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IMHO what we need is not more powerful boards but more affordable ones. At $99 it's too expensive for small projects.
by jmnicolas 13y ago
IMHO what we need is not more powerful boards but more affordable ones.
At $99 it's too expensive for small projects.
- sgsyc 13y agomaybe it still cant beat arm cpu.
- sgsyc 13y agoarm cpu board prices are much lowerr. shenzhen cpu board is less than 30 usd.
- mariuolo 13y agoThe big advantage is x86 compatibility. I'd pay a premium for that.
- marcosscriven 13y agoJust curious why you view that as an advantage, unless you mean to run commercial, closed-source applications on it?
- girvo 13y agoLess faffing around with even open-source projects that I can't be bothered porting. Although for me, it's Haiku that I want to run on here, and for now it's x86 :)
- aristidb 13y agoEven open source software is often easier on x86. There are more pre-built binaries from the Linux distributions and so on.
- wycx 13y agoBecause trying to run open source on almost all ARM SoCs is a massive pain in the arse. Is there a single modern ARM SoC for which you can download a Linux install image with a mainline kernel and everything `just works'?
- zimpenfish 13y agoI've had reasonable success running Arch on an ODROIDX. http://archlinuxarm.org/platforms/armv7/samsung/odroid-x http://archlinuxarm.org/platforms/armv7/samsung/odroid-x
- welterde 13y agoI only tried Arch [1] on a raspberry pi so far, but there it worked just fine. [1] http://archlinuxarm.org/platforms/armv6/raspberry-pi http://archlinuxarm.org/platforms/armv6/raspberry-pi
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- joezydeco 13y agoFreescale i.MX. Here's their git repository: http://git.freescale.com/git/cgit.cgi/ http://git.freescale.com/git/cgit.cgi/
- wycx 13y agoThat's not mainline. The almost universal lack of Mainline support is what makes ARM so frustrating. If it is not mainline, I don't want to know. Get a Minnowboard MAX and I suspect all the SoC functions will be available with a mainline kernel. Get any ARM SoC and you are stuck with choosing between a mainline kernel with incomplete functionality OR a custom kernel that might have more functionality (if you are lucky). iMX6 might be the closest SoC to getting kernel sources for full functionality (but still stuck with blobs for Vivante GPU), but how much of that has made it to mainline (genuine question)?
- joezydeco 13y agoIf it's mainline, then you're probably not an experienced SoC developer because we've been dealing with off-track drivers and chip-level craziness for decades. We're happy to get a kernel that exposes 75% of the chip's blocks, at best. Not sure what you mean by "full functionality" other than GPU driver source, and most of us using these for production purposes don't really care about that at this point. Does it need to be mainline to make your product functional?
- Sanddancer 13y agoThere are open source programs out there that make assumptions as to the underlying architecture, such that they don't run as well, or at all, on non-x86 architectures, including OSes like GNU HURD. Sometimes the right tool for the job is x86. Edit: Grepped through the FreeBSD Ports tree for architecture specific ports, and the most common reason not related to using a binary of some sort tends to be that the program uses embedded assembly, usually floating point and/or SIMD extensions, and the developer hasn't coded a fallback of one sort or another. Some of them could probably be ported fairly easily, others may be more difficult projects where it'll be easier/mentally cheaper to just spend the extra money to get an x86 board and be done with it.
- GFK_of_xmaspast 13y agoMediocre and lousy programmers have been making implicit assumptions about architecture and unix variants for 40+ years now that cause all sorts of hell when going to other hardware. (c.f. "all the world's a vax")
- frozenport 13y agoAlmost every package breaks on Gentoo across arches or has different stability/compatibility. Its hard stuff, the only way to fix it is to test on all these platforms which is almost impossible.
- csense 13y agoYou can compile your software on a fast generic PC without setting up a cross compiler.
- rjsw 13y agoThe fully documented GPU is a big advantage too.
- Sanddancer 13y agoWhat sort of project are you doing? I just picked up a teensy 3.1 ( https://www.pjrc.com/teensy/teensy31.html https://www.pjrc.com/teensy/teensy31.html ) for a project I'm working on, and it's got a good amount of horsepower. If you don't need a horrible amount of power, there's also the MSP430 boards which start at ~$5, and go up from there. The low end has been covered for a decent amount of time, this board is actually interesting for the upper-end where you need something fairly beefy, but don't want to start looking at rolling your own board.
- shadowfox 13y ago> there's also the MSP430 boards which start at ~$5 Do you have any pointers to good boards at this range?
- ris 13y agoI've used some of the Olimex ones which are barely more than breadboard breakouts with a good amount of success.
- Sanddancer 13y agoDamn, it looks like they have increased the price on the launchpad since I picked it up. It's now $10. It comes with two micros though with separate use cases, so you can use the launchpad for prototyping before putting it on a breadboard.