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Neat board, but I think it's going to be more useful for the media center/home server crowd than makers/hardware crowd. Some of the gripes I have: - Male head
by tdicola 13y ago
Neat board, but I think it's going to be more useful for the media center/home server crowd than makers/hardware crowd. Some of the gripes I have:
- Male header pins are kind of a pain to connect to a breadboard, at least compared to female pins on a Beaglebone Black or Arduino.
- I'm assuming there's no analog to digital converter, like the Raspberry Pi, so that's annoying if you're reading analog sensors or other things.
- Realtime support. Does the Allwinner A20 have any kind of realtime support microncontroller, kind of like PRU's on the Beaglebone Black? If not that's a bummer since interfacing with anything that has tight timing control (like lighting WS2811 LEDs) will be impossible or require more supporting circuitry.
Don't get me wrong though, an open/hackable stick computer that's not expensive is still very interesting and useful to some folks.
- pekk 13y agoIf the new part would be clearly useful for home servers, I would find that refreshing. "Makers" is not an actual use case. I always struggled to see exactly what Raspberry Pi was good for, that something else isn't better for.
- tdicola 13y ago"Makers" is not an actual use case. I don't agree with that--it might not be a use case to you, but is certainly a valid use case for these small development boards. Look at the success of Arduino, Maker Faire, 3D printing, DIY drones, etc. to see evidence of a large and vibrant DIY and maker community.
- quanticle 13y agoI think a distinction can be drawn between the Arduino and the Raspberry Pi. I can see a use case for a (relatively) cheap, easy to program microcontroller with a board layout that makes it dead simple to integrate with sensors, motors, actuators, switches, etc. But that's an Arduino, not a Raspberry Pi. A Raspberry Pi is a small ARM SoC that tries to be both a microcontroller and a general purpose computer and doesn't do either particularly well.
- tdicola 13y agoWhat about when you want to get those motors, switches, actuators, etc. accessible over the internet? Linux-based boards are fantastic for this use. There are options to get an AVR or similar 8-bit micro onto a network, but if you do anything non-trivial (like parsing web service responses, trying to communicate over SSL, etc.) you will quickly hit the resource limits of the processors. Linux + realtime microprocessor is a really great combo. Right now the Beaglebone Black and Arduino Yun are some options, but it would be nice to see more.
- dfox 13y agoOnly usecase for female header pins on board like this is sticking bare wires into it, which is highly unreliable. If you want reliable connection, both female PCB mounted headers and male cable connectors are significantly more expensive than other way around. If you want to read some analog sensor and it is at least somehow critical for you, you still have to use external ADC. There are some processors that have usable precision ADCs (MSP430AFExxx comes to mind), but they are not exactly SoCs capable of running Linux. Generally, ADCs on MCUs/SoCs are meant for non-critical applications, mostly concerned with user interface.
- tdicola 13y agoPrecisely, bread-boarding circuits with wires is why I prefer female connectors. Once you have something working and want to take it beyond a one-off prototype then you're going to want to build your own custom circuit board anyways, so I really don't see reliability being a huge issue for dev boards. And having an ADC on board for non-critical stuff is still super useful for many projects. For example reading a thermister or LM335 to check the temperature of a water bath in a DIY sous-vide setup would be a great application of a cheap ADC on a Linux-based dev board. You don't need a crazy 24-bit ADC with precision voltage references, etc. just to measure if water is 140 vs 150 degrees F. A simple 10-12 bit ADC is great for many uses.