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Unihiker, an $80 single-board PC with 2.8“ touchscreen, quad-core ARM Cortex-A35
- nashashmi 3y agoThe next iteration of RPi. Finally.
- ethanpil 3y agoI love to see one of these come with the ability to fit into a gang box on the wall... to use in a place where one would usually have light switches, etc.
- deeesstoronto 3y agoHave you looked at the Sonoff nspanel?
- Matsta 3y agoThis is a good idea. You don't want to have a full-on Linux distro controlling your lights. You want something you can set up and forget. You will feel a world of pain when there is some bug, and it will take you 8 hours to figure out the issues so that you can turn your lights on. The simplier, the better for these kinds of applications.
- sosodev 3y agoAre you able to run your own software on that? It looks fully integrated to me
- kevin_thibedeau 3y agoThis definitely puts the STM32F429 Discovery board to shame with its now inflated $80 price tag.
- LeifCarrotson 3y agoThe STM32F4 is a Cortex-M4 microcontroller. You have direct access to optimally do whatever you want with the CubeIDE and GCC libraries. This is a platform, if the things you want to do are possible with the entire stack of Debian, the pre-existing touchscreen menus, the PinPong Python libraries, etc. then sure, use this...but that's a lot of wasted efficiency and a very large dependency. The STM32F4, for example, can be configured to enter deep sleep and run for a long time on a battery. This likely cannot.
- dmitrygr 3y agoThat dev board has a schematic and data sheets for all parts. This one has a flashy website with no such thing. That’s what you pay your $80 for
- markstos 3y agoThe video says "No coding skills? No worries. Just write your code with ChatGPT."
- Retr0id 3y agoI'm incredibly curious what the experience of trying to write code with ChatGPT is like, if you have no prior knowledge. Obviously, it's impossible for me (and most others reading this) to un-know everything and approach it with fresh eyes. Are there any good real-time videos of non-programmers using ChatGPT to write code? (seems like the best way to understand what it's like)
- joshuakogut 3y agoWell, it is helpful for learning new frameworks and stuff when you already have a grasp of general programming.
- Retr0id 3y agoRight, but what's it like if you know nothing about programming?
- willcipriano 3y agoSort of like using Google translate for a language you don't speak a word of I'd imagine. "I just said what the computer said to say and now the computer/waiter is mad at me"
- NhanH 3y agoHard to image OpenAI not at least trying that out, so if we haven't heard any thing from them, it's safe to say it doesn't work.
- iamflimflam1 3y agoI suspect that people would fail at the first hurdle and not even be able to run the code. I also wonder if they'd even know what to ask.
- Hextinium 3y agoLink to the pin out of the bottom connector: https://www.unihiker.com/wiki/board-overview https://www.unihiker.com/wiki/board-overview Looks like a neat board, I could see making expansion modules that plug into the bottom and running like a IR blaster or other stuff off the SPI/UART bus.
- BeefySwain 3y ago> The UNIHIKER's pins are compatible with micro:bit They really bury the lede here, awesome that there is already an ecosystem that exists for the edge connector.
- DWakefield 3y agoIt's the same connector as on the BBC Micro:bit, right?
- adolph 3y agoI was thinking the same, and it is! Edge Connectors Pin numbers are compatible with micro:bit, 19 independent I/O (Support 1 ×I2C, 1×UART, 2×SPI, 6×12-bit ADC, 5×10-bit PWM) https://www.unihiker.com/wiki/specification https://www.unihiker.com/wiki/specification Note: The edge connector on the back has no electrical connection. https://www.unihiker.com/wiki/board-overview https://www.unihiker.com/wiki/board-overview
- Tepix 3y agoHey, that's really cool!
- tmaly 3y agoAside from pins, does this mean you can program with this MakeCode ?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- LeifCarrotson 3y agoWhere's the schematic? If I want to program and debug real-time routines in the coprocessor, rather than using the built-in userspace drivers, how do I do that?
- zihotki 3y agoJust like with many other RPi "killers" from China - you don't. They all suffer from the same issue with software :(
- 908B64B197 3y agoSo, like all other "raspberry pi killers" this is running a patched kernel released by some company in Shenzhen with no plan to upstream changes or get them into the main kernel tree. E-Waste in less than three years!
- MartijnBraam 3y agoLooks like it's based around the Rockchip RK3308 so it's likely not that bad. I'm sure this ships with some old patched vendor kernel but the SoC is already supported in mainline. I've not gone through the other components but this probably doesn't take too much time to get to full mainline linux support.
- darkwater 3y agoUnrelated but trying the HN wisdom here: any suggestion for a cheap touchscreen with a CPU attached and a battery that can be used as a control panel for Home Assistant? Yeah, probably some Android tablet but something that actually works well for this job and costs as less as possible? I cannot power it properly where I want to put it so it needs battery and then I can charge it as needed. Suggestions?
- anigbrowl 3y agom5stack.com
- HeyLaughingBoy 3y agoI love M5Stack and in fact just shipped my first project with an M5 Tough. However, those screens are tiny. Even 3" would be a huge improvement.
- anigbrowl 3y agoTrue that. They do have a phone-size e-reader device which is great, but obviously is subject to the limitations of e-ink. I suggest reaching out to them, they're very responsive on Twitter and @lovyan3 has developed a universal graphics library for the ESP32 stack and works closely with them.
- anigbrowl 3y agoSorry, that's @lovyan03 if you were looking to follow up.
- lbotos 3y agoI mean, You are spot on -- A cheap android tablet sounds like the fastest/best/most aesthetically pleasing option. Otherwise Waveshare screen + some PI board is the "easy hacker-aesthetic way"
- thesh4d0w 3y agoKindle tablets with fully Kiosk browser.
- theamk 3y agoMy usual question for small cheap boards is: what will happen to OS support in 3 years? Is it using regular distro or is this a custom fork which will likely be never updated? The website says: > The UNIHIKER comes with a Linux operating system based on Debian and various built-in features, which will be upgraded from time to time. ... don't expect OS upgrades here. If you want to play with it for a while then put it away forever, go ahead and do it; but if you want to build something long-term, better find a different board.
- CoastalCoder 3y agoI've never done a project using a board like this, so out of ignorance: Does LTS support usually matter, if you're using the device for a stand-alone application such as a lighting controller or front-door camera?
- idiotsecant 3y agodepends on whether you care about vulnerabilities or not, I suppose. Presumably that lighting controller talks to something. If it talks to a local network only and it's impossible for external traffic to reach it, maybe not such a big deal. If that's not true it might be significant. That's also true of all IoT junk anyhow, it's all running some linux variant under the hood and security / updating is rarely a major concern.
- CoastalCoder 3y agoThat's what I was thinking. I was assuming that e.g. the lighting controller would only have 3 modes of access enabled: (1) USB commections (2) wired ethernet during admin (3) ZWave via a USB adapter
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y agoThis is actually one of the reasons I like bluetooth/zigbee/z-wave/IR/etc. so much - it puts a significant barrier to attacking devices even if they don't get patches. Of course, you still should pay attention to security and update them if possible because local and/or proxied attacks are still a thing, but it's much less likely to get hit.
- Tepix 3y agoThis device is similar to many hacker festival badges from the recent years. Just a bit more expensive. For example: - the Camp 2023 flow3r badge https://events.ccc.de/2023/06/05/camp23-the-flow3r-badge/ https://events.ccc.de/2023/06/05/camp23-the-flow3r-badge/ - the MCH2022 badge https://wiki.mch2022.org/Badge https://wiki.mch2022.org/Badge - the SHA2017 badge with E-Ink https://wiki.sha2017.org/w/Projects:Badge https://wiki.sha2017.org/w/Projects:Badge - the Camp 2011 badge R0ket https://events.ccc.de/camp/2011/wiki/R0ket https://events.ccc.de/camp/2011/wiki/R0ket The first three have ESP32 CPUs, not sure how it compares to the ARM Cortex-A35
- dmayle 3y ago"If your badge has been hit by ransomware, see how to enter Safe mode." What a world we live in...
- solardev 3y agoWait till your brain integration gets malware and your thoughts are locked away...
- RobotToaster 3y agoNever gonna give you up Never gonna let you down....
- dcow 3y agoI'm pretty sure that was a game/gimmick and part of the conference badge challenge. But maybe not. Regardless it is a security conference after all and I'd totally expect people to be playing around like that. I don't think it would have been seen as malicious.
- lostgame 3y agoIt was a joke and part of the actual hacker festival.
- Gys 3y agoThis thing runs full linux and requires 3.3V, 2000mA (max). A badge is probably not the best use case.
- Dnguyen 3y agoI wish the RAM could be a bit more, at least 1G or 2G, so I can have a database on there without having to ship my data to the cloud. Then the system can really run isolated as much as possible, for security and privacy.
- Narishma 3y agoIt has 16GB of flash. Can't you put your database there?
- lostgame 3y agoThis. Back in the day when we lacked RAM, especially on *nix based systems, it's absolutely normal to use the disk/flash as pseudo-RAM. This was just...a normal part of computing at the time, heh. Of course, applications would respond shit slow this way, but in the case of a DB it'd be more than fine, no?
- wongarsu 3y agoSQLite would still be a good option. It's incredibly lightweight, and if you set the database to WAL mode it also works well for a database file accessed by multiple applications on the same device.
- wilonth 3y agoDude database is supposed to be on disk not RAM.
- Dnguyen 3y agoYes, I understand the content of the database is supposed to be on disk. But for the database to function and do its thing, it needs space in RAM. Like page swap and cache.
- oneplane 3y agoAs usual, looks good on papier but no ecosystem and the current stack that it comes with is dead on arrival. Boards need to come with mainstream distro support or with an ecosystem (or both), otherwise it will just die. And with internet connected devices, you can't set-and-forget, so it needs to have live support. Edit: a RockPi S (same SoC) can be had for $35 and a touch LCD for $11... Granted, it doesn't come with the same integration and headers, and doesn't have a microphone by default, and no RISC-V MCU. But the point of integration is a useful product that stays useful, and it doesn't if there is no ecosystem. As for 'adding' mainstream support, it takes quite some effort and active ownership. Out of the many rockchip boards and add-ons this is the set that made it to some level of standard inclusion: http://ftp.debian.org/debian/dists/stable/main/installer-arm64/current/images/device-tree/rockchip/ http://ftp.debian.org/debian/dists/stable/main/installer-arm...
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- CommanderData 3y agoI purchased a few ARM boards in the past and won't do it again. All became e-waste. Rockchip notably, great hardware on paper. Try developing something that needs hardware acceleration and it's a paper weight. It's a common cycle of broken promises to provide drivers by manufactures, rinse and repeat. The exception being raspberry pi or expressif. Depending on the application.
- sosodev 3y agoI've had the same experience with non Raspberry Pi boards. They've become useless thanks to endlessly broken software and zero support. My rpi's have been useful for years and are still getting regular updates. I think I too was drawn in by the performance claims made by those other manufacturers. I realized though that raspberry pi are very powerful computers. We just take the scale of modern computing for granted and our software is the real problem.
- Klinky 3y ago
- WhereIsTheTruth 3y agoIs it open source? Can't find that information on the website
- ck2 3y agoUm, it looks like a $20 android phone without the case or battery?
- janoc 3y agoBecause that's pretty much what it is.
- userbinator 3y agoDoesn't even have a cell modem. More like an Android tablet than a phone.
- dmitrygr 3y agoThe “documentation” page is a joke. I cannot eve find if the touch screen is resistive or capacitive. I see no schematics, making bring up if your own OS in it unlikely. I see no data sheets either. Just another piece of e-trash waiting to end up on a landfill..
- ytjohn 3y agoNothing special, it's touchable.
- FlyingSnake 3y agoSigh... one more device to buy and put in my shelf with RaspberryPis, Arduinos, eInk devices and ESP32s.
- hawski 3y agoSo do not buy it. Sell the stuff you are not using. It is ok to leave one thing that you wish to tinker with in the future, but it is not advised. While we're at it, a clean up of files on your computer is also way overdue. I should not mention hundreds of opened tabs in your browser.
- GrumpyNl 3y agoYou missed the pine64, great choice.
- StayTrue 3y agoMost people seem concerned about software, ecosystem and community. After my experience with Raspberry Pi, my top concern is investing in a platform that may leave me hanging for supply reasons.
- samstave 3y ago[flagged]
- anigbrowl 3y ago[flagged]
- anaganisk 3y agoUgh, u may not like the following but the devices you are using to get on the internet, are used to collect a treasure trove of information, to conduct information warfare. And regardless of whatever your bullshit political specrum is.... this is a platform for stalking, propaganda, tracking and killing Human Beings. Period. Street Cred: I have common sense. There is only one outcome: Defense spending, Military Death.
- isoprophlex 3y agoYou flash the OS (okay, admittedly, debian which is nice) onto it from windows with some lugubrious .exe https://www.unihiker.com/wiki/burner https://www.unihiker.com/wiki/burner No linux/macos tool available. No thanks.
- lostgame 3y agoHah. Way too misread the room, are they serious? Who even develops Windows-exclusive apps these days, anyway? Even the average user these days seems to find it simply abhorrent. It's so simple to create cross-platform applications these days, there's literally no excuse. I can't imagine the thought process that went behind this beyond greed and profit, a little mind-numbing.
- mynameisvlad 3y agoImage burning is certainly more involved than your run of the mill cross-platform Electron app. It likely uses lower-level system calls that might not even be possible in most cross-platform frameworks. Additionally, the screenshots make clear mention of a driver, something that would certainly be different depending on the OS. You simply assumed there is "no excuse" because you couldn't think of one, but you weren't in the room when the decision was made, and don't know the reasonings behind it. My blurb above could certainly have been one of several reasons brought up. You can choose not to agree with the decision, that's fine, but you're attributing a whole lot of malice to what is ultimately a decision they made based on factors which you are not privy to.
- lelanthran 3y ago> It likely uses lower-level system calls that might not even be possible in most cross-platform frameworks. So? I made a Qt-based low-level flashing utility at a previous job. Or do you consider C++ callign C functions not low-level enough?
- mynameisvlad 3y ago
- Hexigonz 3y agoI'm sorry this is off topic, but I love the homepage design. Have too many rPIs to justify buying this, but something about a nice, light, internet blue, simplistic design really makes me happy. Too many sites with their dark mode BS trying to be super serious and deep toned today.
- CodeWriter23 3y agoMakes the cards pop really nicely
- jedberg 3y agoThis seems like a somewhat related place to ask this: Does anyone know where I can get a 3" round screen? I have a Star Wars clock from the 1970s that has a ton of empty space in the base. I want to put a small computer in it and replace the 3" clock face with a round screen, so it can show the time and maybe some fun Star Wars animations. But I just don't know how to find a 3" round screen without buying 1000 of them from China. How do I get just one 3" screen that I can attach to a Raspberry Pi or equivalent linux computer?
- HeyLaughingBoy 3y agoLilyGo has an ESP32 with an attached round TFT screen that's (I think) 2.8" diameter. You can buy single units on Amazon. One of the demo applications is a clock, but it shouldn't be difficult to load a bitmap.
- jedberg 3y agoLooks like it's 2.1", but thanks for the tip!
- gadgetoid 3y agoOur (Pi compatible) HyperPixel Round is just shy of 3” if you count the thick, black border around the edges. Actual screen is 2.1” but diameter is 71.8mm.
- 3y ago
- BlackLotus89 3y agoI remember a few sites that had arm soc comparison lists. This would check none of my boxes... Basically I'm looking for 1) a homeserver board with low energy consumption, m.2/sata, maybe a usb3 port and fast ethernet 2) a lightweight desktop with hdmi/dp, usb c, m.2 and good software support (media codecs anyone?) 3) something cheap for projects the "cheap" pis, esp32 and so on are my go to option For 1) and 2) I'm looking at cheap pi4 compute module boards... but tbh is the pi4 always short of being good enough
- anaganisk 3y agoUsed Lenovo think center I bought off eBay has, Intel 7th gen with vPro, 8GB ram, 256GB nvme, all of that for 76$ including shipping, pi can even beat that price.
- progman32 3y agoWhat's the power consumption like?
- BlackLotus89 3y agoOne of the rhings I would like are arm or risc v, but tbh if the power consumption is around pi level it is tempting
- driggs 3y agoWith "hiker" in the name, I had hoped to see onboard GPS. Nope!
- CobrastanJorji 3y agoTo nit pick on the website itself, the caption "Black and white, it's colorful" is a terrible way to convey information.
- xwdv 3y agoI’ve become very cynical of these types of tiny computer products. These computers are like puppies that tech nerds will gush over and buy impulsively, do a couple small things with, then never use again. It seems like the smaller it is, the crazier people get.
- Animats 3y ago"The built-in IoT service on UNIHIKER allows users to store data through the MQTT protocol and provides real-time data access via web browser." That reads as "comes with integrated backdoor you may not want." It may or may not be any good from a security standpoint, but it's a risk. > This is designed as an embeddable component for learning, prototyping, and OEMs. It's trying to be a lot of things at once. It has connectors on all four sides and no screw holes for mounting, which is a headache when you need to build it into something. That layout started with Arduino, continued into Raspberry Pi, and continues to be a headache. It's fine for desktop prototyping, not good for deployment. Note how vague the site gets when they talk about applications.
- sbierwagen 3y ago>It has connectors on all four sides and no screw holes for mounting There's three nuts soldered on the back: https://www.unihiker.com/wiki/dimension https://www.unihiker.com/wiki/dimension >That layout started with Arduino, continued into Raspberry Pi Pre-2010 Arduino boards had three 1/8 inch mounting holes, post-2010 ones had four: https://blog.adafruit.com/2011/02/28/arduino-hole-dimensions-drawing/ https://blog.adafruit.com/2011/02/28/arduino-hole-dimensions... The Raspberry Pi 1 had two mounting holes located in stupid places, but the Pi 4 has four: https://www.robot-advance.com/userfiles/www.robot-advance.com/images/raspberry-4-modele-b-4go.jpg https://www.robot-advance.com/userfiles/www.robot-advance.co... >Note how vague the site gets when they talk about applications. It's a DFRobot product. I used to work for a company that distributed DFRobot products in the US, and this is broadly consistent with their corporate philosophy. Their designers crank out thousands of products to keep ahead of other Shenzen companies who are fast-following them. (Notably Seeedstudio) You can view their full catalog here, and it's quite the sight to see: https://www.dfrobot.com/category-48.html https://www.dfrobot.com/category-48.html They generally take the OEM reference design, put it on a pcb, and add connectors. The API will be minimal. Compatibility is a joke. (For instance, they make no effort to avoid I2C address collisions-- how could they, when most of them are hard-coded by the device vendor, and they only make the PCB? You have to be careful when stacking several different Arduino shields, since they'll very often be talking on the same pins. There will be no warning of this on the product page, of course, so the end user must carefully examine the board schematic. Etc etc etc.) When I was working with them, I had the impression there were maybe three people who spoke English at the company, and they spent most of their time writing product pages. Email support was hopeless, and their forums were the usual mess. DFRobot products are best thought of as a convenient way to get a sensor or microprocessor without having to design and reflow your PCB. If you don't like reading manufacturer datasheets, then you won't like DFRobot. They're not legos, and they're far from the kind of integrated product family you'd expect from a US company. The unihiker.com webpage has a California startup website aesthetic, so you might expect a small company built to support this one board, but DFRobot literally has dozens of SBCs just like this: https://www.dfrobot.com/category-184.html https://www.dfrobot.com/category-184.html I would be surprised if they even have one person dedicated to this product. An easy guess is they're already moving on to the next board launch, with yet another small ARM chip from another vendor.
- vardump 3y agoBluetooth 4.0, insecure enough that they might as well omitted it entirely. Only 512 MB RAM is a bit limiting in 2023.
- sbr464 3y ago[flagged]
- amelius 3y agoSince when is less modularity a good thing?
- noipv4 3y agoInteresting, but A35 is grossly underperforming, and is an efficiency core.
- throwaway_v 3y agohas anyone from india tried to buy this?
- numpad0 3y agoThis seems like a purported industrial HMI(human-machine interface) unit, a kind of a Pi that are one-off customized to fit on front faces of giant beige metal boxes of all kinds. And there seems to be trend of HMI devices from Chinese market. I wonder who's buying these and for what...
- HeyLaughingBoy 3y agoHa. I just bought two ESP32-based ones: with a 5" & a 7" TFT display cuz I wanted to try both. My application was an HMI (using LGVL) for a device I'm building to order, but I've since decided that I don't need touch input and thus can use a much smaller display. The devices however, are cheap and really nice for the $30 price tag. Having such capable, easy to use hardware at such a low price point opens up markets that couldn't feasibly be served before. There are a lot of people who need one-offs or very small quantities of devices that can't withstand a 5- or 6-figure development cost. When that cost drops to low four-figures because you can use the Arduino ecosystem, then the cash flows.
- fennecbutt 3y agoI desperately want something similar, a small touchscreen Linux board that's thin/slim without any annoying headers etc so I can make a digital badge. I've literally found nothing that fits the bill, they're either thick tft lcds, lack touch or have stupid peripherals. I just need to make a digital badge but I feel like I'll have to build it from scratch myself. How is it phone screens are <1mm much of the time but the only boards with a screen I can find are >3mm thick (often like >10mm). What happened to miniaturisation...