NanoPi – Micro ARM WiFi Board | Hacker News Reader

NanoPi – Micro ARM WiFi Board

nanopi.org

70 pointszdw34 comments

64MB is pretty restricting for most things people would want to run on a Raspberry Pi, the text says you can run Debian on it but that feels like it would be pretty tight. That said, the thing is stupidly cheap for driving small displays (huh, it's analogue RGB though) with as a complete system, and the amount of GPIO available is quite incredible. I'll be excited to buy one to play with if the shipping doesn't double the cost.

Of course you can run Debian with 64 MB RAM. I ran Linux on a 200 MHz Pentium with 32 MB for years as my only computer. It was perfectly fine.

You probably didn't run a current Debian, though; things have grown a bit. The current official "recommended minimum" memory is 128MB, though they mention it's possible to get away with less: https://www.debian.org/releases/stable/i386/ch03s04.html.en

I agree, debian hasn't ran in 64MB for a very long time now. Just try launching 'aptitude' and /that/ will just explode in your face.

You can always swap on the SD card.?. >:->

You can put Debian on a lego mindstorms EV3 [1], and the environment has just as much ram, with a slower CPU I think. Yet booting was fine, and I was able to run a simple servo rocker with sensor feedback in python just fine.

[1] http://www.ev3dev.org/

It's also got an LVDS port, which a lot of open frame monitors support, or get a dongle to convert it to hdmi.

I see a buy button that goes to Features#order, but nowhere do I see where I can actually order it. Is it available yet?

dont bother, this is an ancient 7 year old soc

Is there a big downside to that?

Technology-wise, no. You are only giving up small efficiency gains in power usage and perhaps calculations per clock cycle. But knowing that it's a 400 MHz chip you probably weren't expecting the power of a modern desktop.

But in terms of actual part numbers, yes. If you throw an old IC on your board because you could get it cheaper than a more modern part, you are risking the manufacturer EOL (end-of-life) that part sooner than you'd want. The manufacturer may have a replacement that is instruction set compatible on the software side and pin compatible on the hardware side, but you are running a very real risk of having to redesign your boards and recode a bunch of software when you can't get that chip any more.

But some parts have been around forever and will continue to be around forever. So the designer has to consider for themselves if the old part is popular enough to continue being manufactured. I would have no problem dropping a 555 timer in a circuit, even though it's been around for decades. But I might want to ask the manufacturer about their lifecycle plans for a CPU, considering how fast things change in the industry.

Its a one off. They wont make them after they run out of old chips.

This industry has almost always used older silicon for lesser expensive parts.

Once you're off my lawn I'll teach you all about the 8051, HCS09, and Z80, sonny boy.

Actually, I agree with the previous post; and I'm the former maintainer of the mini2440 architecture (which used the SoC that board inherits from).

arm9 are a bit lame, and /ancient/ -- you can at least get a cortex a8 or so. A 400mhz arm9 is also dog slow.

Also, on every single previous friendlyarm board, they tried to push their proprietary crap bootloader, until I ported u-boot in 2008 or so, but every single board afterward, they tried to push their binaries... .. down to shipping kernel sources with '.fo' files for drivers (!!!) -- as object files!

For a bit of history on this, do read my old blog: http://bliterness.blogspot.co.uk/2012/09/mini210s-and-open-s...

Thats great, but Samsung is not big on second sourcing its designs. This SoC is no longer in production, it never be again. This board is build using waste reels found in Shenzhen market.

My video decoder ran at 40-90fps (admittedly, at a contemporary console resolution of 288x320) on an 8MHz ARM6 core. Are you certain a 400MHz device lacks utility?

For $16, I'll certainly bother. I paid $45 shipped for the original Raspberry Pi with a processor that wasn't much better than this, and found all kinds of uses for it.

Now, if this one was the price of the current RasPi 2, I wouldn't touch it. But this is most of the functionality of the original Pi at a third of the price. Sign me up!

I contacted them, and they replied today saying that it will be available next week.

I think that this is awesome. I see this as a very affordable board in between Arduino and RaspberryPi. Also, competition is always good.

Competition is good, but does it need to have the same name?

With the popularity of the RasPi, everyone is using the name. This product has specifically called out a pin-compatible header with the RasPi, so I think putting Pi in the name is okay. They are drawing attention to the fact that it can use many of the same accessories, not necessarily just riding the coattails of a recognizable name.

There ARE tons of boards between arduidiot and raspberry pi, just the range of STM32 based 'discovery' board is awesome, and in fact makes you wonder why people don't use them more.

There are also a lot of 'intermediate' boards like the Olinuxino boards (the ones with the freescale imx233) that are almost on spec with this, but /completely/ open hardware + software.

I'm personally very fond of this one, that can slot happily on a breadboard.

https://www.olimex.com/Products/OLinuXino/iMX233/iMX233-OLin...

Oh and I made a full Qemu port for the imx233, on my github: https://github.com/buserror/qemu-buserror

It's a tiny thing but I wish the small USB connector was on the other end so it could be connected to power at the end, instead of at a 90deg angle to the board.

This looks awesome, obviously couldn't run xbmc or emulators like the normal pi but with integrated wireless and a low price this seems like it will be much better than the normal pi for integrated projects.

Could probably emulate lots of things, it's a hell of a lot faster than a Commodore 64.

Yeah, emulation probably ends just after SNES with this thing, but it would be cool to see how far someone could push it :)

zsnes (before the C rewrite) ran FFVI at full speed on a pentium 166 with 32MB RAM.

UltraHLE ran Mario64 full-speed on a celeron 300Mhz with 64MB RAM.

Is all the source available or are blobs required to build images?

Did you dig into their website? They have a github repo:

https://github.com/friendlyarm

I looked through the repo, but it is not easy to tell if and what blobs are needed by the system. I was hoping someone more familiar with the SoC would know.

I was actually looking at OpenWRT devices at this price point for a possible project, but this looks a lot better for the price.

The Nexx 3020H is a great OpenWRT device.

* 400MHz RAMIPS CPU

* 64MB RAM

* 8 MB SPI flash

* USB A port

* dual 100Mbit ethernet

* 2.4GHz 802.11n 2T2R (300Mbit claimed)

There's even a Chinese build of u-boot that has a web interface for directly flashing the mtd partition that OpenWRT is on, so it essentially becomes unbrickable from bad OpenWRT builds.

You can buy them from AliExpress for around $14.50 USD in single quantity with free shipping. They don't have any GPIO to speak of (except internal UART pads) but for that price, just buy a cheap Arduino/STM/PIC board and hook it up through USB to the 3020H for all the I/O you need.

8MB flash is pretty good too, that was the limiting factor on the 703n's

DVP Camera Interface is cool

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