https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/15 ... ideo_share
Yes it's Alwinner.
But with builtin wifi and bluetooth, and for an extra 10 bucks, you can either get a vga adapter, or a battery it runs on.
Not bad at all.
C.H.I.P. on Kickstarter - Raspberry Pi killer?
When you put this in a historical perspective, it is absolutely insane where computer development has taken us in such a relatively short amount of time.
I can remember gawking at the first commercially available home computer in our town with a friend of mine. It was a Commodore VIC-20 I believe. My friend knew some DOS commands and tried them on the demonstration model. The store clerks immediately became very nervous because the boy was doing stuff on the machine and the machine responded.
Anyway, we're talking 30 years ago, and that machine cost a good deal of money back then and weighed a ton.
And to think that in 30 years time, we went from that, to a creditcard sized, 9 dollars worth of kit that outperforms that old computer at least a thousand fold...
You know, I really have trouble wrapping my head around that.
I can remember gawking at the first commercially available home computer in our town with a friend of mine. It was a Commodore VIC-20 I believe. My friend knew some DOS commands and tried them on the demonstration model. The store clerks immediately became very nervous because the boy was doing stuff on the machine and the machine responded.
Anyway, we're talking 30 years ago, and that machine cost a good deal of money back then and weighed a ton.
And to think that in 30 years time, we went from that, to a creditcard sized, 9 dollars worth of kit that outperforms that old computer at least a thousand fold...
You know, I really have trouble wrapping my head around that.
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bark_bark_bark
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- Location: Wisconsin USA
It's very nice. I'll put forth my usual critique tho -- it needs to have VGA as the standard display interface. Composite is old, grainy, and as far as image quality goes, nasty. (I don't mind the first as much as the others, TBH.) HDMI is a hobbyist-inaccessible pain in the butt at best (and it has an extraordinarily expensive license, if you use it legally, which --from my understanding-- most Chinese "TV stick" manufacturers do not).
If and when it hits proper production I'll consider getting one... but Kickstarters have a habit of enormous delays simply because their creators generally don't understand what it takes to get a product to market via mass production. (Full disclosure: I would be one of those people, if I had a Kickstarter. But at least I'd know it!)
If and when it hits proper production I'll consider getting one... but Kickstarters have a habit of enormous delays simply because their creators generally don't understand what it takes to get a product to market via mass production. (Full disclosure: I would be one of those people, if I had a Kickstarter. But at least I'd know it!)
Sometimes you can tell where they cut corners. Presumably the VGA out was too expensive of a component. Only one USB. Allwinner is bargain basement. Kind of like, "well what do you expect", right? No real fault there; it's a cheap computer.
But to be brutally honest I find this to be unlikely to be a winner. Here's why. I don't think they can actually produce it at that cost. I think more components have to come off the board, and potentially already have. They refer to the thing as a blank slate for "whatever you want to do" which implies you have to add stuff.
I'm not saying that's necessarily bad, it just adds risk. The margins on this thing are razor-thin, and potentially nearly zero. If the manufacturer comes back once they place their order and says, "sorry guys, costs have gone up, this per unit cost is now $9.40" ... then what? They have 5000 people who forked over $9 and they need an extra $2000 to fill the order? At present they have far exceeded their minimum, which means they now need the volume pricing lever to outweigh very small changes in per-unit cost - and do you really think they can pull the volume lever much further?
The pricing makes more sense if you think of it as a price leader with profitable add ons. So maybe they can't make money on the headline item, but they know most people will need an add-on and be willing to pay for it. At THAT point you have another risk -- they're marketing a ton of add ons. How much work is it going to be to bring 10 products to market, each of them at far smaller volumes than the base? Still, it could work -- nearly NO one is getting the $9 order. People are going for at least the battery, and a lot more for the CHIP+HDMI.
Here's why I think this has a chance:
There's nothing like this available for this price, and for some applications price is king. We think the R Pi is amazing, as is the BeagleBone Black or Odroid U3 -- but they're expensive by comparison. At $35 something like that is a great deal as a single-unit hobby for you, but what if you wanted 200 of them to monitor a factory or to teach a class? So there will certainly be an appetite for this; but I fear a lot of those people will end up disappointed at the quality and capability.
For my money, I'd go with the high-component-quality, volume produced, made in a high skill factory in England, widely tested and well-supported Raspberry Pi.
But then again, I'm more of an Arduino man myself.
But to be brutally honest I find this to be unlikely to be a winner. Here's why. I don't think they can actually produce it at that cost. I think more components have to come off the board, and potentially already have. They refer to the thing as a blank slate for "whatever you want to do" which implies you have to add stuff.
I'm not saying that's necessarily bad, it just adds risk. The margins on this thing are razor-thin, and potentially nearly zero. If the manufacturer comes back once they place their order and says, "sorry guys, costs have gone up, this per unit cost is now $9.40" ... then what? They have 5000 people who forked over $9 and they need an extra $2000 to fill the order? At present they have far exceeded their minimum, which means they now need the volume pricing lever to outweigh very small changes in per-unit cost - and do you really think they can pull the volume lever much further?
The pricing makes more sense if you think of it as a price leader with profitable add ons. So maybe they can't make money on the headline item, but they know most people will need an add-on and be willing to pay for it. At THAT point you have another risk -- they're marketing a ton of add ons. How much work is it going to be to bring 10 products to market, each of them at far smaller volumes than the base? Still, it could work -- nearly NO one is getting the $9 order. People are going for at least the battery, and a lot more for the CHIP+HDMI.
Here's why I think this has a chance:
There's nothing like this available for this price, and for some applications price is king. We think the R Pi is amazing, as is the BeagleBone Black or Odroid U3 -- but they're expensive by comparison. At $35 something like that is a great deal as a single-unit hobby for you, but what if you wanted 200 of them to monitor a factory or to teach a class? So there will certainly be an appetite for this; but I fear a lot of those people will end up disappointed at the quality and capability.
For my money, I'd go with the high-component-quality, volume produced, made in a high skill factory in England, widely tested and well-supported Raspberry Pi.
But then again, I'm more of an Arduino man myself.
The $9 Computer: What do you get?
ZDNet By Adrian Kingsley-Hughes for Hardware 2.0 | May 11, 2015
The project, called C.H.I.P., is a Linux-powered computer that's described as being "built for work, play, and everything in between!"
But what does $9 buy you? The answer is, a lot.
At the heart of the C.H.I.P. is a 1GHz Allwinner SoC, with a built-in Mali400 GPU that is compatible with OpenGLES and OpenVG. Backing that up is 512MB of DDR3 RAM and 4GB of flash storage.
On the output front it features a single USB port, a micro USB that supports OTG, a composite video output (with options for VGA and HDMI via an adapter), headphones output and microphone input.
C.H.I.P. also supports 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.0, so it's also a capable wireless device.
This hardware is powerful enough to power LibreOffice, the Chromium browser, and a whole host of games and programs to teach programming. There are options for an external battery, a 4.3-inch touchscreen, and a plastic shell to compliment the C.H.I.P.
Yeah but you know, nine dollars man. I mean...come on. You can't even buy a pack of cigarettes for that in a lot of places.Ted Dog wrote:I have two devices with allwinner chipsets both are flaky and need to be restarted more then common cpus. A mele 1000 and a cisco branded settop for cable. Would not run anything in a factory with such a chipset.
Even if its buggy and unstable. You can keep that little bugger stored in your wallet for some weird moment which might never come, but when it does, it might just turn out to be a lifesaver.
In fact, selling these things out of vending machines in public places is totally possible.
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bark_bark_bark
- Posts: 1885
- Joined: Tue 05 Jun 2012, 12:17
- Location: Wisconsin USA
But can this REALLY compete with the Raspberry Pi 2? Probably, not.solo wrote:Yeah but you know, nine dollars man. I mean...come on. You can't even buy a pack of cigarettes for that in a lot of places.Ted Dog wrote:I have two devices with allwinner chipsets both are flaky and need to be restarted more then common cpus. A mele 1000 and a cisco branded settop for cable. Would not run anything in a factory with such a chipset.
Even if its buggy and unstable. You can keep that little bugger stored in your wallet for some weird moment which might never come, but when it does, it might just turn out to be a lifesaver.
In fact, selling these things out of vending machines in public places is totally possible.
....
No. That title is pure clickbait.bark_bark_bark wrote:But can this REALLY compete with the Raspberry Pi 2? Probably, not.
I believe that they are trying to create a new market, which is that of a semi-disposable micro computer.
If this thing will be brought on the market as cheap as they claim it will be, then the threshold to buy one is so low, that it is no longer a matter of choosing between one or the other.
People will just buy one out of curiosity, even if they have a Raspberry Pi.
If this little thing becomes real, it will create a whole new situation.