slightly more powerful and only costs 100 bucks.
- maximilian 18y ago
  Even as a teaching tool it would suck because it's all surface mount. Sure you could just buy all the parts, but it'd be near impossible to get surface mount working reliably in a classroom environment. My buddies built a robot controller using a gumstix board running linux, so for doing robots like the article said its pretty shitty for being bigger and probably having higher power draw.
  - pmorici 18y ago
    Most things are SMT these days. You can still solder SMT by hand w/o much trouble. People are just intimidated by it. It's a lot easier than it looks. There are some great video tutorials on youTube as well as at sparkfun.com and http://www.curiousinventor.com/guides/Surface_Mount_Soldering/101 http://www.curiousinventor.com/guides/Surface_Mount_Solderin...
    - mhb 18y ago
      Sure. But unless it's a board assembly class, the students will spend an inordinate amount of time becoming proficient at soldering, removing solder bridges and replacing burned out chips.
- stcredzero 18y ago
  loses
18y ago

jrockway 18y ago

This is cool and all, but if it's called a "linux stamp" it should at least have some I/O capability other than a serial port. (I am thinking of "turn on the LED" type things.) The basic stamp does really well here, despite being proprietary, horribly limited computationally, and locked-in to one of the worst programming languages ever designed (PBASIC). I remember it offending my sensibilities even when I was in middle school :) Programming I/O in Haskell would be fun. What would you call the "turn on the LED" monad? :)

ralph 18y ago
Have a closer look at the photo. There's rows of holes for connectors along the top and bottom of the board. I see one set is labelled JTAG. It looks like the tracks and holes are there for soldering on other I/O connectors if you wish. Oh, and there's a LED in each of the bottom corners. ;-)
ajross 18y ago
It has a USB host port, which at least means that the universe of USB devices is available. You can get USB RS-232 devices, parallel I/O ("printer ports"), cheap ADCs ("joystick ports") etc... But I agree. A tiny microcontroller board is really only useful for what you can control with it, and out of the box this doesn't do much. Would it have killed them to toss a dozen bidirectional TTL ports on the thing?