10 ms·
Tiny $45 cubic mini-PC runs Android and Linux
- acowlichenbag 13y agohttp://dpaste.com/1365011/ http://dpaste.com/1365011/ http://redd.it/1lnun3 http://redd.it/1lnun3 I killed christopher 'aempirei' abad with my 5" dick Cowabunga, dude! And now you're going to die wearing that stupid little hat. How does it feel!? You got caught with the seat of your pants flying down and now everyone laughs at your little picopenis on a daily basis. Microchipping a fellow hacker just because you can't sniff out your own? Hilariously inept. Throwing a well-known, contributing veteran of the hack/trollscene into a mental institution just because you had a hangover and forgot to take your klonopin? Over the top. Having a wanton disregard for the history of the internet, the hackscene, trollscene and everything about humanity in general? Get a clue. Your holier-than-thou attitude can screw back off to the 1980's. Yes, folks, christopher 'ambient empire' abad has been bitchtagging and torturing anyone that walks by him just because, well, "I feel like it!" Yes, folks, christopher 'ambient empire' abad fails to understand the first rule of the U.S. system: you can always just buy people off with cash. ' We've been talking to your friends, coworkers and they've been telling us what a lazy, unappreciative little shit you are. Not to mention a sociopath of the lowest order. You won the birth lottery and coasted your way to the top of the U.S. system on a skateboard. Now it's going to be a fun ride when we push your little deck the way back down. You are nothing but a barking little dog who got caught sneaking up the backstairs into the big people's club and now you're being thrown out the window. Your last thought as you realize nothing of value will be lost when your head cracks on the floor of a 12x12 supermax prison cell: "I like to copy from my 1337 civics textbook." Sayanora, sucker! Malaclypse the Younger http://pastie.org/8295259 http://pastie.org/8295259 http://pastebin.com/6CsUg70D http://pastebin.com/6CsUg70D
- aegiso 13y agoThank you. I now understand the need for hellbanning on HN. But it speaks volumes about HN's filtering that it took this long for me to see the need.
- s_baby 13y agoThe I2Ultra model could make a promising NAS with its gigabit ethernet and SATA II.
- Osiris 13y agoI've been looking around for a device that can run Netflix + Pandora + XBMC but so far each device I've found has some compromise or another.
- kelvin0 13y agoI am one of the early backers of the OUYA, and I can confirm XBMC and Netflix work great (don't know for Pandora). The only issue I have with the OUYA is the weak Wifi support in XBMC, which forces you to: A) link the device via ethernet B) Copy files via a USB connection to OUYA
- duked 13y agoI also was an early backer of the OUYA and couldn't run a decent netflix version. I side loaded a netflix apk from a tablet version and the result was really poor (low res and impossible navigation). Do they finally have an "official" version of netflix ?
- aphexairlines 13y agoNetflix on ouya does not stream in HD and has a touch UI that's pretty difficult to use on the ouya controller.
- aray 13y agoFeature set is similar to the (non-enclosed) Sabre Lite development platform for the Freescale iMX6 processors: http://www.element14.com/community/community/knode/single-board_computers/sabrelite?CMP=KNC-USA-SADK-FSL-SABRELITE http://www.element14.com/community/community/knode/single-bo... What strikes me is that this is similar, but $130 (as opposed to $180 for the iMX6 Quad dev board).
- joezydeco 13y agoKnocking off a ton of connectors and cutting the PCB size down will do that. The Element14/Boundary board has a lot more signal lines broken out to connectors, as a good development board should.
- bdcravens 13y agoOperating system — ships with optional Android 4.2.2 microSD card; supports Android and Linux Pedantic, I know, but title sounds like you get a device that dual-boots into Android and Linux. By "optional", I presume that means at added cost. By "supports", I think that means you're on your own as to distro (though I suspect a device-specific distro would come out in short order). The $45 version only ships with 512mb RAM - I run servers without windowing environment in that space all the time, but perhaps one of the smarter Linux gurus can comment as to suitability for running XBMC, etc?
- cs02rm0 13y agoThe Raspberry Pi copes with XBMC even on the 256MB model, 512 should be fine if the GPU is at least roughly equivalent. Video acceleration I gather is the usual issue, I've no idea what the software support is like on this.
- zapt02 13y agoCan vouch for this. My 512MB pi never utilizes more than 80MB RAM when running Raspbmc (XBMC).
- joezydeco 13y agoI've run Android on an i.MX6 with 512MB of SDRAM. It's tight but you get a little more headroom with a lot of stuff disabled (phone, email, mms, calendar) and only a single app running at a time.
- brokenparser 13y agoNo, it would be pedantic to point out that Android uses a Linux kernel. So it really says "supports Linux and Linux", good to know it supports Linux besides supporting Linux. Don't even think of running anything other than Linux!
- marcosdumay 13y agoLots of devices come with an Android distro that has a custom kernel for supporting the device. Those ones can not run a GNU/Linux distro, so manufacturers will tell you they don't support Linux. No, it's not technically correct, but communicates the point quite well.
- dlhavema 13y agoa new one of these little computer in a box things seem to be popping up every couple weeks, are they selling that well to warrant so many companies making so many varieties?
- ollybee 13y agoIs there a good website for keeping track of these ARM SoC PC's ? I'd like to see at a glance what is currently available and detailed spec of the chipsets.
- ytjohn 13y agoI haven't seen such a site, but the two sites I follow for these type of devices are: http://www.cnx-software.com/ http://www.cnx-software.com/ http://liliputing.com/tag/mini-pc http://liliputing.com/tag/mini-pc They do reviews on most of these devices. I have two mk802s that I'm trying to setup as a sort of custom monitoring devices. This probably sounds like a form of pen testing (and it is similar) but I'm working on having one of these power up, search out open wifi networks, connect, then vpn into my server and start posting stats. Among other things I do managed wifi. In the past, I've had to setup some sort of pre-configured desktop or laptop on site to do something like this. I'd like to improve on that (and a < $50 price point is nice) by dropping one of these off and letting it do the work automatically. I can do some access point monitoring remotely (ping, ssh, https, number of clients), but doing a speedtest and signal strength pretty much needs a device on premise.
- Ecio78 13y ago+1 for CNX Software, you can find a mix of news, deals and reviews about embedded devices and I think it has been around for some years
- joezydeco 13y agoThe OP's site, http://linuxgizmos.com http://linuxgizmos.com, is pretty good for that kind of thing. The blog to be called Linux Devices but got idled in some kind of Ziff-Davis acquisition. The editor has restarted it at this new address. Unfortnately there isn't a central chart tracking each of these chip families and their capabilities. You're better off targeting a processor core (MIPS or ARM), speed/core quantity, and then deciding what kind of spice you want added to the mix (USB, UARTs galore, LCD controller, HDMI, Ethernet PHY, etc.)
- x0054 13y agoI think MK808 is a much better deal at the same price.
- friism 13y agoNo SATA though...
- x0054 13y agoThat's true, the IO performance is nothing to write home about. But the CPU / GPU is really good. The only Linux I got working on it is Kali Linux. But Ubuntu is also available. I think a SOC with dual SATA for raid would be really cool for a small server.
- Ecio78 13y agoMany "low-cost" (80-150$) 1 or 2-bay NAS (seagate, netgear, dlink, zyxel etc..) can be "hacked" and the OS can be substituted with Linux. The difference is that they don't have a video output, and I think the CPUs should be more limited (many have Marvell Kirkwood 800mhz-1.5ghz), but they are designed for NAS usage so multiple SATA ports, eventually gigabit ethernet etc.. Having said that, probably the best home NAS could be built out of an HP Microserver N54L: 250$ for an Amd Turion "small" server that supports up to 8GB of RAM (16GB sometimes), it has 4 (non-hot-swappable) disk slots (but there are guys who have installed more using 2.5 disks and the dvdrom slot). there are plenty of forums and sites showing how to do it, the only downside is that it is bigger (but 4 slots) and it consumes more power EDIT: I'm still deciding which way to go in order to substitute my old Seagate Dockstar running Debian (and with a single old 2.5 disk attached to one of the USB ports)
- rjsw 13y agoThe HP Microservers also have ECC RAM, Marvell Kirkwood based servers don't.
- rektide 13y agoA) slow last gen chip (rk3088), superseded by rockchip's RK3166: far slower than an i.mx6. B) no easy path to run linux, only really intended for Android stick use (Rockchip hasn't had an open source come to jesus meeting & won't- freescale makes docs avail). C) extremely limited I/o on the MK808 and all Android sticks- single USB + HDMI is it. There are some interesting sticks out if the i/o limitation is ok but the MK808 is obsolete & slow.
- X-Istence 13y agoThe downside is that the ethernet controller is run over USB. This is what kills performance drastically on the raspberry pi as well. USB is simply not a good protocol to run high speed network traffic over with low latency. The protocol is extremely chatty!
- nobodysfool 13y agoSo it's USB 2.0? That's half duplex anyway, so no way are you going to get 470mb/sec out of it. Max is probably around 423.
- X-Istence 13y agoIt is actually not, I was wrong. It is an internal limitation on the bus that limits it to about 400 Mbps by default, some people have been able to squeeze a little more out of it. After that point though all kinds of issues start appearing. See the links provided in the discussion below.
- makomk 13y agoAre you sure about that? The block diagram shows an Ethernet PHY connected directly to the SoC, and it appears the i.MX6 has a built-in Ethernet controller.
- X-Istence 13y agoI am going off the bottom of the page (http://cubox-i.com http://cubox-i.com), where it says it is limited to 470 Mb/sec due to internal busses. 470 Mb/sec sounds too similar to USB 2 to not be USB 2. -- Actually did the right thing and looked at the datasheets involved: http://cache.freescale.com/files/32bit/doc/data_sheet/IMX6DQCEC.pdf?fpsp=1&WT_TYPE=Data%20Sheets&WT_VENDOR=FREESCALE&WT_FILE_FORMAT=pdf&WT_ASSET=Documentation http://cache.freescale.com/files/32bit/doc/data_sheet/IMX6DQ... and http://cache.freescale.com/files/32bit/doc/errata/IMX6DQCE.pdf?fpsp=1&WT_TYPE=Errata&WT_VENDOR=FREESCALE&WT_FILE_FORMAT=pdf&WT_ASSET=Documentation http://cache.freescale.com/files/32bit/doc/errata/IMX6DQCE.p... This seems to be an internal limitation of the bus. It is not run over USB! This means it will most likely reach that 400 Mbps claimed in the errata: Quote: ERR004512 ENET: 1 Gb Ethernet MAC (ENET) system limitation Description: The theoretical maximum performance of 1 Gbps ENET is limited to 470 Mbps (total for Tx and Rx). The actual measured performance in optimized environment is up to 400 Mbps. Projected Impact: Minor. Limitation of ENET throughput to around 400 Mbps. ENET remains fully compatible to 1Gb standard in terms of protocol and physical signaling.
- fragsworth 13y agoExtremely off-topic, but did the missing advertisement on the right really catch your eye? More than an actual advertisement would? "Companies serving the Embedded Linux Market are invited to advertise here" It was the first thing I read on the page. Am I the only one?
- Miyamoto 13y agoAre you left handed?
- Pxtl 13y agoThe market of these kinds of devices is booming... I'm constantly surprised that no major Android company (or Google itself) has invested in this kind of device.
- zokier 13y agoGoogle had that IO board for Android though.
- RamiK 13y agoGoogle's Chromecast: https://www.google.com/intl/en/chrome/devices/chromecast https://www.google.com/intl/en/chrome/devices/chromecast
- AceJohnny2 13y agoChromecast is a closed platform. https://plus.google.com/110558071969009568835/posts/ZeHgRXS6AZs https://plus.google.com/110558071969009568835/posts/ZeHgRXS6...
- ClayM 13y agoUnfortunately the Chromecast is so locked down you can't compare them.
- arbuge 13y ago>> The market of these kinds of devices is booming It certainly seems to be... I'm curious about who the typical buyer is. Is it primarily hobbyists or are real product applications being served with them?
- fnordfnordfnord 13y agoI might build a NAS with one, or get one for my kid to play with. Looks like a decent platform for a MAME cabinet, too.
- nodata 13y agoSomething with pure dual gigabit ethernet please! (not over usb)
- angusgr 13y agoFreescale i.MX6 is a really nice platform. Shame it hasn't gotten broader traction, I think because it is moderately more expensive than its competition. Since May I've been using an imx6 based gk802 ($70 quad core "Android TV" stick) as a personal server (email, RSS, VPN, etc.) Has worked really nicely considering. (Blog post about installing debian on it: http://projectgus.com/2013/05/debian-installer-for-zealz-gk802-android-tv-quad-core-arm-minipc/ http://projectgus.com/2013/05/debian-installer-for-zealz-gk8... )
- voltagex_ 13y agoDon't Freescale have a bad reputation for not being particularly open?
- plopper 13y agoThey are far more open than BCM or Qualcomm.
- angusgr 13y agoI haven't tried any of their other products, but the iMX6 has a very large detailed technical manual (publicly available, not under NDA) and their Linux kernel trees are updated in public via git (presumably not everything is public but it's a lot more transparent than the occasional tarball source drop approach), plus they have people involved in yocto development. Better than many/most of the ARM SoC manufacturers. The only undocumented/secret squirrel business AFAIK is the Vivante GPU. And that's universal across ARM Soc GPUs, sadly.
- joezydeco 13y agoHere's the i.MX6 documentation and file dump: http://www.freescale.com/webapp/sps/site/prod_summary.jsp?code=i.MX6Q&nodeId=018rH3ZrDRB24A&fpsp=1&tab=Documentation_Tab http://www.freescale.com/webapp/sps/site/prod_summary.jsp?co... The TRM is also here: http://cache.freescale.com/files/32bit/doc/ref_manual/IMX6DQRM.pdf?fpsp=1 http://cache.freescale.com/files/32bit/doc/ref_manual/IMX6DQ... , all 7000+ pages of it. I've built the Linux kernel and Android AOSP/ICS directly from their git repos and it all runs just fine. You can ask support questions on http://imxcommunity.org http://imxcommunity.org but the response you get will be sporadic. Your best bet at getting answers is to be a real customer and get an FAE to help you out. But otherwise I've never had a problem with a lack of "openness" from Freescale.
- Someone 13y agoAnybody know or dare to guess how warm this thing gets? All I could find is that it needs a 5V@2A power supply, but it doesn't tell how much of that is overprovisioned for e.g. powering USB devices. If most of that is converted to heat inside that box, I guess it gets hot (that's 10W in a package slightly larger than an eighth of the volume and a quarter of the area of a light bulb)
- justincormack 13y agoThe original one does not get noticeably hot. I think there is some thermal dissipation in the case, like a chunk of heatsink.
- icambron 13y agoHappy to be wrong about this, but I wouldn't think that thermal dissipation in the case would make the case less hot. Where does the heat go?
- grannyg00se 13y agoIf the whole case is sinking heat, that's a relatively decent amount of surface area to dissipate it. If the heat was a problem it would be pretty simple to add additional surface area. The fact that they have not done so would suggest to me that the heat situation is just fine.
- Someone 13y agoThat's my worry :-) _just_ fine, or fine by a wide margin? If this thing dissipates 5W as is (without powering USB devices), I would think it gets fairly warm. 2 inch = 5 cm, so area will be 150 cm^2, or 0.015 m^2, or about 300W/m^2 = one third of summer sunshine, radiating out of what looks like a plastic enclosure.
- deadfish 13y agoI am keen to set up an emulation box to play MAME - Gamecube or greater. I am not very knowledgeable on hardware... do you think this or the ODROID-XU would be better suited to the job? My understanding is that most emulators rely predominately on the CPU rather then the GPU, unlike most PC games. http://www.hardkernel.com/renewal_2011/products/prdt_info.php?g_code=G137510300620 http://www.hardkernel.com/renewal_2011/products/prdt_info.ph...
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- ajtaylor 13y agoWill something like this run OpenELEC? There is a Raspberry Pi build for ARM, but the download page [1] says it's specific to the RP. I saw things like the Xtreamer Ultra but it's way out of my budget. Up to a couple hundred dollars is acceptable, but I don't need a full mini-PC. Low power and quiet is far more important to me than say a core i5 CPU. [1] http://www.openelec.tv/index.php/get-openelec/download http://www.openelec.tv/index.php/get-openelec/download
- DannyBee 13y agoThey run something like openelec (IE XBMC based). Geexbox is usually what supports these things. I use a mini-pc (a little asus eeepc box with a "who cares" intel cpu in it and a nvidia gt620m running openelec). The reason is actually simple: A lot of the embedded processors are much more finicky in terms of hardware decode. I used to run geexbox on a TI OMAP4460, and it worked wonderfully, right until you hit a track with DTS or DTS-MA audio, and then because it was not hardware supported, it fell right down and couldn't even play at 3fps. Maybe with XBMC now having a new audio engine (This was in the XBMC 11 days) the world is different. The hardware decoders were also not quite as resilient to restart and had occasionally random failures compared to the nvidia chipset , which were very annoying when watching movies. I have never had this happen on anything in the nvidia/amd/intel world, and anything that can't be hardware decoded, the intel can absolutely handle. Given the very low idle state of the newer haswell chips, unless you had a strong desire to not be intel based, i'd see if i could find a mobile motherboard and run openelec on a 15w TDP mobile haswell (or at worst, an itx motherboard and core i3 haswell). Basically, these boxes are fun if you want to futz, but just aren't really "living room ready" unless you have a very fixed set of source video/audio.
- voltagex_ 13y agoI've gone with the WDTV series for my media needs - the earlier gens were very hackable but they've turned on codesigning in the latest WDTV Live Media hub range. They're not bad and play everything I throw at them (Sigmatek decoders, afaicr)
- 13y ago
- frozenport 13y agoI have seen too many of the same thing to be supportive of this project. I see nothing here that hasn't been done, and still very little market, target application or vision.
- IgorPartola 13y agoJust learned about these today. The nice thing about the Is that they have crypto instructions on the chip and outperform the Raspberry Pi 40 to 1 when using OpenSSL (at least according to benchmarks). With the price point cheaper than the RPi (comes with a case, flash, etc.) these may have just won me over. See http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?t=38411&p=396499 http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?t=38411&p=39...
- rwg 13y agoLooks like there's a (power gated!) hardware random number generator, too. It uses ring oscillators, so it's not going to pump out hundreds of megabytes per second like RdRand, but it's enough to at least throw a few kilobits of randomish data into Linux's random device at boot time before turning off to save power.
- inoop 13y agoDX also sells loads of 'stick' form factor Android devices for around the same price, including shipping. MK802, MK808 run Ubuntu as well. http://dx.com/s/android%2bmini?Sort=PriceL2H&category=191 http://dx.com/s/android%2bmini?Sort=PriceL2H&category=191
- mintplant 13y agoThe BeagleBone Black [1] is also $45. [1] http://beagleboard.org/Products/BeagleBone%20Black http://beagleboard.org/Products/BeagleBone%20Black
- dspillett 13y agoThat is without case though IIRC, where this unit is being sold as a complete little "desktop" unit.
- Uberphallus 13y agoWell, as a not completely satisfied owner of: eSata Sheevaplug: currently NAS, no video, soft floating point. Raspberry Pi B/512: was a music server but the built-in audio is extremely crappy, unbalanced GPU/CPU power (damn you, DTS tracks), now sitting in a corner. Cubieboard: (current music server, stable, faster than RPi but no video hardware acceleration in linux). I just bought this in without much thinking. I hope now I can run XMBC and have hardware acceleration for video directly in Linux. As some other said, Freescale is much more open than the ones I listed above.
- Ecio78 13y agoIsn't Raspberry PI's gpu acceleration supported on XBMC (with the right driver and/or dedicated distro?)
- Uberphallus 13y agoYes, but most HD content is delivered with DTS audio, and the CPU chokes hard on that. So either you output directly via HDMI passthrough(which in my case means a long ass cable from the projector to the speakers) or reencode. Also, even if HDMI audio works for you, XBMC interface is sluggish in the RPi. I'd check anything else for serious XBMC use.
- Ecio78 13y agoI knew there were problems with some audio ouput, but I had read about the possibility of passthrough - in my case it will be ok. I suppose the CPU "choking" is only present when trying to let the RPi transcode the audio, right? I have a 2012 Panasonic Plasma TV and the integrated media player is so-so: i.e. it doesn't support external srt subtitles when playing mp4 or mkv files, so I have to remux them in mkv with subs in order to play them, and I was thinking about getting a RPi (and also changing my Seagate Dockstar tranmission/minidlna system with 2 or more disks NAS)
- Uberphallus 13y agoIn that case I think RPi can fit your needs, though the GUI will feel slow anyway.
- jheriko 13y agobut can i put windows 8 on it? :P
- hdsjulian 13y agoI'm still looking for the optimal device to connect to my HiFi and TV. I used to have a Fit-Pc2 but unfortunately it comes with a GMA500 chipset, for which there aren't proper Linux drivers. So what I want is: - something that is actually available in Germany - Fanless - At least 2 USB ports (4 would be better), so I can add external HDDs as well as a DAC for good sound output - Fast enough to run XBMC and similar stuff (no, Raspi doesn't do that trick) - WiFi - HDMI Optimal would be: - an IR interface for remote controls - Ethernet - eSata - An internal Hard Drive Any hints? Prices below 99 USD would be nice :)