A $1, Linux-Capable, Hand-Solderable Processor (hackaday.com) 114
An anonymous reader shares a report: Over on the EEVblog, someone noticed an interesting chip that's been apparently flying under our radar for a while. This is an ARM processor capable of running Linux. It's hand-solderable in a TQFP package, has a built-in Mali GPU, support for a touch panel, and has support for 512MB of DDR3. If you do it right, this will get you into the territory of a BeagleBone or a Raspberry Pi Zero, on a board that's whatever form factor you can imagine. Here's the best part: you can get this part for $1 USD in large-ish quantities. A cursory glance at the usual online retailers tells me you can get this part in quantity one for under $3. This is interesting, to say the least.
The chip in question, the Allwinner A13, is a 1GHz ARM Cortex-A8 processor. While it's not much, it is a chip that can run Linux in a hand-solderable package. There is no HDMI support, you'll need to add some more chips (that are probably in a BGA package), but, hey, it's only a dollar. If you'd like to prototype with this chip, the best options right now are a few boards from Olimex, and a System on Module from the same company. That SoM is an interesting bit of kit, allowing anyone to connect a power supply, load an SD card, and get this chip doing something. Currently, there aren't really any good solutions for a cheap Linux system you can build at home, with hand-solderable chips.
The chip in question, the Allwinner A13, is a 1GHz ARM Cortex-A8 processor. While it's not much, it is a chip that can run Linux in a hand-solderable package. There is no HDMI support, you'll need to add some more chips (that are probably in a BGA package), but, hey, it's only a dollar. If you'd like to prototype with this chip, the best options right now are a few boards from Olimex, and a System on Module from the same company. That SoM is an interesting bit of kit, allowing anyone to connect a power supply, load an SD card, and get this chip doing something. Currently, there aren't really any good solutions for a cheap Linux system you can build at home, with hand-solderable chips.
Waiting for RISC-V (Score:5, Insightful)
Or is it Mill Computing? (Score:1, Interesting)
A fundamentally new architecture: The Mill [millcomputing.com]
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Mill computing? It only runs g-code?
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It's patented, no thanks.
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No, Out of the Box Computing wants to be a chip manufacturer, and the fallback is the be an IP house like ARM. And the design is as a family, so I don't think it would be hard to find a chip to run a tablet or phone with a secure micro-kernel. And yes that is the great befifit of the chip, and they make function calls about as cheap as any architecture while providing a secure hardware-managed stack.
This only cheap (Score:4, Informative)
Unless you want to do it yourself or you have a project that needs it. 5 dollar will get you a Raspberry Pi Zero with a full system minus storage.
Re:This only cheap (Score:5, Insightful)
I can see if you are making something that you plan to semi-mass-produce say with a custom PCB boards. While cheap, is also very under feature, and soldering for your own little project would just take up more then it would be worth getting full computer on a board like the Raspberry Pi or an Arduino. For a single use project the difference between $1.00, $5.00 or $20.00 isn't that big of a deal. Especially if you are going to manually solder it.
Re:This only cheap (Score:4, Insightful)
I can't, really. It's $5 for a Pi Zero with tons of support for the platform and a million people doing stuff with that exact size build to draw on for info/experience/inspiration. Someone comes out with the $3.50 SalmonBerry Cake Zero that nobody's seen before with some kitbashed board config, are you really going to try and save $1.50 going with the weirdo board? If it causes you 20 minutes of trouble, then you've already lost compared to just going with the Pi Zero.
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It's useful for commercial projects. Even for companies BGA soldering is an issue. You can't just throw a BGA part in without looking at the soldering profiles of everything else on the board, and manufacturing costs more in any case.
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$5US for a Pi Zero W at my local Micro Center. But I can only buy one at that price. $15 for 2-5. $20 for 6+.
It's really hard to beat the price/performance of the various Pi boards.
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$16 at ebay (with 512GB RAM) And no HDMI.
No.
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"We have passed the threshold."
we have to wait for intel.
Allwinner is garbage (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Allwinner is garbage (Score:4, Interesting)
Allwinner is garbage. This is the shit you get in those chinese Raspberry Pi clones.
Uhm, what? They run circles around anything Raspberry Pi can do. Here's for example why rpi open firemware died [github.com] because Raspberry is utter shit. And just see what the author recommends instead. Allwinner is a cheap-and-cut-corners alternative, but at least it gets shit done. Its support is also mostly non-existant, but the community managed to write free drivers — including beating the ATF into shape, so it's ready [github.com], included in Debian [debian.org] and mostly merged upstream [github.com] (this one lacks a few patches for Pinebook/etc).
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Clearly YES: after 8 years of efforts, the mainline Linux kernel support is absolutely better for Allwinner chips. See by yourself: http://linux-sunxi.org/Linux_mainlining_effort
I have do many projects with Allwinner H2+ or H3 processors. There are supported by mainline Linux kernel, free of binary blob, powerful, reliable, cheap, an AVAILABLE to purchase directly from Allwinner. Seriously, most clients have done a demo of there future product idea with a Raspberry PI, but there is no way to design a produc
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Likely the broadcom chips in the PIs are unavailable because the chips in all the PIs are EOL. The PI foundation clears out broadcom's remaining stock for pennies on the dollar cranks out PI boards till they run out of chips and then spins up a new PI board using the next EOL part that broadcom has. Win Win for most everyone. Broadcom gets to clear out their EOL stock, PI foundation gets cheap chips, We get cheap SBCs.
Likely the reason we are stuck with binary blobs for the drivers is because of the license
Re: Allwinner is garbage (Score:2, Insightful)
That's a lot of likely guesses. Unsurprisingly you have a few wrong, most clearly illustrated by the ongoing availablity of raspberry pi 1s.
The fact is Broadcom sucks to work with. They require you to hand over a kidney to get access to a single datasheet, if they feel your kidneys are worth having. I can only guess how hard it is to get actual product.
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Allwinner have a much better attitude towards open source support than Broadcom (the Raspberry Pi CPU manufacturer). They have been opening up more and more hardware documentation.
The main issue seems to be that they are a Chinese company which makes it harder for westerners to interact with them, but they are getting better.
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False. It has full support in mainline kernel, and work just fine. And it's two time faster of a rasberry pi 1 (or zero) anyway..
It's true that allwinner doesn't care to much for "not" android market, but linux-sunxi community has developed a very good support in linux.
Re: Allwinner is garbage (Score:2)
Last time I tried All winner, the Linux ran badly, built in WiFi did not work, and basically I had to consign them to the bin. For the saving over a pi, All winner is not worth the hassle.
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Probably you did something wrong. I'm still using a olinuxino-micro-a20 as a home server, and it works fine. 100% supported by the debian installer.
Also the a13 cpu has full support in mainline linux and mainline u-boot, without binary blob. The same is impossible with raspberry pi. For me is a thing...
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The support and documentation are essentially nonexistant.
I think that's actually a language barrier. Do you speak Chinese?
About that hand computer... (Score:4, Funny)
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What should we use instead?
Can you imagine... (Score:5, Funny)
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The 1980's called, they want their expression back.
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The 1970s called they want casual sex back everyone agreed.
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This Chip is NOT Hand Solderable (Score:4, Interesting)
Well, maybe it is if you have $2k+ in SMT soldering equipment like: https://www.weller-tools.com/p... [weller-tools.com] and a reasonable quality microscope: https://www.microscope.com/oma... [microscope.com]
A TQFP chip usually has pins on 0.8mm centres or less (down to 0.4mm). In case you don't know what this means, this chip will have 32 to 64 pins per inch that need soldering.
In any case, you need to have a PCB of appropriate quality to solder it on and, if you aren't experienced in working with them, you'll fuck up a lot of PCBs and chips. These chips are meant to be soldered on an appropriately solder pasted PCB and then run through an oven. Single pins can be reworked with the tools noted above or with custom hot gas tools.
I'm sure shortly somebody with the appropriate knowledge, skills and resources will design a Single Board Computer (SBC) around this chip with an appropriate BIOS chip or tools to flash it. If they don't come up with the SBC, then there is a reason why they didn't (or stopped before offering a product) and you will avoid going down a rabbit hole.
It is easily Hand Solderable (Score:5, Informative)
Have a look at some youtube videos of hand soldering TQFP, there are loads.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com] for example
I'm happy hand soldering 0.65mm devices and I have done 0.5mm. It is easy enough to do if you are careful however my preferred method is to get a £30 stencil and use solder paste together with hand placement. I then chuck it in my £30 oven and get results good enough that my customers assume that it has been made on a pick and place machine.
Yes it takes a bit of practise and experience but certainly no expensive equipment.
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I've hand-soldered quite a few packages with similar pitch. Granted, you're not going to do it on a plain protoboard with a $15 hardware store soldering iron with a naked eye. But a decent iron with the appropriate tip (I run an old school metcal with an sttc-140 tip), some liquid flux, solder wick, and an eye loupe it can be done. Get two corners tacked, drag solder the pins (don't worry about bridging yet), apply some flux, and use the wick to clean it up. It won't look like it was solder pasted, but
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So it's a $1 chip that needs a $1 breakout board.
Or: Custom PCBs aren't difficult or expensive anymore, ranging from Osh Park to Dirty PCBs. There's *lots* of options, even if the only goal is to break out the interesting interfaces and put them on 0.1" headers so you can breadboard easily with the things.
(And more to the point: It only takes one person to design such a PCB, and then everyone else can benefit from that design.)
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>> A TQFP chip usually has pins on 0.8mm centres or less (down to 0.4mm). In case you don't know what this means, this chip will have 32 to 64 pins per inch that need soldering.
No problemo, even 0.4mm. Use drag soldering techniques with a lot of flux, and a concave tip.
https://www.youtube.com/result... [youtube.com]
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TQFPs can be hand soldered with normal soldering equipment. The trick is not to even try to solder the individual pins one at a time. That way lies madness.
Put down the chip on the footprint, line it up and put a blob of solder on one corner, then check it is still lined up, if not re-heat the blob and carefully push the chip into position. Now solder the rest of the chip, don't worry about shorts at this stage, just make sure there is solder joining the pins to the pads. Often it's easiest to drag a blob
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Solder paste and a toaster oven. I'm amazed at what some people can do at home without spending a lot of money.
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I've soldered a lot of 0.5mm pitch TQFP chips by hand with just a decent soldering iron (Hakko, but cheaper ones can be used) and a concave tip using the drag soldering method.
I start by tacking down two opposing corner pins to give a bit of mechanical stability and ensure that the part is placed properly. Then apply flex all along one side (I like the pasty stuff that liquifies when heated) and apply solder to the iron. Then just drag from one end to the other, touching each pin and letting the flux do its
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Oh, and I should add that I solder these mostly on to low cost PCBs manufactured in China for $0.50 each. HASL finish, 6mil min spacing.
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> This Chip is NOT Hand Solderable
ROFL. You must be a software person.
Me, I routinely hand solder TQFP chips.
And I'm in my late 70's with eyesight problems..
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Well, maybe it is if you have $2k+ in SMT soldering equipment like: https://www.weller-tools.com/p [weller-tools.com]... and a reasonable quality microscope: https://www.microscope.com/oma [microscope.com]...
A good quality soldering iron, some solder flux, and some skill is all you need to hand solder packages like these. I have hand soldered packages such as the PowerPC 601 perfectly. For reference https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
The trick is to place the part appropriately, use generous amounts of flux, and move the soldering iron and solder at a consistent pace. The solder is essentially attracted to the legs of the package and the consistent motion ensures that not too much solder ends up on any single leg
There are other TQFP packages (Score:2)
There are other QFP/TQFP packages from cypress and (I think) TI that are hand-solderable.
Using flash and DRAM compatible with these chips you can have a sufficiently usable board with nothing BGA on it.
Just look at the Olimex older designs for these chips. And the documentation and reference Linux implementation are nicer than Allwinner.
The only newsworthy item here is the $1 part, but I thought the Rock-something MIPS chip with stacked ra
Uh, Why? (Score:2)
"Currently, there aren't really any good solutions for a cheap Linux system you can build at home, with hand-solderable chips."
Gee, I can't imagine why...I mean, in a world of $1500 iPhones, who the hell can afford a $35 Raspberry Pi, amirite?
Guess it's best to go cheap(er), and re-invent the wheel. Or at least make a half-assed version of a wheel and pretend that there are millions of Linux DIY fans who just can't wait to hand-solder their computers together (as if "hand-solderable" here implies $50 worth of cheap tools)...
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Uh, Why?
I can't imagine why anyone would ever wany enything custom ever. We should just consume poducts.
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Uh, Why?
I can't imagine why anyone would ever wany enything custom ever. We should just consume poducts.
I'm not speaking against the concept of customization or the freedom to do so, but it doesn't really make any sense here.
In this case, a "custom" solution requires thousands of dollars of equipment to take a "one-dollar" chip and attach it properly to a board to do something with it. Custom PCB shops do exist, so it would be far cheaper to engage with one of them if you truly want or need a custom build.
And the market has countless options out there for a DIY Linux box (beaglebone, Pi, etc.) and has for ye
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In this case, a "custom" solution requires thousands of dollars of equipment to take a "one-dollar" chip and attach it properly to a board to do something with it.
You really don't need that much though. You can buy a servicable reflow oven for about... (checks) huh they've gone up in price. About $200 for a T962. They're not great but I've got one and they work well enough. (https://www.ebay.co.uk/bhp/reflow-oven)
You can get a servicable iron and hot air gun for rather cheaper than they used to be (an 852D+
Could have fooled me (Score:2)
hand solderable ... (Score:2)
How many people out there have ever actually soldered one of these?
It's a 20 mm Ã-- 20 mm eLQFP176 with a 55 nm pin spacing, er, lithography.
Where's my pi 4? (Score:2)
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Guess I need to start transcoding those videos the pi can't do.
Wireless controller (Score:2)