Tiny open source computer made from six ICs (hardware startup) | Hacker News Reader

Tiny open source computer made from six ICs (hardware startup)

linuxdevices.com

63 pointstoni17 comments

The beagleboard (.org) is way cooler than this thing. Its $149 and has a much more powerful ARM processor with a built-in DSP and 3d accelerator (probably similar to the chip powering the iPhone). It already has an HDMI/DVI output and can also output S-Video. Probably similar in size as well. It has linux running on it already as well.

I agree, the only advantage I see in this product is as a potential teaching tool. There isn't a lot of opensource hardware out there to go with all that software.

This board looses in all categories I would consider important when choosing an embedded linux board. Those being speed, size, and price. As you mentioned for a comparable price Beagle Board is much faster with cooler i/o features. If you are going for price and size the lowest cost Gumstix (gumstix.com) is like a third the size, slightly more powerful and only costs 100 bucks.

Even as a teaching tool it would suck because it's all surface mount. Sure you could just buy all the parts, but it'd be near impossible to get surface mount working reliably in a classroom environment.

My buddies built a robot controller using a gumstix board running linux, so for doing robots like the article said its pretty shitty for being bigger and probably having higher power draw.

Most things are SMT these days. You can still solder SMT by hand w/o much trouble. People are just intimidated by it. It's a lot easier than it looks. There are some great video tutorials on youTube as well as at sparkfun.com and http://www.curiousinventor.com/guides/Surface_Mount_Solderin...

Sure. But unless it's a board assembly class, the students will spend an inordinate amount of time becoming proficient at soldering, removing solder bridges and replacing burned out chips.

loses

I wonder what the size comparison is to the beagleboard. We are playing around with a beagleboard in our office and the thing is pretty impressive, for the price it might be the best choice for a single board computer right now. The OMAP3 processor on it is impressive, it is smaller and cheaper than comparably powerful ARM chips.

Be careful. The video hardware drivers on the beagleboard will not be open source. There will be open source kernel modules, but the real stuff will be binary only and no doubt supported for only as long as it serves the IP house that owns those cores.

Another limitation of beagleboard is that there is no digital audio support. The video out is DVI, not HDMI. And the sound is analog 2 channel.

Considering that the beagleboard is intended for HDTV applications, that seems like a bit of an oversight to me.

This is cool and all, but if it's called a "linux stamp" it should at least have some I/O capability other than a serial port. (I am thinking of "turn on the LED" type things.) The basic stamp does really well here, despite being proprietary, horribly limited computationally, and locked-in to one of the worst programming languages ever designed (PBASIC). I remember it offending my sensibilities even when I was in middle school :)

Programming I/O in Haskell would be fun. What would you call the "turn on the LED" monad? :)

Have a closer look at the photo. There's rows of holes for connectors along the top and bottom of the board. I see one set is labelled JTAG. It looks like the tracks and holes are there for soldering on other I/O connectors if you wish. Oh, and there's a LED in each of the bottom corners. ;-)

It has a USB host port, which at least means that the universe of USB devices is available. You can get USB RS-232 devices, parallel I/O ("printer ports"), cheap ADCs ("joystick ports") etc...

But I agree. A tiny microcontroller board is really only useful for what you can control with it, and out of the box this doesn't do much. Would it have killed them to toss a dozen bidirectional TTL ports on the thing?

wow! can I run Photoshop CS3 on this?

boy, you HN people have absolutely NO sense of humor!!!

I for one welcome our new humorless hackerlords.

Sure, it's humorous, but unsophisticated and shows little effort. I didn't downmod you, by the way, but I didn't find it funny.

I for one don't welcome them. I thought the comment was reasonably amusing -- a Slashdot-esque quip here and there surely does no real harm -- but even if it were deemed unfunny, is -17 really appropriate? Would not a 0 suffice?

My /. joke was written in jest. I read funny comments here now and then, but you have to admit that template jokes get old really fast, and the lack of thought involved adds a displeasing element to them.

I do agree that -17 is unnecessary though, and I don't understand why it happens.

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