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VoCore: A coin-sized Linux computer with wifi
- noonespecial 12y agoPoor guy. He played the "secret chord" of maker crowdfunding: Linux, Network, GPIO, <=$20. Looks like he was planning on making about 300 units by hand. Now he has to make nearly 700 and it hasn't even been a week. 8 weeks left to go. Good luck. May the maker gods smile upon you.
- pjc50 12y agoI think he was always planning on getting them properly made by machine, that's what the kickstarter is for (the upfront cost). His other advantage is being Chinese, and therefore not having to bother with any of the expensive wireless approval process that's normally required for this sort of thing.
- stephengillie 12y agoChinese people get FCC exemptions?
- deckiedan 12y agoSeems too good to be true - but I'm not a hardware guy. Something like this looks like a Godsend for wearable computing, drones/copters, smart toys, household automation, etc. Can anyone with more clue comment?
- revelation 12y agoThese kind of gadgets already exist, see e.g. the http://8devices.com/carambola-2 http://8devices.com/carambola-2 They are basically breakout boards for MIPS SoC chips intended for use in home routers.
- jrockway 12y agoIt's basically an eval board for a Ralink SoC. I believe this particular chip is for lowish-end WiFi routers.
- turnip1979 12y agoI like the dock concept. Haven't seen it before. He (she?, they?) isn't claiming originality on the dock but it seems to fit his board form factor perfectly. Any precedence on that?
- beagle3 12y agoeyeFI cards and their ilk already exist. They don't usually expose their ARM processor, but I've seen a few articles about how to hack specific models. They usually run linux on an arm inside.
- fhars 12y agoIt is actually quite bulky for a wlan capable linux computer, but the smaller ones like http://hackaday.com/2013/08/12/hacking-transcend-wifi-sd-cards/ http://hackaday.com/2013/08/12/hacking-transcend-wifi-sd-car... don't give you acces to any gpio pins.
- marvin 12y agoI really want a computer that you can run on a potato battery or two. Does such a board exist? What is the lowest-power general-purpose Linux computer in existence that's somewhat convenient to use?
- confluence 12y agoA cheap android phone.
- rwmj 12y agoIf my maths is right, based on this Wikipedia article[1] a typical lemon or potato battery will deliver about 1mW. That's not enough to drive even the smallest 32 bit CPU (eg the Cortex M0). Or to be more accurate, you could drive the CPU at ~ 100 Hz from your potato, assuming you had no other hardware. If you want to play with a tiny, cheap 32 bit board that does not run Linux, but is a lot of fun anyway, I recommend the Freescale Freedom board FRDM-KL26Z (under £13/$20 each -- they're so cheap that one unit didn't reach the minimum order value of the reseller so I had to buy two of them :-). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemon_battery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemon_battery
- jacquesm 12y agoPic chips would work just fine on such a power budget. Especially if you let them go dormant for a bit between work to charge up a capacitor.
- yuvadam 12y agoWith 64MB RAM, this could have been a superior alternative to the TL-WR703n [1]. Still even with 32MB it's nice to see more devices and boards in this area. [1] - http://wiki.openwrt.org/toh/tp-link/tl-wr703n http://wiki.openwrt.org/toh/tp-link/tl-wr703n
- bottled_poe 12y agoAnyone know how much power this thing would draw? In my experience wifi is one of the more power-consuming components of a lightweight computer.
- zokier 12y agoCarambola2 linked by user revelation above specs .5W power consumption. I'd assume this device would be in the same ballpark.
- Aardwolf 12y agoIf you get the 50-pack, is it possible to make a Beowulf cluster out of them, using Wifi for the network connections?
- VLM 12y agoFrom the linked article "It contains 32MB SDRAM" which would have been pretty awesome in 1994 or so. In other words you could do what I did with linux in '94, which was quite a bit. Unfortunately given what I do with linux in '14 I checked and per ps on one box and the VSZ of /usr/sbin/sshd is 43792K aka about 44 megs, so you'd be about 12 megs into the swap just to log in. Not that vanilla sshd is the lightest memory process out there. Of course people did run Beowulf clusters before 2014, you'll have to run some 90s era software given 90s era specs.
- icebraining 12y agoI don't get it; VSZ is just the virtual memory, i.e., address space, not actually used space (at least, not in Linux). You shouldn't need any swap for it. My laptop doesn't have swap and only has 2GB of RAM, but it has no problem "allocating" the 3GB+ of virtual memory that the processes are using.
- VLM 12y agoFair enough, but the general point of mere utility processes consuming all of the available resources leaving nothing to the overall app remains an issue. I looked for a "big" RSS/RSZ and found my puppet using 53 megs. On a 6 gig machine thats not a big deal, and the elimination of "by hand" administration makes it a fair trade, but on a 32 meg machine that 53 megs would be an issue.
- zokier 12y agoOpenWRT has been running quite successfully on that class of devices for some time now. Sure it is using busybox, some lightweight libc, dropbear instead of openssh for ssh etc, but in the end there is still some RAM left for applications.
- Gracana 12y agoBacked at the $40 level. I'm a big fan of CPU modules like this, they solve the difficult problems and I can solder them onto a simple two-layer PCB that has whatever I need for my application.
- inoop 12y agoA 4MB flash, 16MB ram version of this (same chipset) is already freely available for $15 as module (1), or $26 with a break-out board (2). You get 2xserial, a bunch of free GPIO's, 2xethernet, i2c, usb. OpenWRT has already been ported to this module, although you need to really strip it down to make it work reliably given the small amount of ram. 1) http://www.dx.com/p/hi-link-hlk-rm04-serial-port-ethernet-wi-fi-adapter-module-blue-black-214540 http://www.dx.com/p/hi-link-hlk-rm04-serial-port-ethernet-wi... 2) http://www.dx.com/p/hlk-vrm04-multifunction-uart-serial-port-to-ethernet-wi-fi-converting-adapter-module-w-antenna-310407 http://www.dx.com/p/hlk-vrm04-multifunction-uart-serial-port... 3) http://wiki.openwrt.org/toh/hilink/hlk-rm04 http://wiki.openwrt.org/toh/hilink/hlk-rm04
- lnteveryday 12y agoI was looking at the product picture for the module with the breakout board (2). It looks like the only available GPIO come from the 10-pin header at the top of the board. From what I could see it looked like there were only 6 free GPIO. Am I missing something? I did not see any datasheets or PCB layout files on their site.
- inoop 12y agohttp://www.hlktech.net/product_detail.php?ProId=39 http://www.hlktech.net/product_detail.php?ProId=39
- natch 12y agoIt's unfortunate that of all the options, only one is a dock + board option (and that one is, of course, sold out). Am I missing something? Clearly I could buy the board and dock separately but it's odd that the higher priced options don't include an option with docks.