12 ms·

The $8 Linux Computer

455 points by lioeters 4y ago

teraflop 4y ago
Based on a brief bit of googling about this board's CPU (the Bouffalo Lab BL808), it seems to have one RV64 and two RV32 cores. The RV64 core may be capable of running RV32 machine code, if the OS sets various flags correctly, but the reverse isn't possible without emulation. How does Linux handle this? Can you just run an executable and have it automatically scheduled onto whichever cores can execute it? Wouldn't the kernel itself have to be compiled for both architectures? EDIT: Maybe I was overthinking this -- I found what looks like the devicetree file for the BL808, and it seems like only the single RV64 core is supported: https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20221127132448.4034-7-jszhang@kernel.org/ https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20221127132448.4034-7-jszhang@k...
- boojums 4y ago
  One proposal I saw was to treat the RV32 core like a microcontroller or as a dedicated co-processor. https://www.robertlipe.com/bl808-not-symmetric/ https://www.robertlipe.com/bl808-not-symmetric/
  - blippage 4y ago
    Let me see if I have this straight ... it's a device that can run a general OS like Linux, but say, have a core that could be run real-time, with all the goodies like timers and stuff that we expect from microcontrollers? If so, then that would be pretty awesome. I think that people have been trying to get real-time working on Raspberry Pis. It seems that they get kinda close, but never manage to get all the way.
    - pantalaimon 4y ago
      This is actually a common pattern you get from multiple vendors.
      - tyingq 4y ago
        The TI AM335x is a good example of that. An ARM core with 2 "PRU" microcontrollers, and they share access to the memory. The BeagleBone Black uses the AM335x, and there's various projects that make use of the PRUs. A list of some of them: https://beagleboard.org/static/prucookbook/ https://beagleboard.org/static/prucookbook/
        aswanson 4y ago
        Also the TI AM6442. Its an awesome chip but the sdk and tooling for the evaluation board is a little rough around the edges.
      - magicalhippo 4y ago
        Just as a semi-random example, NXP has the i.MX series[1] with one or more application-level cores alongside a microprocessor-level core. You can get something like the i.MX 8M Nano[2] with 4x Cortex-A53 and a single Cortex-M7. Another "big-player" option is ST which has the STM32MP1[3], which features a single Cortex-A7 alongside a Cortex-M4. [1]: https://www.nxp.com/products/processors-and-microcontrollers/arm-processors/i-mx-applications-processors:IMX_HOME https://www.nxp.com/products/processors-and-microcontrollers... [2]: https://www.nxp.com/products/processors-and-microcontrollers/arm-processors/i-mx-applications-processors/i-mx-8-applications-processors/i-mx-8m-nano-family-arm-cortex-a53-cortex-m7:i.MX8MNANO https://www.nxp.com/products/processors-and-microcontrollers... [3]: https://www.st.com/en/microcontrollers-microprocessors/stm32mp1-series.html https://www.st.com/en/microcontrollers-microprocessors/stm32...
        joezydeco 4y ago
        NXP's software support for the heterogenous ARM cores is abysmal. I had to abandon an architecture on the iMX7 because their RPMSG drivers were simply broken. Documentation and examples were multiple-years old and their FAE support came down to "well, the examples work." Except they didn't. Perhaps it's better with the newer BSPs on the 8, but I wouldn't be too quick to jump back into it.
    - tuetuopay 4y ago
      Most modern ARM SoCs capable of running Linux have one or more cortex M cores, down from M1s to M4s (I have yet to see M7s). It is precisely for what you describe.
      - repiret 4y ago
        M0. I’ve never seen an SoC with an M1, which is a core specifically designed to be implemented on an FPGA. Cortex-R is also pretty common (R5 on Zynq-7000 and R7 on UltraScale MPSoC, for example)
        tuetuopay 4y ago
        Indeed, brainfart, thinking too much about the Apple M1. Thanks!
- Taniwha 4y ago
  I think you need to think of the RV32 as what they were designed for as I/O processors, one in particular is for networking
- monocasa 4y ago
  > The RV64 core may be capable of running RV32 machine code It's not, xlen is fixed on that core like most RISC-V cores. > How does Linux handle this? Can you just run an executable and have it automatically scheduled onto whichever cores can execute it? Wouldn't the kernel itself have to be compiled for both architectures? With asymmetric multiprocessing like you get with OpenAMP. The RV32 cores are more real time management cores. One core only has an MPU, no MMU. The other core doesn't even have that. So run something like freertos (or just a superloop) on those cores to babysit realtime tasks and either respond quicker and/or more deterministically than Linux can, or avoid waking up the Linux core.
- wzdd 4y ago
  Side note, but someone linked a great talk by OS researcher Timothy Roscoe the other day about a) the increasing heterogeneity of our computing devices, b) Linux's inability to really support same, and consequently c) Linux being used on the device, because the device has to "run Linux", but in increasingly smaller and more walled-off spaces, leaving board management which you'd normally think of as an "OS task" to device drivers or onboard firmware. The non-Linux-running processors on the board run an RTOS or whatever. This would seem to be what's happened here with Linux running on, and really only in charge of, a small portion of the SOC. https://www.usenix.org/conference/osdi21/presentation/fri-keynote https://www.usenix.org/conference/osdi21/presentation/fri-ke... To paraphrase what he says at the end of the talk, it would be a great idea to think about the kind of OS which could take these three cores properly into account.
  - JoeAltmaier 4y ago
    Yet Windows ran 16-bit, 32-bit and 64-bit code on the same core for years. Huh. Really folks. It doesn't take new research or exotic OS design ideas, to do something that has been common practice for a decade. Let's quit pretending linux is driving any innovation. It's followed behind in OS design, often by years.
    - tomsmeding 4y ago
      Linux is, too. The thing being discussed here is supporting multiple pieces of _hardware_ in the same machine that have different instruction sets. I don't think Windows supports that either.
      - alexklarjr 4y ago
        they do, using drivers, that is too novel idea for linux.
        monocasa 4y ago
        Linux has just as much native support for such things as Windows does, if not more.
teleforce 4y ago
There's another post on HN several days back with similarly price Sipeed M1s that's based on the same Bouffalo Lab BL808 RISC-V SoC module including NPU providing support for WiFi/BL, 802.15.4 Zigbee connectivity and interfaces such as UART, I2C, SPI, etc: $10.80 RISC-V AIoT module supports Linux: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33874032 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33874032 EDIT: This is the official website for the Sipeed M1s showcasing the specs and application video for AIoT: https://wiki.sipeed.com/hardware/zh/maix/m1s/m1s_dock.html https://wiki.sipeed.com/hardware/zh/maix/m1s/m1s_dock.html
- sandos 4y ago
  Wooha, thats kind of awesome. Does this mean you could make your own zigbee sensors or whatever?
  - LASR 4y ago
    You can already do that with all kinds of boards. You don’t necessarily need it to run Linux.
  - wojciii 4y ago
    I would think that Zephyr would be better suited for this. Linux is great for many things, but it can also be overkill.
    - VLM 4y ago
      The ultimate "wireless sensor" experience would probably be something like an ESP32 size, power, and price that provides a nice Node-RED interface on the sensor.
    - jacob019 4y ago
      Generally I would agree with that sentiment, but when we have Linux running on cheap low power MCU grade hardware, why not use it?
      - 4y ago
etaioinshrdlu 4y ago
Can this chip output HDMI? I looked at the datasheet and it didn't look like it: https://github.com/bouffalolab/bl_docs/blob/main/BL808_DS/en/BL808_DS_1.2_en.pdf https://github.com/bouffalolab/bl_docs/blob/main/BL808_DS/en...
- baobrien 4y ago
  It looks like it has MIPI DSI. If you were determined, you could use a DSI->HDMI bridge. AD makes one of those for some reason: https://www.analog.com/media/en/technical-documentation/data-sheets/adv7533.pdf https://www.analog.com/media/en/technical-documentation/data...
- monocasa 4y ago
  No. It has MIPI DSI, but I'd be surprised if you could clock it very fast across these board layouts. The very similar Allwinner D1 can push HDMI though. It's got the same main core (T-Head c906) and is about the same price point. That SoC doesn't have the nice wireless interfaces builtin though.
- unwind 4y ago
  Not directly but it seems to be able to generate video out over the MIPI, at least. Not so convenient though, converter chips are probably small and not super hobbyist-friendly (like the one from Analog a siblibg comment dug up).
- tuetuopay 4y ago
  It has an RGB interface (basically parallel bus for pixels + clock), for which multiple bridges exist to HDMI. However, those are like QFN-88 packages so for soldering here be dragons. On the plus side, it avoids the mess that MIPI-DSI is...
etaioinshrdlu 4y ago
What is the power consumption of the processor chip (with CPU using and not using radio?) I couldn't find any info on this from its datasheet.
- hoppyhoppy2 4y ago
  I don't know, but it runs off of a 5V/0.5A power supply if that helps at all.
pjmlp 4y ago
> It looks like a microcontroller, but behaves like a UNIX machine. While a great achievement and very interesting article, the same can be said from many RTOS that offer POSIX compatibility.
- pantalaimon 4y ago
  The difference is that with RTOSes you typically link the application together with the OS, whereas with Linux you can dynamically load applications at run-time.
  - pjmlp 4y ago
    Like everything in computing, it depends.
  - solarkraft 4y ago
    This is a big deal to me. What's stopping normal microcontroller platforms like Zephyr from providing dynamic loading of programs? It'd be great for iteration to have a solid OS that cares about networking and updates and a an application layer you can move fast and break things with without risking soft-bricking your device. I'm currently finding this with interpreted platforms like Espruino and Micropython, but don't understand at all why they have to be the only ones making this possible.
    - pantalaimon 4y ago
      Where would you even load to program to and where from? Typical microcontroller platforms only have a few kB of ROM and RAM, you can't load your application to RAM to run it, it's directly run from Flash. But the internal flash of a MCU can only be erased in pages that can range up to 4k or 8k depending on the platform. So that already limits how many free pages you might have that you could dedicate to an application. What usually is done is to partition the flash into two areas, so you have two firmware slots. This allows you do do OTA updates: While you run from slot A you can write the new firmware to slot B, once you verified the firmware in slot B you set a flag that tell the bootloader to boot from slot B next time. (Oh and you need different firmware images for slot A and slot B as ROM addresses will be different and there is no address translations. Some bootloaders will avoid this always copying slot B to slot A if it's newer than slot A, but IMHO that's unnecessarily complex/inefficient. You might as well always generate both slot images and let the firmware decide which one to request). Another question is, why would you even want to dynamically load applications? Those systems are not interactive, if you have some sensor monitoring the water level of your pot plant or the vibrations on some industrial equipment, it will only ever run that single application. It might get updates if it's doing some networking, but that will just be an update of the whole firmware.
Taniwha 4y ago
English language BL808 data sheets: https://github.com/bouffalolab/bl_docs/blob/main/BL808_DS/en/BL808_DS_1.2_en.pdf https://github.com/bouffalolab/bl_docs/blob/main/BL808_DS/en... https://github.com/bouffalolab/bl_docs/blob/main/BL808_RM/en/BL808_RM_1.1_en.pdf https://github.com/bouffalolab/bl_docs/blob/main/BL808_RM/en...
mmuless22 4y ago
what is the memory management unit supposed to do on embedded computers? I'd rather like one for 5$ without mmu.
- alexisread 4y ago
  This chip has 4 cores, and I believe they all share the same memory bus ie. Each core can access the 64GB ram directly. There is also 768K sram for low power use. Only the RV64 large core has an mmu, the two RV32 cores don't. I think the chip's main use could be robotics- the lowest power core for networking, npu for image processing, the mid core for simple tasks and the large core for Linux and complex tasks eg. Navigation. With the shared memory bus, you can hand over tasks between the cores. You may not have the same software running on each core, but the data can be the same. For your use then, you could just use the lowest power microcontroller with 64GB ram. You can't get that ability anywhere else.
  - Tepix 4y ago
    > the 64GB ram It's 64 MB RAM
    - alexisread 4y ago
      Ah yes thanks, still pretty good though for on-package for £3-odd (UK price). https://m.aliexpress.com/item/1005004970779483.html https://m.aliexpress.com/item/1005004970779483.html
      - aswanson 4y ago
        Any experience with this board? Toolchain, etc?
        alexisread 4y ago
        Not yet- I have a maix M1s dock full package on order, so hope to try it shortly. Sipeed supply a connector to be able to flash their board easily, and they seem to have an IDE for various use cases. I'm hoping the MCU in the chip is the same as the BL602 chip- the 602 has a fully opensource firmware for the radio and cpu, can run zig and lora: https://lupyuen.github.io/ https://lupyuen.github.io/ For me, I'm looking forward to using a riscV MCU with a decent amount of ram, as a fixed platform to build an OS on.
Roark66 4y ago
"[currently out of stock, restock on January 2023]" That is all that needs to be said about this...
- diarmuidc 4y ago
  That's 2 weeks time
  - amelius 4y ago
    lol :)
psychphysic 4y ago
My VisionFive2 just arrived last weekend and I've got the simple buildroot image running. That was about 10x as expensive but probably more bang per buck.
- Klasiaster 4y ago
  Does it support UEFI with an updateable open source firmware (e.g. u-boot)? With enough kernel mainlining happening this would allow to use any distro image instead of always having to fiddle with custom images.
  - psychphysic 4y ago
    Yes u-boot. I think Debian, Ubuntu, fedora and OpenSuse are preparing images. FreeBSD possibly too (I think at Tier 2 level/no binary updates). I am hoping it gets first class support from some distro! Definitely don't want to rely on starfive support.
    - Klasiaster 4y ago
      Well, that was the UEFI part of the question: With UEFI you don't need special images built, you can use the generic arm64 image and it will boot as long as things are in the mainline Linux kernel.
      - psychphysic 4y ago
        VisionFive2 is RISCV based but I take your point!
reaperducer 4y ago
The form factor is similar to the old Onion SBC, but more expensive and less capable. The Onion was $5, and included a proper serial interface, an SD card slot and wifi. It might have also had Bluetooth, but I'm not sure as this was seven years ago. It was a great little machine. Very promising to have an entire Linux machine the size and shape of a 6502. Alas, the company that made it put out a firmware update that made them act unpredictably, then another that ended up bricking machines. And at a cost of $5, there was no margin for customer support. The last time I looked into it, several years ago, the company appeared to be in pivot mode. There was a vibrant emerging market of tiny SBCs in the years before COVID. Now everything is Raspberry Pi and Arduino. If you can get one.
- type0 4y ago
  > The Onion was $5, ... the company appeared to be in pivot mode. Oh, I see, they produce satirical news now
iamflimflam1 4y ago
You can get a pi zero w for $10
- nsteel 4y ago
  The RRP is now $15, if by some small miracle you find one in stock somewhere. https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/supply-chain-update-its-good-news/ https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/supply-chain-update-its-goo...
  - bmitc 4y ago
    I'm a bit over Raspberry Pis at this point. They're impossible to find, and their performance is terrible. I tried getting back into one of my Raspberry Pis from scratch just earlier today, and even with setting up the OS from scratch and the most up to date version, it was unbearably slow. So slow as to be unusable for even the most simple tasks. So that kickstarts forum hopping trying to figure why, and there's laundry lists. It's just a massive time sync. I've decided to upgrade to a Dell or Lenovo mini PC for some desktop Linux needs, where I need a GUI, and go with other embedded solutions over Raspberry Pis or relegate them to headless only uses.
    - Matsta 4y ago
      By the time you get a Rpi 4, a decent power supply and an external SSD, it's usually around the same price as a mini PC which you can get with a 7th/8th/9th Gen i3 or even i5 with everything included. I get that the Rpi will use less power, but I imagine many people will be like me and have it overclocked to 2.1ghz, and my heatsink was pretty warm all day long. I've recently picked up a Optiplex 3070 with a i5 9500t for $120 and bought 32gb of ram off ebay for another $40. Considering a Rpi 4 is going for $100 on eBay, it's not a bad deal at all.
      - Eisenstein 4y ago
        RPis are used as embedded controllers and such instead of a custom solution, which is why they are so hard to get right now -- many companies based their products on them when they were plentiful and now get priority over end-users for distribution. It is (or was) kind of a scandal as RPi's self-mandate was to provide cheap computing devices for learning, not for businesses to make products.
Jorengarenar 4y ago
Wasn't Pi Zero around $5 on release?
- mmoskal 4y ago
  It's subsidized. Try getting them at $5 in volume.
  - iakh 4y ago
    I know you're right, but I never could figure out why they'd sell singles for less than wholesale. what's the point?
    - jkestner 4y ago
      First hit is free/cheap. This is common for dev boards for whatever component a company's trying to get you to buy a million of.
- jon_adler 4y ago
  I bought a $9 C.H.I.P computer many years back which had pretty decent specs. They might have been too cheap though, because they sadly went out of business. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CHIP_(computer) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CHIP_(computer)
- moffkalast 4y ago
  And didn't require a PhD in UART to get an OS running on it. Seriously, who the hell thought the process described in that blog makes any kind of practical sense at all. I mean the thing has two USB ports, TWO! And you can't use either, hahaha!
  - aswanson 4y ago
    PhD in uart. Loled on that one. Thanks.
  - stefan_ 4y ago
goodpoint 4y ago
While this is "technically" a "Linux computer", in practice with such a small amount RAM the name is a stretch.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- puzzlingcaptcha 4y ago
  I wonder how fast the PSRAM is. Is it 200MHz at 16bit?
- stolk 4y ago
  OP here... My first linux computer was a 33Mhz i386. I can't remember the amount of RAM, but it must have been 2MB or maybe 4MB. This thing has 64MByte of RAM, after login, 44MB of it is free.
- Jenda_ 4y ago
  No it's not, you can run lots of useful applications in 64 MiB. Things we are running: - processing data from a marine radar (it streams individual A-scopes as UDP stream), aggregating the sweeps into a .png image, denoising and uploading and handling some related logic (antenna tilt, gain settings) - weather station pulling in data via serial/GPIO/... and publishing them as a webserver (lighttpd) and uploading them via OpenVPN to a cloud storage; firmware in the sensors can be easily updated and debugged remotely because the system runs avrdude and openocd - emergency serial console - connected via USB to serial adapter to server, and you can SSH into it (again through OpenVPN/Wireguard), open a serial terminal or power-cycle the machine - LoRaWAN gateway And the best thing is that all this was written in Python! (with occasional C functions where native performance is required) So you have all the comfort of a high-level language and a full comfort of a standard Linux stack (though a bit limited because it is Busybox).
turbobooster 4y ago
Why would you use this instead if some rpi version?
- riskable 4y ago
  Better embedded GPIO. RPi Zero is a great little board/computer but the capabilities of the GPIO pins are lacking in a lot of ways. Speed being the biggest problem. This little $8 board will run circles around even an RPi 4 when it comes to doing something like controlling a long strip of ws2812b RGB LEDs, as an example.
  - wenus 4y ago
    >run circles around even an RPi 4 when it comes to doing something like controlling a long strip of ws2812b RGB LEDs Why would a Raspberry Pi have any issue with this?
    - monocasa 4y ago
      Linux and it's lack of hard real time functionality. ws2812b's don't have a clock signal and instead rely on relatively tight timing of the data to seperate the bits. So you end up having to write a kernel driver to either disable interrupts as you bit bang GPIO, or take over a SPI device and set it up with nasty parameters to get a ws2812b waveform out of the MOSI data line. This chip can simply dedicate one of the MCU cores to the task of babysitting that interface.
- TJSomething 4y ago
  Currently, RPis are quite difficult to obtain and have been since 2020. I was just looking at a project design that required 2 RPi Zero 2 Ws and I'm currently considering alternatives. Unfortunately, the software stack is Java, so I don't think this will work.
spacebuffer 4y ago
haven't seen a blogger blog in a while
- stolk 4y ago
  Heh... I do feel like a dinosaur at times. Do you have a suggestion for a better platform?
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krm01 4y ago
Does anyone know of cheap touch screens to hook up to this. I feel a lot of cheap computers are available by now but the expensive pieces are displays which would 100X the value of these boards.
- wrycoder 4y ago
  Yes, for small systems, I think of the processor as free, with the cost and bulk being in the peripherals these days. As processors become more powerful, voice I/O becomes the cheapest way to interact - microphones and speakers, or even just a Bluetooth link, are much less expensive and less bulky than a screen and keyboard.
- elevaet 4y ago
  You can find used monitors really cheap these days, at least in N. America. $40 gets you something decent, but not touch screen. I'm sure you could get a used mouse, keyboard and screen for $50.
- Bluecobra 4y ago
  If you are looking for a generic screen (likely without a bezel) take a look at Alibaba.
fajarsiddiqfs 4y ago
I wonder if it is able to power on AA battery?
- lioeters 4y ago
  The Ox64 takes 3.3V power. That's the same as ESP32, which is in a similar category of "system on a chip". From what I read, two AA batteries in a series can supply that (~1.5V each) but their total current is weak (50 mA) compared to what the ESP32 requires, 300~500 mA. This type of Alkaline batteries is also rather unsuitable due to the profile of how the voltage is reduced as it discharges. I imagine the same applies to Ox64, that AA batteries won't work at all or only for a short time. Typically recommended are lithium iron phosphate (LiFePO4) or lithum polymer (LiPo) batteries, both of which have higher capacity, better discharge profile, and can be recharged (the latter while the device is in operation).
- Jenda_ 4y ago
  Yes, with a step-up converter to 3.3V. Unfortunately it has no sleep mode (the supported power-down modes erase the main RAM, leaving only 64KiB region, so it's unusable for suspending of the booted-up Linux), so it will last a few hours at most. This is a common problem with almost all of such boards. And we see great power management is definitely possible: Android phones can suspend to milliwatts for a decade. But there is no support in this hardware, where you can run "normal" Linux, not Android :(
hungryforcodes 4y ago
I don't get it. We've had fully functional ARM based Linux boards in this form factor for a few years now, such as the Nano Pie Duo. So it's $15... https://wiki.friendlyelec.com/wiki/index.php/NanoPi_Duo https://wiki.friendlyelec.com/wiki/index.php/NanoPi_Duo
- eric__cartman 4y ago
  The interesting thing about this is that it's a RISC-V machine, at least for me. A few years ago RISC-V dev boards were much more expensive than their ARM counterparts, nowadays they still are but are getting closer in price parity.
  - kamranjon 4y ago
    I just bought one of these esp32 boards with risc-v chip off adafruit a couple days ago: https://www.adafruit.com/product/5337 https://www.adafruit.com/product/5337 I think they are positioned to be the new low-cost esp32 variant.
    - stolk 4y ago
      Yes, but those are microcontrollers. This is a computer on a chip with mmu, and three cores, 64MB ram.
      - hungryforcodes 4y ago
        The NanoPi Duo has 4 cores and 512MB of RAM which is super usable. Includes WiFi etc. I'm not sure why RISC-V is such a draw here, considering the boards limitations.
solarkraft 4y ago
Show me one with an integrated serial adapter and I'll buy it. I know how to generally program things via UART, but really would prefer not having to bother with it. It's not a great development experience. Pine64 keep making these silly little mistakes limiting their products' appeal.
- gjsman-1000 4y ago
  Why not just get a serial adapter, or repurpose an Arduino as one?
  - solarkraft 4y ago
    I don't want to bother. Manually creating a serial connection means it's more effort to hook up and the whole thing is larger, more fragile and less portable than necessary. Might just be me, but I value the ability to quickly get started without a lot of setup and debugging hardware before getting to the software aspect. I don't want to keep the thing fully set up on my desk, I'd like to put it in a bag and get it out whenever I feel like it. The WiFi capability may make this easier after the initial setup, but it's still an unnecessary hurdle.
- packetlost 4y ago
  As a Pine64 fan... yeah. I think their thinking is that the hard core devs who are needed to get these things off the ground are comfortable with UART and have the tools to program them externally, but IMO that really misses the mark when you need community-critical mass to get anywhere close to the popularity of something like Arduino or Raspberry Pi. Both of those companies/products make programming stupid easy for professionals and hobbyists alike, so they get a lot of attention and sales. The RP2040 is also superbly documented, unlike basically anything Pine64 has put out.
- karmanyaahm 4y ago
  The lack of USB serial is just a bug in the first batch https://gist.github.com/lupyuen/7a0c697b89abccda8e38b33dfe5ebaff https://gist.github.com/lupyuen/7a0c697b89abccda8e38b33dfe5e...
cs702 4y ago
Cool. Soon enough, it will be the even smaller $1 Linux computer. And then, the even smaller $0.10 Linux computer. In the future, even toilet paper will be running Linux.
- porkbrain 4y ago
  > That's a nice watch you got there, want me to turn it into a webserver? https://youtube.com/watch?v=lE4UXdJSJM4 https://youtube.com/watch?v=lE4UXdJSJM4
imhoguy 4y ago
We could have pretty decent $8 Linux machines, with USB, screen, touch, audio, MBs or even GBs RAM, if there would be some standard way to sideload fresh GNU/Linux onto billions of retired Android devices.
- alexklarjr 4y ago
  linux made by corporations exactly to prevent it.
- AtlasBarfed 4y ago
  I thought you could root them and install Linux? But yeah, we need to recycle these phones by making them home servers, etc.
  - monocasa 4y ago
    Depends on the phone. It's been getting more difficult.
  - imhoguy 4y ago
    Yep, LineageOS+Termux is serving me very well, still it is a lot of manual steps and hacking varying by HW vendor and model.
- HPsquared 4y ago
  The Termux app provides a pretty good fraction of the useful Linux stuff. It's basically a userspace chroot environment. You can run a lot of Linux distributions this way, though some of the features don't work. Can even have a desktop environment and run things like desktop Chromium. Or things like FTP servers, etc etc. Basically you get most of the useful functionality from installing Linux, without needing root.
  - imhoguy 4y ago
    I use Termux as my daily driver, but I never thought it can run desktop stuff. Still HW (Samsung) is locked down a bit as it doesn't allow autostart after power failure or can't power up without battery.
bullen 4y ago
What is this thing a MCU or a CPU? 64-bit?!?! It has a MMU? 700K of SRAM is alot for a MCU but so little for a CPU no?
- stolk 4y ago
  It is a SoC with MMU. It just looks like a MCU. 64MByte RAM, (45MByte of it free after logging in.)
  - monocasa 4y ago
    It also has MCU cores in addition to the application core. In fact I don't think there's anything stopping you from just running on the larger MCU cores and simply disabling the large core if you really wanted to for some reason.
barbazoo 4y ago
> You cannot program it using USB, like you would an Arduino, ESP32, Stamp-C3 or rPi Pico. Nope... this needs to be programmed via the UART TX/RX pins. I think it should be possible to use another ESP32 or ESP8266 for programming.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

455 points by lioeters 4y ago

Based on a brief bit of googling about this board's CPU (the Bouffalo Lab BL808), it seems to have one RV64 and two RV32 cores. The RV64 core may be capable of running RV32 machine code, if the OS sets various flags correctly, but the reverse isn't possible without emulation. How does Linux handle this? Can you just run an executable and have it automatically scheduled onto whichever cores can execute it? Wouldn't the kernel itself have to be compiled for both architectures? EDIT: Maybe I was overthinking this -- I found what looks like the devicetree file for the BL808, and it seems like only the single RV64 core is supported: https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20221127132448.4034-7-jszhang@kernel.org/ https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20221127132448.4034-7-jszhang@k...

boojums 4y ago
One proposal I saw was to treat the RV32 core like a microcontroller or as a dedicated co-processor. https://www.robertlipe.com/bl808-not-symmetric/ https://www.robertlipe.com/bl808-not-symmetric/
- blippage 4y ago
  Let me see if I have this straight ... it's a device that can run a general OS like Linux, but say, have a core that could be run real-time, with all the goodies like timers and stuff that we expect from microcontrollers? If so, then that would be pretty awesome. I think that people have been trying to get real-time working on Raspberry Pis. It seems that they get kinda close, but never manage to get all the way.
  - pantalaimon 4y ago
    This is actually a common pattern you get from multiple vendors.
    - tyingq 4y ago
      The TI AM335x is a good example of that. An ARM core with 2 "PRU" microcontrollers, and they share access to the memory. The BeagleBone Black uses the AM335x, and there's various projects that make use of the PRUs. A list of some of them: https://beagleboard.org/static/prucookbook/ https://beagleboard.org/static/prucookbook/
      - aswanson 4y ago
        Also the TI AM6442. Its an awesome chip but the sdk and tooling for the evaluation board is a little rough around the edges.
    - magicalhippo 4y ago
      Just as a semi-random example, NXP has the i.MX series[1] with one or more application-level cores alongside a microprocessor-level core. You can get something like the i.MX 8M Nano[2] with 4x Cortex-A53 and a single Cortex-M7. Another "big-player" option is ST which has the STM32MP1[3], which features a single Cortex-A7 alongside a Cortex-M4. [1]: https://www.nxp.com/products/processors-and-microcontrollers/arm-processors/i-mx-applications-processors:IMX_HOME https://www.nxp.com/products/processors-and-microcontrollers... [2]: https://www.nxp.com/products/processors-and-microcontrollers/arm-processors/i-mx-applications-processors/i-mx-8-applications-processors/i-mx-8m-nano-family-arm-cortex-a53-cortex-m7:i.MX8MNANO https://www.nxp.com/products/processors-and-microcontrollers... [3]: https://www.st.com/en/microcontrollers-microprocessors/stm32mp1-series.html https://www.st.com/en/microcontrollers-microprocessors/stm32...
      - joezydeco 4y ago
        NXP's software support for the heterogenous ARM cores is abysmal. I had to abandon an architecture on the iMX7 because their RPMSG drivers were simply broken. Documentation and examples were multiple-years old and their FAE support came down to "well, the examples work." Except they didn't. Perhaps it's better with the newer BSPs on the 8, but I wouldn't be too quick to jump back into it.
  - tuetuopay 4y ago
    Most modern ARM SoCs capable of running Linux have one or more cortex M cores, down from M1s to M4s (I have yet to see M7s). It is precisely for what you describe.
    - repiret 4y ago
      M0. I’ve never seen an SoC with an M1, which is a core specifically designed to be implemented on an FPGA. Cortex-R is also pretty common (R5 on Zynq-7000 and R7 on UltraScale MPSoC, for example)
      - tuetuopay 4y ago
        Indeed, brainfart, thinking too much about the Apple M1. Thanks!
Taniwha 4y ago
I think you need to think of the RV32 as what they were designed for as I/O processors, one in particular is for networking
monocasa 4y ago
> The RV64 core may be capable of running RV32 machine code It's not, xlen is fixed on that core like most RISC-V cores. > How does Linux handle this? Can you just run an executable and have it automatically scheduled onto whichever cores can execute it? Wouldn't the kernel itself have to be compiled for both architectures? With asymmetric multiprocessing like you get with OpenAMP. The RV32 cores are more real time management cores. One core only has an MPU, no MMU. The other core doesn't even have that. So run something like freertos (or just a superloop) on those cores to babysit realtime tasks and either respond quicker and/or more deterministically than Linux can, or avoid waking up the Linux core.
wzdd 4y ago
Side note, but someone linked a great talk by OS researcher Timothy Roscoe the other day about a) the increasing heterogeneity of our computing devices, b) Linux's inability to really support same, and consequently c) Linux being used on the device, because the device has to "run Linux", but in increasingly smaller and more walled-off spaces, leaving board management which you'd normally think of as an "OS task" to device drivers or onboard firmware. The non-Linux-running processors on the board run an RTOS or whatever. This would seem to be what's happened here with Linux running on, and really only in charge of, a small portion of the SOC. https://www.usenix.org/conference/osdi21/presentation/fri-keynote https://www.usenix.org/conference/osdi21/presentation/fri-ke... To paraphrase what he says at the end of the talk, it would be a great idea to think about the kind of OS which could take these three cores properly into account.
- JoeAltmaier 4y ago
  Yet Windows ran 16-bit, 32-bit and 64-bit code on the same core for years. Huh. Really folks. It doesn't take new research or exotic OS design ideas, to do something that has been common practice for a decade. Let's quit pretending linux is driving any innovation. It's followed behind in OS design, often by years.
  - tomsmeding 4y ago
    Linux is, too. The thing being discussed here is supporting multiple pieces of _hardware_ in the same machine that have different instruction sets. I don't think Windows supports that either.
    - alexklarjr 4y ago
      they do, using drivers, that is too novel idea for linux.
      - monocasa 4y ago
        Linux has just as much native support for such things as Windows does, if not more.

teleforce 4y ago

There's another post on HN several days back with similarly price Sipeed M1s that's based on the same Bouffalo Lab BL808 RISC-V SoC module including NPU providing support for WiFi/BL, 802.15.4 Zigbee connectivity and interfaces such as UART, I2C, SPI, etc: $10.80 RISC-V AIoT module supports Linux: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33874032 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33874032 EDIT: This is the official website for the Sipeed M1s showcasing the specs and application video for AIoT: https://wiki.sipeed.com/hardware/zh/maix/m1s/m1s_dock.html https://wiki.sipeed.com/hardware/zh/maix/m1s/m1s_dock.html

sandos 4y ago
Wooha, thats kind of awesome. Does this mean you could make your own zigbee sensors or whatever?
- LASR 4y ago
  You can already do that with all kinds of boards. You don’t necessarily need it to run Linux.
- wojciii 4y ago
  I would think that Zephyr would be better suited for this. Linux is great for many things, but it can also be overkill.
  - VLM 4y ago
    The ultimate "wireless sensor" experience would probably be something like an ESP32 size, power, and price that provides a nice Node-RED interface on the sensor.
  - jacob019 4y ago
    Generally I would agree with that sentiment, but when we have Linux running on cheap low power MCU grade hardware, why not use it?
    - 4y ago

etaioinshrdlu 4y ago

Can this chip output HDMI? I looked at the datasheet and it didn't look like it: https://github.com/bouffalolab/bl_docs/blob/main/BL808_DS/en/BL808_DS_1.2_en.pdf https://github.com/bouffalolab/bl_docs/blob/main/BL808_DS/en...

baobrien 4y ago
It looks like it has MIPI DSI. If you were determined, you could use a DSI->HDMI bridge. AD makes one of those for some reason: https://www.analog.com/media/en/technical-documentation/data-sheets/adv7533.pdf https://www.analog.com/media/en/technical-documentation/data...
monocasa 4y ago
No. It has MIPI DSI, but I'd be surprised if you could clock it very fast across these board layouts. The very similar Allwinner D1 can push HDMI though. It's got the same main core (T-Head c906) and is about the same price point. That SoC doesn't have the nice wireless interfaces builtin though.
unwind 4y ago
Not directly but it seems to be able to generate video out over the MIPI, at least. Not so convenient though, converter chips are probably small and not super hobbyist-friendly (like the one from Analog a siblibg comment dug up).
tuetuopay 4y ago
It has an RGB interface (basically parallel bus for pixels + clock), for which multiple bridges exist to HDMI. However, those are like QFN-88 packages so for soldering here be dragons. On the plus side, it avoids the mess that MIPI-DSI is...

etaioinshrdlu 4y ago

What is the power consumption of the processor chip (with CPU using and not using radio?) I couldn't find any info on this from its datasheet.

hoppyhoppy2 4y ago
I don't know, but it runs off of a 5V/0.5A power supply if that helps at all.

pjmlp 4y ago

> It looks like a microcontroller, but behaves like a UNIX machine. While a great achievement and very interesting article, the same can be said from many RTOS that offer POSIX compatibility.

pantalaimon 4y ago
The difference is that with RTOSes you typically link the application together with the OS, whereas with Linux you can dynamically load applications at run-time.
- pjmlp 4y ago
  Like everything in computing, it depends.
- solarkraft 4y ago
  This is a big deal to me. What's stopping normal microcontroller platforms like Zephyr from providing dynamic loading of programs? It'd be great for iteration to have a solid OS that cares about networking and updates and a an application layer you can move fast and break things with without risking soft-bricking your device. I'm currently finding this with interpreted platforms like Espruino and Micropython, but don't understand at all why they have to be the only ones making this possible.
  - pantalaimon 4y ago
    Where would you even load to program to and where from? Typical microcontroller platforms only have a few kB of ROM and RAM, you can't load your application to RAM to run it, it's directly run from Flash. But the internal flash of a MCU can only be erased in pages that can range up to 4k or 8k depending on the platform. So that already limits how many free pages you might have that you could dedicate to an application. What usually is done is to partition the flash into two areas, so you have two firmware slots. This allows you do do OTA updates: While you run from slot A you can write the new firmware to slot B, once you verified the firmware in slot B you set a flag that tell the bootloader to boot from slot B next time. (Oh and you need different firmware images for slot A and slot B as ROM addresses will be different and there is no address translations. Some bootloaders will avoid this always copying slot B to slot A if it's newer than slot A, but IMHO that's unnecessarily complex/inefficient. You might as well always generate both slot images and let the firmware decide which one to request). Another question is, why would you even want to dynamically load applications? Those systems are not interactive, if you have some sensor monitoring the water level of your pot plant or the vibrations on some industrial equipment, it will only ever run that single application. It might get updates if it's doing some networking, but that will just be an update of the whole firmware.

Taniwha 4y ago

English language BL808 data sheets: https://github.com/bouffalolab/bl_docs/blob/main/BL808_DS/en/BL808_DS_1.2_en.pdf https://github.com/bouffalolab/bl_docs/blob/main/BL808_DS/en... https://github.com/bouffalolab/bl_docs/blob/main/BL808_RM/en/BL808_RM_1.1_en.pdf https://github.com/bouffalolab/bl_docs/blob/main/BL808_RM/en...

mmuless22 4y ago

what is the memory management unit supposed to do on embedded computers? I'd rather like one for 5$ without mmu.

alexisread 4y ago
This chip has 4 cores, and I believe they all share the same memory bus ie. Each core can access the 64GB ram directly. There is also 768K sram for low power use. Only the RV64 large core has an mmu, the two RV32 cores don't. I think the chip's main use could be robotics- the lowest power core for networking, npu for image processing, the mid core for simple tasks and the large core for Linux and complex tasks eg. Navigation. With the shared memory bus, you can hand over tasks between the cores. You may not have the same software running on each core, but the data can be the same. For your use then, you could just use the lowest power microcontroller with 64GB ram. You can't get that ability anywhere else.
- Tepix 4y ago
  > the 64GB ram It's 64 MB RAM
  - alexisread 4y ago
    Ah yes thanks, still pretty good though for on-package for £3-odd (UK price). https://m.aliexpress.com/item/1005004970779483.html https://m.aliexpress.com/item/1005004970779483.html
    - aswanson 4y ago
      Any experience with this board? Toolchain, etc?
      - alexisread 4y ago
        Not yet- I have a maix M1s dock full package on order, so hope to try it shortly. Sipeed supply a connector to be able to flash their board easily, and they seem to have an IDE for various use cases. I'm hoping the MCU in the chip is the same as the BL602 chip- the 602 has a fully opensource firmware for the radio and cpu, can run zig and lora: https://lupyuen.github.io/ https://lupyuen.github.io/ For me, I'm looking forward to using a riscV MCU with a decent amount of ram, as a fixed platform to build an OS on.

Roark66 4y ago

"[currently out of stock, restock on January 2023]" That is all that needs to be said about this...

diarmuidc 4y ago
That's 2 weeks time
- amelius 4y ago
  lol :)

psychphysic 4y ago

My VisionFive2 just arrived last weekend and I've got the simple buildroot image running. That was about 10x as expensive but probably more bang per buck.

Klasiaster 4y ago
Does it support UEFI with an updateable open source firmware (e.g. u-boot)? With enough kernel mainlining happening this would allow to use any distro image instead of always having to fiddle with custom images.
- psychphysic 4y ago
  Yes u-boot. I think Debian, Ubuntu, fedora and OpenSuse are preparing images. FreeBSD possibly too (I think at Tier 2 level/no binary updates). I am hoping it gets first class support from some distro! Definitely don't want to rely on starfive support.
  - Klasiaster 4y ago
    Well, that was the UEFI part of the question: With UEFI you don't need special images built, you can use the generic arm64 image and it will boot as long as things are in the mainline Linux kernel.
    - psychphysic 4y ago
      VisionFive2 is RISCV based but I take your point!

reaperducer 4y ago

The form factor is similar to the old Onion SBC, but more expensive and less capable. The Onion was $5, and included a proper serial interface, an SD card slot and wifi. It might have also had Bluetooth, but I'm not sure as this was seven years ago. It was a great little machine. Very promising to have an entire Linux machine the size and shape of a 6502. Alas, the company that made it put out a firmware update that made them act unpredictably, then another that ended up bricking machines. And at a cost of $5, there was no margin for customer support. The last time I looked into it, several years ago, the company appeared to be in pivot mode. There was a vibrant emerging market of tiny SBCs in the years before COVID. Now everything is Raspberry Pi and Arduino. If you can get one.

type0 4y ago
> The Onion was $5, ... the company appeared to be in pivot mode. Oh, I see, they produce satirical news now

iamflimflam1 4y ago

You can get a pi zero w for $10

nsteel 4y ago
The RRP is now $15, if by some small miracle you find one in stock somewhere. https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/supply-chain-update-its-good-news/ https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/supply-chain-update-its-goo...
- bmitc 4y ago
  I'm a bit over Raspberry Pis at this point. They're impossible to find, and their performance is terrible. I tried getting back into one of my Raspberry Pis from scratch just earlier today, and even with setting up the OS from scratch and the most up to date version, it was unbearably slow. So slow as to be unusable for even the most simple tasks. So that kickstarts forum hopping trying to figure why, and there's laundry lists. It's just a massive time sync. I've decided to upgrade to a Dell or Lenovo mini PC for some desktop Linux needs, where I need a GUI, and go with other embedded solutions over Raspberry Pis or relegate them to headless only uses.
  - Matsta 4y ago
    By the time you get a Rpi 4, a decent power supply and an external SSD, it's usually around the same price as a mini PC which you can get with a 7th/8th/9th Gen i3 or even i5 with everything included. I get that the Rpi will use less power, but I imagine many people will be like me and have it overclocked to 2.1ghz, and my heatsink was pretty warm all day long. I've recently picked up a Optiplex 3070 with a i5 9500t for $120 and bought 32gb of ram off ebay for another $40. Considering a Rpi 4 is going for $100 on eBay, it's not a bad deal at all.
    - Eisenstein 4y ago
      RPis are used as embedded controllers and such instead of a custom solution, which is why they are so hard to get right now -- many companies based their products on them when they were plentiful and now get priority over end-users for distribution. It is (or was) kind of a scandal as RPi's self-mandate was to provide cheap computing devices for learning, not for businesses to make products.

Jorengarenar 4y ago

Wasn't Pi Zero around $5 on release?

mmoskal 4y ago
It's subsidized. Try getting them at $5 in volume.
- iakh 4y ago
  I know you're right, but I never could figure out why they'd sell singles for less than wholesale. what's the point?
  - jkestner 4y ago
    First hit is free/cheap. This is common for dev boards for whatever component a company's trying to get you to buy a million of.
jon_adler 4y ago
I bought a $9 C.H.I.P computer many years back which had pretty decent specs. They might have been too cheap though, because they sadly went out of business. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CHIP_(computer) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CHIP_(computer)
moffkalast 4y ago
And didn't require a PhD in UART to get an OS running on it. Seriously, who the hell thought the process described in that blog makes any kind of practical sense at all. I mean the thing has two USB ports, TWO! And you can't use either, hahaha!
- aswanson 4y ago
  PhD in uart. Loled on that one. Thanks.
- stefan_ 4y ago

goodpoint 4y ago

While this is "technically" a "Linux computer", in practice with such a small amount RAM the name is a stretch.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
puzzlingcaptcha 4y ago
I wonder how fast the PSRAM is. Is it 200MHz at 16bit?
stolk 4y ago
OP here... My first linux computer was a 33Mhz i386. I can't remember the amount of RAM, but it must have been 2MB or maybe 4MB. This thing has 64MByte of RAM, after login, 44MB of it is free.
Jenda_ 4y ago
No it's not, you can run lots of useful applications in 64 MiB. Things we are running: - processing data from a marine radar (it streams individual A-scopes as UDP stream), aggregating the sweeps into a .png image, denoising and uploading and handling some related logic (antenna tilt, gain settings) - weather station pulling in data via serial/GPIO/... and publishing them as a webserver (lighttpd) and uploading them via OpenVPN to a cloud storage; firmware in the sensors can be easily updated and debugged remotely because the system runs avrdude and openocd - emergency serial console - connected via USB to serial adapter to server, and you can SSH into it (again through OpenVPN/Wireguard), open a serial terminal or power-cycle the machine - LoRaWAN gateway And the best thing is that all this was written in Python! (with occasional C functions where native performance is required) So you have all the comfort of a high-level language and a full comfort of a standard Linux stack (though a bit limited because it is Busybox).

turbobooster 4y ago

Why would you use this instead if some rpi version?

riskable 4y ago
Better embedded GPIO. RPi Zero is a great little board/computer but the capabilities of the GPIO pins are lacking in a lot of ways. Speed being the biggest problem. This little $8 board will run circles around even an RPi 4 when it comes to doing something like controlling a long strip of ws2812b RGB LEDs, as an example.
- wenus 4y ago
  >run circles around even an RPi 4 when it comes to doing something like controlling a long strip of ws2812b RGB LEDs Why would a Raspberry Pi have any issue with this?
  - monocasa 4y ago
    Linux and it's lack of hard real time functionality. ws2812b's don't have a clock signal and instead rely on relatively tight timing of the data to seperate the bits. So you end up having to write a kernel driver to either disable interrupts as you bit bang GPIO, or take over a SPI device and set it up with nasty parameters to get a ws2812b waveform out of the MOSI data line. This chip can simply dedicate one of the MCU cores to the task of babysitting that interface.
TJSomething 4y ago
Currently, RPis are quite difficult to obtain and have been since 2020. I was just looking at a project design that required 2 RPi Zero 2 Ws and I'm currently considering alternatives. Unfortunately, the software stack is Java, so I don't think this will work.

spacebuffer 4y ago

haven't seen a blogger blog in a while

stolk 4y ago
Heh... I do feel like a dinosaur at times. Do you have a suggestion for a better platform?

deleted 4y ago

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krm01 4y ago

Does anyone know of cheap touch screens to hook up to this. I feel a lot of cheap computers are available by now but the expensive pieces are displays which would 100X the value of these boards.

wrycoder 4y ago
Yes, for small systems, I think of the processor as free, with the cost and bulk being in the peripherals these days. As processors become more powerful, voice I/O becomes the cheapest way to interact - microphones and speakers, or even just a Bluetooth link, are much less expensive and less bulky than a screen and keyboard.
elevaet 4y ago
You can find used monitors really cheap these days, at least in N. America. $40 gets you something decent, but not touch screen. I'm sure you could get a used mouse, keyboard and screen for $50.
Bluecobra 4y ago
If you are looking for a generic screen (likely without a bezel) take a look at Alibaba.

fajarsiddiqfs 4y ago

I wonder if it is able to power on AA battery?

lioeters 4y ago
The Ox64 takes 3.3V power. That's the same as ESP32, which is in a similar category of "system on a chip". From what I read, two AA batteries in a series can supply that (~1.5V each) but their total current is weak (50 mA) compared to what the ESP32 requires, 300~500 mA. This type of Alkaline batteries is also rather unsuitable due to the profile of how the voltage is reduced as it discharges. I imagine the same applies to Ox64, that AA batteries won't work at all or only for a short time. Typically recommended are lithium iron phosphate (LiFePO4) or lithum polymer (LiPo) batteries, both of which have higher capacity, better discharge profile, and can be recharged (the latter while the device is in operation).
Jenda_ 4y ago
Yes, with a step-up converter to 3.3V. Unfortunately it has no sleep mode (the supported power-down modes erase the main RAM, leaving only 64KiB region, so it's unusable for suspending of the booted-up Linux), so it will last a few hours at most. This is a common problem with almost all of such boards. And we see great power management is definitely possible: Android phones can suspend to milliwatts for a decade. But there is no support in this hardware, where you can run "normal" Linux, not Android :(

hungryforcodes 4y ago

I don't get it. We've had fully functional ARM based Linux boards in this form factor for a few years now, such as the Nano Pie Duo. So it's $15... https://wiki.friendlyelec.com/wiki/index.php/NanoPi_Duo https://wiki.friendlyelec.com/wiki/index.php/NanoPi_Duo

eric__cartman 4y ago
The interesting thing about this is that it's a RISC-V machine, at least for me. A few years ago RISC-V dev boards were much more expensive than their ARM counterparts, nowadays they still are but are getting closer in price parity.
- kamranjon 4y ago
  I just bought one of these esp32 boards with risc-v chip off adafruit a couple days ago: https://www.adafruit.com/product/5337 https://www.adafruit.com/product/5337 I think they are positioned to be the new low-cost esp32 variant.
  - stolk 4y ago
    Yes, but those are microcontrollers. This is a computer on a chip with mmu, and three cores, 64MB ram.
    - hungryforcodes 4y ago
      The NanoPi Duo has 4 cores and 512MB of RAM which is super usable. Includes WiFi etc. I'm not sure why RISC-V is such a draw here, considering the boards limitations.

solarkraft 4y ago

Show me one with an integrated serial adapter and I'll buy it. I know how to generally program things via UART, but really would prefer not having to bother with it. It's not a great development experience. Pine64 keep making these silly little mistakes limiting their products' appeal.

gjsman-1000 4y ago
Why not just get a serial adapter, or repurpose an Arduino as one?
- solarkraft 4y ago
  I don't want to bother. Manually creating a serial connection means it's more effort to hook up and the whole thing is larger, more fragile and less portable than necessary. Might just be me, but I value the ability to quickly get started without a lot of setup and debugging hardware before getting to the software aspect. I don't want to keep the thing fully set up on my desk, I'd like to put it in a bag and get it out whenever I feel like it. The WiFi capability may make this easier after the initial setup, but it's still an unnecessary hurdle.
packetlost 4y ago
As a Pine64 fan... yeah. I think their thinking is that the hard core devs who are needed to get these things off the ground are comfortable with UART and have the tools to program them externally, but IMO that really misses the mark when you need community-critical mass to get anywhere close to the popularity of something like Arduino or Raspberry Pi. Both of those companies/products make programming stupid easy for professionals and hobbyists alike, so they get a lot of attention and sales. The RP2040 is also superbly documented, unlike basically anything Pine64 has put out.
karmanyaahm 4y ago
The lack of USB serial is just a bug in the first batch https://gist.github.com/lupyuen/7a0c697b89abccda8e38b33dfe5ebaff https://gist.github.com/lupyuen/7a0c697b89abccda8e38b33dfe5e...

cs702 4y ago

Cool. Soon enough, it will be the even smaller $1 Linux computer. And then, the even smaller $0.10 Linux computer. In the future, even toilet paper will be running Linux.

porkbrain 4y ago
> That's a nice watch you got there, want me to turn it into a webserver? https://youtube.com/watch?v=lE4UXdJSJM4 https://youtube.com/watch?v=lE4UXdJSJM4

imhoguy 4y ago

We could have pretty decent $8 Linux machines, with USB, screen, touch, audio, MBs or even GBs RAM, if there would be some standard way to sideload fresh GNU/Linux onto billions of retired Android devices.

alexklarjr 4y ago
linux made by corporations exactly to prevent it.
AtlasBarfed 4y ago
I thought you could root them and install Linux? But yeah, we need to recycle these phones by making them home servers, etc.
- monocasa 4y ago
  Depends on the phone. It's been getting more difficult.
- imhoguy 4y ago
  Yep, LineageOS+Termux is serving me very well, still it is a lot of manual steps and hacking varying by HW vendor and model.
HPsquared 4y ago
The Termux app provides a pretty good fraction of the useful Linux stuff. It's basically a userspace chroot environment. You can run a lot of Linux distributions this way, though some of the features don't work. Can even have a desktop environment and run things like desktop Chromium. Or things like FTP servers, etc etc. Basically you get most of the useful functionality from installing Linux, without needing root.
- imhoguy 4y ago
  I use Termux as my daily driver, but I never thought it can run desktop stuff. Still HW (Samsung) is locked down a bit as it doesn't allow autostart after power failure or can't power up without battery.

bullen 4y ago

What is this thing a MCU or a CPU? 64-bit?!?! It has a MMU? 700K of SRAM is alot for a MCU but so little for a CPU no?

stolk 4y ago
It is a SoC with MMU. It just looks like a MCU. 64MByte RAM, (45MByte of it free after logging in.)
- monocasa 4y ago
  It also has MCU cores in addition to the application core. In fact I don't think there's anything stopping you from just running on the larger MCU cores and simply disabling the large core if you really wanted to for some reason.

barbazoo 4y ago

> You cannot program it using USB, like you would an Arduino, ESP32, Stamp-C3 or rPi Pico. Nope... this needs to be programmed via the UART TX/RX pins. I think it should be possible to use another ESP32 or ESP8266 for programming.

deleted 4y ago
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