4 ms·

I'm curious to see the niche, if any, that this is able to carve out for itself. It's low on RAM, but might fit the same sort of profile as a Raspberry Pi W, ev

by qchris 4y ago

I'm curious to see the niche, if any, that this is able to carve out for itself. It's low on RAM, but might fit the same sort of profile as a Raspberry Pi W, even on price. That said, the RISC-V architecture will make things interesting--ARM cross-compilation is pretty well supported by most tiolchains now, even for older architectures. Should be interesting to see if that affects community interest, as I think onboard compilation of anything remotely complicated is probably going to be a no-go.

throwaway81523 4y ago
64MB used to be a lot of memory even for Linux. It is fine unless you're trying to run very bloaty software like web browsers. I wrote a fairly substantial embedded app for a 64MB ARM board running some forerunner of Angstrom Linux, in CPython, that used around 20 threads to talk to different peripherals. It wasn't terribly short on memory. It felt like a mini server. It ran Emacs just fine, and Emacs was once jokingly called "Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping" because 8MB was in those days huge. 64MB leaves plenty of space for it. The Raspberry Pi W is overpowered because it's basically a media processor. It's not for what we usually think of as embedded apps. The difference between the Linux and RTOS versions of this Pine board seems to be the amount of on-board flash. But given the built-in MicroSD slot, maybe that doesn't matter and you can run Linux on both.
techdragon 4y ago
I think theres a pretty good niche to be carved out here, the Raspberry Pi Pico is just too minimal to run Linux or another "full" operating system like it, which can give you several quality of life features for free especially networking related ones like DHCP/mDNS/etc... meanwhile the Raspberry Pi Zero family are all but impossible to get in stock to experiment with let alone rely on getting a hold of, its more powerful than you need for a lot of smaller applications. I've got one use where it was the only good choice but it always rubbed me the wrong way I was seeing such a big premium in getting a Zero W + shipping (locals never in stock) + time spent hunting, just to get USB-OTG to pretend to be a keyboard and have linux networking for 3-way network based auto-discovery service between the 3 devices I was building. The Ox64 can definitely be a very competitive new product in the "low end but not arduino" area, I wont be surprised if this quickly becomes one of the best supported devices Pine ever make once a lot of people have gotten their hands on it and started tinkering.
- karmanyaahm 4y ago
  > which can give you several quality of life features for free especially networking related ones like DHCP/mDNS/etc > just to get USB-OTG to pretend to be a keyboard and have linux networking for 3-way network based auto-discovery service between the 3 devices I was building The Ox64 and Pi Zero W have another advantage over the Pico: USB 2.0. I had a somewhat similar use case, bridging a USB stream to a TCP connection. Unfortunately, the device I was using had a non-compliant HS (12Mbit) USB implementation and in the end it was just simpler to use an Orange Pi Zero than mess around with the Pico. However, Linux boot times are atrocious, in the 30 second range. This is where the Ox64 might shine, having USB 2.0, but also running a (presumably) minimal RTOS with boot times far faster than Debian.
  - Oxodao 4y ago
    > However, Linux boot times are atrocious, in the 30 second range. That's wrong. It takes time to optimize it but as long as you're willing to make the effort and don't have too much dependencies you can strip a lot of stuff to make it really quick e.g.: https://www.furkantokac.com/rpi3-fast-boot-less-than-2-seconds/ https://www.furkantokac.com/rpi3-fast-boot-less-than-2-secon... Not sure if you can do this easily on OPIZ since it's a RPi clone it might be less open
alexisread 4y ago
I think there are a lot of new applications something like this can fill. Farmbots are a good example, requiring ML, cameras, low power operation, radio (lora would be better here, but you should be able to add it easily https://lupyuen.github.io/articles/lora2 https://lupyuen.github.io/articles/lora2). The other thing to note here is that the bl808 is likely to be completely open, no binary blobs. To be this full featured in the cpu, npu, mcu, IO, and radio space for such a low price, and open source firmware is unheard of. I can actually see many hobby OSes supporting a device like this as it's a single open target- driver support should not be an issue.
- BizarroLand 4y ago
  I am somewhat confused over the CPU design. Does anyone know what the reason or advantage is for having 2 different architecture processors running at different clock speeds in the same SOC sharing the same ram? Was this an accident or did it serve a specific purpose?
  - alexisread 4y ago
    I think it's for hi/low power switching- radio stacks and ML models can be shared, so you don't need to reinitialise them, and you can activate only the high power cpu when required. Farmbots and wearables are a couple of applications that would match this pattern. Camera AI and radio but running on battery.
    - BizarroLand 4y ago
      Interesting! I didn't consider power draw at all. That is kind of weird as the whole system only draws (5v/0.5a = 2.5w) and I can't find anything that states that the power draw would radically alter for utilizing only 1 core. At 2.5w a 10,000wh battery would run this non-stop for weeks.

by qchris 4y ago

throwaway81523 4y ago

64MB used to be a lot of memory even for Linux. It is fine unless you're trying to run very bloaty software like web browsers. I wrote a fairly substantial embedded app for a 64MB ARM board running some forerunner of Angstrom Linux, in CPython, that used around 20 threads to talk to different peripherals. It wasn't terribly short on memory. It felt like a mini server. It ran Emacs just fine, and Emacs was once jokingly called "Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping" because 8MB was in those days huge. 64MB leaves plenty of space for it. The Raspberry Pi W is overpowered because it's basically a media processor. It's not for what we usually think of as embedded apps. The difference between the Linux and RTOS versions of this Pine board seems to be the amount of on-board flash. But given the built-in MicroSD slot, maybe that doesn't matter and you can run Linux on both.

techdragon 4y ago

I think theres a pretty good niche to be carved out here, the Raspberry Pi Pico is just too minimal to run Linux or another "full" operating system like it, which can give you several quality of life features for free especially networking related ones like DHCP/mDNS/etc... meanwhile the Raspberry Pi Zero family are all but impossible to get in stock to experiment with let alone rely on getting a hold of, its more powerful than you need for a lot of smaller applications. I've got one use where it was the only good choice but it always rubbed me the wrong way I was seeing such a big premium in getting a Zero W + shipping (locals never in stock) + time spent hunting, just to get USB-OTG to pretend to be a keyboard and have linux networking for 3-way network based auto-discovery service between the 3 devices I was building. The Ox64 can definitely be a very competitive new product in the "low end but not arduino" area, I wont be surprised if this quickly becomes one of the best supported devices Pine ever make once a lot of people have gotten their hands on it and started tinkering.

karmanyaahm 4y ago
> which can give you several quality of life features for free especially networking related ones like DHCP/mDNS/etc > just to get USB-OTG to pretend to be a keyboard and have linux networking for 3-way network based auto-discovery service between the 3 devices I was building The Ox64 and Pi Zero W have another advantage over the Pico: USB 2.0. I had a somewhat similar use case, bridging a USB stream to a TCP connection. Unfortunately, the device I was using had a non-compliant HS (12Mbit) USB implementation and in the end it was just simpler to use an Orange Pi Zero than mess around with the Pico. However, Linux boot times are atrocious, in the 30 second range. This is where the Ox64 might shine, having USB 2.0, but also running a (presumably) minimal RTOS with boot times far faster than Debian.
- Oxodao 4y ago
  > However, Linux boot times are atrocious, in the 30 second range. That's wrong. It takes time to optimize it but as long as you're willing to make the effort and don't have too much dependencies you can strip a lot of stuff to make it really quick e.g.: https://www.furkantokac.com/rpi3-fast-boot-less-than-2-seconds/ https://www.furkantokac.com/rpi3-fast-boot-less-than-2-secon... Not sure if you can do this easily on OPIZ since it's a RPi clone it might be less open

alexisread 4y ago

I think there are a lot of new applications something like this can fill. Farmbots are a good example, requiring ML, cameras, low power operation, radio (lora would be better here, but you should be able to add it easily https://lupyuen.github.io/articles/lora2 https://lupyuen.github.io/articles/lora2). The other thing to note here is that the bl808 is likely to be completely open, no binary blobs. To be this full featured in the cpu, npu, mcu, IO, and radio space for such a low price, and open source firmware is unheard of. I can actually see many hobby OSes supporting a device like this as it's a single open target- driver support should not be an issue.

BizarroLand 4y ago
I am somewhat confused over the CPU design. Does anyone know what the reason or advantage is for having 2 different architecture processors running at different clock speeds in the same SOC sharing the same ram? Was this an accident or did it serve a specific purpose?
- alexisread 4y ago
  I think it's for hi/low power switching- radio stacks and ML models can be shared, so you don't need to reinitialise them, and you can activate only the high power cpu when required. Farmbots and wearables are a couple of applications that would match this pattern. Camera AI and radio but running on battery.
  - BizarroLand 4y ago
    Interesting! I didn't consider power draw at all. That is kind of weird as the whole system only draws (5v/0.5a = 2.5w) and I can't find anything that states that the power draw would radically alter for utilizing only 1 core. At 2.5w a 10,000wh battery would run this non-stop for weeks.