VIA Unveils $79 Rock and $99 Paper ARM PCs 158
Don't yet have one of those million Raspberry Pis, but you're in the market for a tiny, cheap ARM computer? An anonymous reader writes with this snippet from geek.com: "VIA has decided it's time to update the APC (ARM PC) board with new components and the choice of two configurations. The new systems are called APC Rock and APC Paper. The hardware spec for both boards is exactly the same except for the fact the Rock ships with a VGA port whereas the Paper doesn't. The Rock also costs $20 less at $79, whereas the Paper is $99. The reason for the price difference is the fact that the Paper ships with a rather novel case whereas the Rock is a bare board. The Paper's case is made from recycled cardboard attached to an aluminum chassis to help with strength, meaning it will keep the dust off the components and make it easier to carry while keeping weight to a minimum."
What about (Score:5, Funny)
scissors?
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Re:What about (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:What about (Score:5, Funny)
The APC Scissors will have superior specs and and be priced above the APC Paper's cost of $99, although it will also be inferior to and priced below Rock's cost of $79.
Re:What about (Score:4, Funny)
The APC Scissors will have superior specs and and be priced above the APC Paper's cost of $99, although it will also be inferior to and priced below Rock's cost of $79.
How is this possible? The answer is that they'll push it out at $119 dollars and then have to cut the price to $49 due to the Rock crushing it in sales.
I think that about wraps it up.
Re:What about (Score:5, Funny)
Re:What about (Score:5, Funny)
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Yes. Scissors, $119.
Re:What about (Score:5, Funny)
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That would be the Raspberry Pi, which underCUTs them by half. Or you might wait for Dell's hopefully not vaporware $50 PC (http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/13/01/16/2317205/meet-ophelia-dells-plan-to-reinvent-itself)
Re:What about (Score:5, Informative)
RasPi has very close specs, this one adds just a tiny 4GB flash card, which is obviously not worth the $44 price difference.
You'd want this one [hardkernel.com] instead: more than 10x the performance, 2GB memory, $89 w/o disk.
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Actually, it has a significantly better CPU. The Raspberry Pi CPU is an ARM11 (like the original APC) that, among other lacks, doesn't have hardware division. The Cortex A9 used in this thing is rather more sophisticated: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_Cortex-A9_MPCore#Features [wikipedia.org]
Re:What about (Score:4, Interesting)
Why not Buy one of those Chinese A9 tablets for less than $60? They come with LCD, battery, USB and SD card extension. You can remove the case if you like.
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Do they have video out? It seems that a lot of these tiny Android "PC's" are going after traditional desktop PC's by bringing tablet software to the desktop form factor.
I'll personally admit that while it wouldn't be my first choice, a small Android device attached to a 23" monitor, keyboard, and mouse really wouldn't hinder my day to day (home) use that much.
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You'd want this one [hardkernel.com] instead: more than 10x the performance, 2GB memory, $89 w/o disk.
There are many boards coming out beating this one in both price and performance. The wandboard [wandboard.org] is another one. Cubieboard probably too.
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The best wandboard has half the cores, half the memory, and half the clockage, for the same price. Oh, and you can't actually buy it yet.
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Afaict that is a dumb design flaw in a kernel-userspace interface not a flaw in the hardware itself.
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Correct. HOWEVER, keep in mind that the Hardkernel U2 is marketed as a "development board" but comes with source code that is vastly outdated (more than a year behind what is found in Exynos 4412 handsets) despite being released in late 2012.
The current major release of Android is 4.2. TI and Qualcomm released reference source for their platforms within weeks of 4.2's release. Reference source for Exynos4 dates back to Gingerbread (2.3). They have minimal hacks to allow them to function with ICS (4.0),
Re:What about (Score:4, Insightful)
The biggest problem with the Pi is the packaging. It was clearly designed to be cheap and thus use the smallest board area possible, but that makes it strange to put into cases and use in practical ways.
Part of what VIA brings to the table here is packaging experience. Yes, the board is a bit bigger, but it was designed to go in a proper case. Depending on the application that may be important and worth the extra bucks.
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You say that like 6+ layer motherboards aren't the norm.
Re:What about (Score:4, Insightful)
To me the biggest question is the software support, andriod is ok for phones/tablets but for desktop and embedded uses I want decent support for regular linux and I want complete kernel source so that there is a chance of support in the long term.
The Pi has that, last I checked the APC did not.
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Which strikes me as sort of an odd omission on VIA's part: competing on pure price with the seething morass of anonymous and ill-supported(I'm not talking about 'slow to update', I'm talking about things like "the firmware flashed on the unit when you got it is the only known firmware for the unit" and "The amount of RAM quoted on the package is a total fiction" stuff) is a sucker's game. That morass is risky, and a certain amount of willingness to shop around is needed; but damn is it cheap...
VIA, by contr
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VIA have been useless with support in the past. Their older CPUs has hardware video decoding acceleration but only an ancient hacked version of mplayer they released actually supported it. No proper patch submitted, and absolutely no Windows support at all.
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Oh, compared to a real company, VIA's "support" isn't worth shit. However, they do at least have a 'support' apparatus that exists enough to mostly fail, and they have actually managed to work with other companies from time to time(a great many HP thin clients were or are VIA based, for instance, after Transmeta died and before Atom hit the scene). I'm not optimistic that they will; but if they actually want their fairly middling hardware to stand out against the cheaper fairly middling hardware that now in
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And I thought a large part of the attractive of the Pi is that it is so damn small, so you can much easier build it into something to do whatever useful tasks you can think of it to do.
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scissors?
Spock? Lizard??
Re:What about (Score:4, Funny)
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I'm holding out for Lizard or Spock.
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No, because you shouldn't run [anything] with scissors.
Overpriced (Score:3)
this [tabletrepublic.com] seems a far better product.
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Yep that is one cool tiny gizmo. I know that it is an over used meme but what if you did have a Beowulf cluster of these? Strip away the packaging and fill a rack with these tiny machines and set up a cluster. Or for that matter a room full of them, how would these scale?
Re:Overpriced (Score:4, Interesting)
why do none of these RPi alternatives have Sata? -- sure there are some high end - expensive ones - but is there something about SATA that add significantly to the price to make uneconomical ?
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Guess there's not much of a market for it. Some of the A10-based boards do have SATA, including the Cubieboard, but not all of them and boards based on other SoC are harder to add SATA support to because there's no support for it on the SoC. (Most of them don't have PCIe support so there's not even anywhere to connect a SATA controller to.)
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When it is in stock, the cubieboard is only $49. That's more than the R-Pi but the same price as the original VIA APC and with more RAM and CPU, and substantially less than these new VIA APCs.
If you don't need video the best buy I know of is the Pogoplug Series 4 [archlinuxarm.org]. The Series 4 pogoplug is $40 and has 1xUSB2, 2xUSB3, and SATA along with 1xGigE. I run Debian on my Dockstar, which has 4xUSB2 &one is a male mini plug but that's not useless.
However, IMO there is little reason for most devices that dinky to h
Raspberry Pi (Score:1)
So this is better Raspberry Pi at three times the price? They just added a twice-as-powerful CPU and 4 GB of flash. Or am I missing something?
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well its 3x as much as the stripped down pi, not quite as big of a difference for the 512 meg pi
What does it say (Score:1, Troll)
when 60% or more of the posts so far attempt to make an extremely obvious joke about scissors? This article even says its from the what-no-scissors? department, so the joke isn't even that inventive.
For crying out loud... you guys call yourselves nerds?
What I want to know is what about the lizard and spock PC's.
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Besides, I thought that everybody wanted a Rock to wind a multi-threaded string around.
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Spock finds your suggestion that scissors are too predictable, but that he and the lizard are not, highly illogical.
Besides, I thought that everybody wanted a Rock to wind a multi-threaded string around.
Hah! Finally, a non-obvious joke in response to this article! Thank you, Sir or Madam!
*Goes back to winding string around rock*
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My post's font was larger. Do you really expect people to be able to read that tiny print in the title?
Have they fixed the memory controller yet? (Score:5, Insightful)
Have they fixed the memory controller yet?
The biggest performance bottleneck for graphics on ARM systems has not been the GPU; I've used Mali-400 systems (like this one is supposed to be), and I've used the nVidia system. Graphics performance sucked on both.
Part of this has to do with the fact that the graphics architecture in standard Linux penalizes you for not GPL'ing your drivers, but the Android graphics stack gets around this by duplicating some kernel interfaces with slightly non-GPL'ed versions - yet the performance is still terrible.
The blame rests squarely on the memory copy speeds, which comes down to the memory controller. Apple has completely addressed this in their ARM chips (but are not sharing), and Samsung has partially addressed this in their ARM chips (and are also not sharing). Has VIA addressed the memory controller bandwidth issues in the WonderMedia, or does "WonderMedia" actually mean "I wonder when they will get media support in their ARM chips"?
Re:Have they fixed the memory controller yet? (Score:4, Informative)
He's referring to a point made recently to some kernel-internal DMA interfaces that are marked as GPL only and Nvidia wanted them to be something else so they could use them with their proprietary module.
Alan Cox resisted, and as a result a small performance boost can't be had by proprietary graphics drivers.
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTA0ODE [phoronix.com]
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This.
Tho elaborate: It's a small boost on Intel architecture systems to avoid the hoops, but somewhat more substantial on ARM systems, where avoiding the hoops requires using a particularly poor part of the hardware implementation, which amplifies the costs.
Why is this good? (Score:4, Insightful)
I keep seeing on eBay these days you can get an Android tablet for about $40. And it has a screen, a touch screen at that. Presumably internally it is some kind of ARM PC with storage and everything. So why is a bare bones ARM PC, especially at these prices good? And what can you realistically do with the damned thing anyway?
Re:Why is this good? (Score:5, Interesting)
Interfaces. Flexibility. You can plug it into a 1080p TV and get video output that way. If you need more storage, a multi-terabyte USB hard drive is easy to plug in. Software is also your responsibility, and that means you can make it run just about anything with more or less effort depending on that. You'd be lucky if the $40 Android tablet even has an HDMI port, much less a USB port, and good luck getting it to run anything but the version of Android it came with. I managed to build a working HTPC with a Raspberry Pi within a few hours of it getting to me in the mail, and the only reason why I haven't yet turned it into a file server/torrent box as well is that I'm reorganising the several external drives I have, so I can repurpose one of them.
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You didn't click though, did you? It's running a keyboard and mouse optimized version of Android 4.0 and ships with a basic suite of apps - browser, mail, file system, etc. by using standard peripherals, you can recycle an old monitor, mouse and keyboard. Out of the box, it's enough computer for 80% of the population. As for the $40 Android tablets on ebay - they absolutely suck.
usability (Score:3)
Sometimes less is more. I have a tablet hooked up to a monitor, but Android constantly gets confused about the two screens and their resolutions. That means you keep having to fiddle with the touch screen. A dedicated device like this always uses the connected monitor for its output, and the mouse and keyboard for its input. Also, this has better specs than low-end tablets; in different words, at the same price, you get better performance for not paying for a screen.
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What about RFI? (Score:5, Interesting)
These boards don't seem to be worried about emitting radio frequency interference (RFI). That "paper" system case is slick but I don't think it effectively shields RFI.
Is RFI somehow not a problem with these? Is it because they are very low-power, or is it because they are somehow not regulated by the FCC for RFI, or what?
Would operating one of these make the amateur radio enthusiasts down the block from you curse you?
Re:What about RFI? (Score:4, Insightful)
Some of those that are purely development boards may not worry about it but anything that is going to be sold as an end user product and where the company cares about the possibilty of lawsuits in the west* will need to pass FCC and CE RFI requirements (note: the requirements have two levels, one for "domestic" and one for "commercial", afaict manufacturers only have to comply with the "commercial" requirements provided they put a couple of lines of warnings about possible interference in a domestic environment in the manual).
AIUI the RFI is kept down through a combination of careful PCB design, slew rate/drive strength control and avoiding having too much high speed stuff on the board at all. Still it can be a close shave sometimes, the rpf were put in a tight spot after their distributors decided that given the volume and demographics of the preorders it was too risky to try and claim it was not an end user product. Fortunately they got the board to pass with only minor firmware tweaks.
* Some chinese vendors simply don't give a fuck :(
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Would operating one of these make the amateur radio enthusiasts down the block from you curse you?
He'll be a lot more pissed about your unshielded kitchen appliances than about your minuscule, low-power unshielded ARM. They don't have to care what they emit because they're not radio transmitters.
One thing though (Score:2)
unimpressive specs (Score:2)
for $99 id expect a dual-core A9, 1GB of RAM, Gigabit ethernet, a FPGA and a well documented 16core coprocessor. http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/adapteva/parallella-a-supercomputer-for-everyone [kickstarter.com]
If cpu power was not an issue i'd just use a raspberry pi.
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For some reason, VIA thinks that they have a good name.
This is absurd, because to me they are still known as the company that made all those chipsets that made me cry for so many years. And cheap IEEE1394 chipsets that don't work worth a crap.
Consequently they overprice themselves right out of the market at every opportunity, then wonder what happened. It's a miracle they still exist. Well, an anti-miracle. I can only assume that it is because they somehow manage to still get their chips bundled onboard man
Cardboard (Score:2)
That aluminum-cardboard fusion is kind of silly. If you made the sides of aluminum, why not throw a top and bottom cover from aluminum too. Or, then make the whole box out of cardboard.
However I think the use of cardboard is possibly quite smart idea (ecologically). I assume this is much harder cardboard than what you would find from typical cardboard boxes. Computers have relatively short use age anyway and do not get beaten much, so they do not need cases that last forever.
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It's a crap idea because humidity makes cardboard warp and sag. When the cardboard cover fails the user is just going to be left wanting another case. They're probably not going to buy it from VIA, but they may buy one.
Pi userbase is key (Score:2)
One reason I am pro-Raspberry Pi is that is has a huge user base. When you are dealing with trying to get Linux stuff to run on ARM and the lower system capabilities of an embedded system, it is nice to have 100,000 friends who are messing with the same system and already worked out the issues.
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you mean the CMOS battery?
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Looks like a vibration motor actually?
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kts
C#2032 3.0V
The energizer CR2032 3.0V battery [ch00ftech.com] has about that size.
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All CR2032's do, brand is irrelevant... 20mm dia x 3.2mm thick. hence 2032.
Lots of embedded boards, laptops, use them like this - heatshrunk and on wires - as opposed to socketed as on a normal motherboard. (presumably to save board space...)
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With the right code you could be sending particles back and forth in time from your basement.
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Oh hai. I'm posting this from an EEE PC netbook, about 4 years old, running Mint... something. I dunno, it Just Works. I ruse it regularly for intardtubes, watching things and also stuff, and even some casual programmorzing. Pew, pew.
Small, cheap general purpose devices - especially with real keyboards - do have a point, and that point is to make it easy to debunk your "spunked from my iPad" chucklehead rant, kthnxbye.
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I'm posting this from a 1.5 year old EEE PC, which replaced my previous EEE PC of 4 years ago (which met an unfortunate end).
I say this to highlight that not only are we netbook users still happily out here, but they're still available in the shops and we're still buying them. I have a Kindle Fire tablet, and I barely use it compared to my trusty netbook; there's no contest between a flippy laptop form factor with real buttons and a little slate which I need to jab at the screen with my finger. I also have
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Actually, I am using a netbook to post this as well. It works quite well.
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"Or the RaspberryPi in my truck hooked up to a bumper-cam and 1TB hard drive is something my safety conscious family doesn't care about."
yikes, a safety system cobbled together by a hobbyist running on a platform that was designed by people who seemed to learn a EDA during the pi's development all running open source software?
sign me up
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You're kidding, right? Are you actually trying to imply a mere bumper-cam can't be cobbled together by a hobbyist?
I guess you're the reason we need to warn everyone that pencils are sharp, coffee is hot, and every building contains chemicals known to the state of California to cause cancer.
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Thats not it at all, its a combination of poor everything that honestly can be accomplished with a composite video signal and a monitor, but knock yourself out, just hope grandpa or whatever mistakes a frozen image for live and backs over the dog
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1. Having the license plate of the guy that rear ended him and drove off.
2. A second rear view mirror to see kids when you are backing up.
3. The fun of creating such a contraption.
4.
5. Profit
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"Or the RaspberryPi in my truck hooked up to a bumper-cam and 1TB hard drive is something my safety conscious family doesn't care about."
yikes, a safety system cobbled together by a hobbyist running on a platform that was designed by people who seemed to learn a EDA during the pi's development all running open source software?
sign me up
Would be more reliable than most of the commercial dash cams and even if you paid someone to build it, cheaper than buying a Blackvue.
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Gee...I guess my RaspberryPi in my kitchen linked up to an old touchscreen and custom recipe software is trash and pointless. Or the RaspberryPi in my truck hooked up to a bumper-cam and 1TB hard drive is something my safety conscious family doesn't care about. Just because you lack the creativity and imagination to put these amazing contraptions to good use doesn't mean that there aren't people out there who don't. Idiot.
How do you handle gracefully shutting down when you turn your truck off? How do you interface your camera to the Pi?
I've been thinking about building a Pi based "dash cam" since I haven't been impressed with the existing dash cams. Though I'd probably write my video to an SD card or USB Memory stick rather than hard drive. I'm just not sure how to get a graceful shutdown after I turn off the car - maybe a supercapacitor with enough stored power to let it shut down when it senses loss of 12V power?
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Why shut it down? it draws ~1amp surely your car battery can supply that for several days without issue
Here's specs from an Optima car battery (an AGM battery that handles deep discharge much better than standard lead plate batteries):
http://jci_media.s3.amazonaws.com/9613/4583/5078/REDTOP_Full_Specs_Sheet.pdf [amazonaws.com] .0030 ohms
Open Circuit Voltage (Fully charged): 12.8 volts
Internal Resistance (Fully charged):
Capacity: 44 Ah (C/20)
Reserve Capacity: BCI: 90 minutes
So it can supply one amp for 44 hours...so in less than 2 days, the battery will be dead. My car often sits for 2 days or longer without starting it.
Even if I could keep the power consumption below 0.5 amps, that's still enough power draw to drain the battery in less than a week and I don't want to have to remember to switch the camera off when I leave the car at the airport fo
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Custom recipe software? Puhlease.
Look up recipe online.
Read recipe.
Cook recipe.
If you want a gadget to hold your hand through that process get a DS / 3DS and the Americas Test Kitchen software. Infinitely superior to whatever you've cobbled together.
I see Osgeld has already covered your camera system. Your solution is bulkier, more of a hassle than, and less reliable than dozens of different off-the-shelf products. But I guess if your time is worth nothing and you don't care how your truck looks it could be worth it since you maybe saved tens of dollars.
Many of the cheap off-the-shelf products that are in the price range of a Pi + cheap camera have a habit of temporarily freezing or losing video while they switch files and/or when they lose power. So it's entirely possible that his solution works better than others in the price range. And given that he's added a 1TB drive to it, his solution probably meets his needs better than other solutions out there since few have the ability to add a hard drive.
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By all means, fellow consumerist. Don't ever bother doing anything yourself even if it may happen to be a hobby of yours. It's always better to buy everything premade. Otherwise you might not have the very best products in every category of your life! We wouldn't want that now would we?
Re:Remember Netbooks? (Score:5, Funny)
Wow, I haven't read so much focused hate in a single post in a while on Slashdot. Did a netbook run over your kitten or something?
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With skill, many years of coding and open source software they will get that old game up on a 1080p TV in all its 2.5D shader and fader glory.
Irc is has a few tiny groups of people with the code, skill and cult like leader who will get their pointless project up on that big TV.
ppc, arm, intel - no real gpu - just makes them code more for boasting rights after their day jobs at telco
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Bah, you had chips to solder together?
Hey! It was because of these people's discoveries that we now have the Pringles CAN antenna.
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Well, I don't know if I'd go that far. This is a bit roundabout but ... I have a white macbook connected to my TV for watching netflix or iTunes movies/TV. It's getting pretty tired, stutters with high def content etc. Last time I wanted to watch a movie netflix didn't have, I rented it through iTunes and downloaded it to my macbook pro because I wanted to watch the hidef version. But it refused to play on my TV because I'm connecting via DVI -- it would only play on the laptop's built in monitor. Then
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I had a 25MHz, x486 netbook with about 100MBytes of HDD, built by compaq in the mid 90s. I upgraded it to 20MBytes of RAM and a big fast hard drive in the early 2000s, and added a PCMCIA WiFi card along-side my 100BaseTx card.
It ran quite nicely with Linux or FreeBSD. Of course I would put the HDD in a modern computer to install the OS, mainly because I had nothing else to boot from in there. I didn't keep it as a paperweight, either... It had serial ports, which made it perfect for console connections
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Does anyone remember netbooks? I don't. Because they were trash and pointless.
I've got an EEE 701SD, an Acer Aspire One, and a Gateway LT. I use the former and the latter on a regular basis, and my lady uses the middle machine when traveling. I took the 701 and she took the Aspire when we went to Panama. We made a fairly hilarious picture in cafes and such with her using the full-size keys and me pecking out on the mini keyboard but I actually managed to upgrade my website and such while we were out, upload images and so on, on a machine that will fit in the pocket of some cargo pant
Whjch OS? (Score:2)
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PS potential purchasers, with an interest in video playback, may well want to ensure that the 'theoretical' support of 1080P is matched by available drivers that prove this ability. Video playback on ARM SoC parts tends to be through 'binary blobs', so you either have proper support from the company making the MB, or you are stuffed UNLESS the CPU has enough grunt for software decoding, and one A9 core won't (for HD).
Not to worry: anybody who has had the...pleasure... of VIA's totally bitchin' and definitely not unstable at all "Unichrome" graphics on the x86 side won't come in to this expecting much more than a serial console...
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Not to worry: anybody who has had the...pleasure... of VIA's totally bitchin' and definitely not unstable at all "Unichrome" graphics on the x86 side won't come in to this expecting much more than a serial console...
And do you walk around the VA going, "boom!" too? I thought I'd put Unichrome behind me.
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Shortly before the malpractice lawsuit.
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Do companies really have to design these project platforms when there are android cell phones that can be had for under $50? They come built in with a small touchscreen, wifi, a low res camera, battery, accelerometer, vibrator, mic, a weak speaker, and possibly a small physical keyboard. Virgin Mobile almost always has a no contract phone for $30-$50.
There is also an overabundance of bad ESN phones on ebay for $15-$30. While there are issues with supporting thievery, not all bad ESN phones have been stolen, some are really just lost and found by others. Either way, the phones have been branded bad and unless re-purposed, represent a waste on society. Do companies really need to design/build these platforms when there are so many used phones that already litter the world?
Most of what I'd use the Pi for doesn't need a screen, but does need I/O ports, so I'd choose the PI just for the GPIO ports (and I2C, SPI, CSI, etc). Plus there's already a large developer community around the platform and they are all using the exact same hardware, while if I buy a random phone off eBay, it would be harder to find help.
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I found this on ebay http://www.ebay.ie/itm/USB-8-RELAY-CARD-BOARD-MODULE-DIGITAL-INPUTS-ANALOG-INPUTS-DS1820-INPUT-/260881091798?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item3cbdb98cd6 [www.ebay.ie]
for $57 you get 6 DIGITAL INPUTS, 3 ANALOG INPUTS AND 1 THERMOMETER INPUT. and 8 Relay outputs.
connects by usb.
An old phone would be almost ideal for the USB Host but for a couple of issues. USB host mode is not universal with android phones. The USB driver will probably not be available for the android kernel (although since source is
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And the final issue I don't think you could charge a phone and use the host mode at the same time.
Sure you could. Power is power. It doesn't care whether a device is the host or not. All it does is follow the wire. Just splice a 5V DC brick into the USB cable and plug it in to the wall. The power doesn't care that it is starting in the middle of the cable. It'll just go towards both ends.
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it's a definite maybe.
From a thread on XDA developers, it was a maybe on a nexus7 If the kernel was patched it could be done but without it it wouldn't work apparently for charging the nexus7 likes the 2 data line shorted which means no data while charging.
So it depends on the Android device, some can and some can't and some can with the right kernel.
on the other hand no reason any android device couldn't recieve and send data via wifi. thus avoiding the problem.
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The difference is that only one has VGA, the other does not. Both have HDMI. Get a clue before spouting nonsense.
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To be fair, some of us still have a lot of VGA equipment. For example, all my monitors, and my TV, have VGA ports (and I still use them). The quality is good enough for me.
My RasPi has the issue that I don't actually have anything with HDMI to plug it into, so have had to use the composite output to my TV (no ideal by any measure). I wish it had a VGA header at least.
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I run a perfectly good VGA monitor and all my available spare displays are VGA. Nothing wrong with running a decade old monitor if that's what you have.
While so far I only run PCs this thing could be cool for some uses and VGA + HDMI actually covers most everything pretty nice (what if you borrow a projector and only have readily available VGA cables)
Over the Pi, you get a much better CPU, more USB and a real ethernet. The main weakness is probably the 512MB ddr3, without swapping. Easy to fill the memory w
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It has both, and yes you can run 1080p over VGA, albeit poorly.
You can actually run it quite well, though the quality of both the signal source and the display's A/D conversion have to be good. When I ran two identical 1920x1200 Samsung 244T LCDs from a Radeon x800xl, one over DVI, one over VGA, I couldn't tell the difference at all.
Wouldn't count on a random cheap ARM box's VGA output to be top-notch, of course, especially these days when the VGA output is just mostly for legacy support. Digital is the more sensible option, with its consistent quality.
Re: (Score:2)
It has both, and yes you can run 1080p over VGA, albeit poorly.
You can actually run it quite well, though the quality of both the signal source and the display's A/D conversion have to be good. When I ran two identical 1920x1200 Samsung 244T LCDs from a Radeon x800xl, one over DVI, one over VGA, I couldn't tell the difference at all.
I've hooked several monitors with both types of connector up to my PC, which has both types of output, and switched between them on mirror. You can't tell the difference that way, if at all, on the same monitor at the same temperature, etc etc. I did use a nice fat VGA cable, though. And there we have the advantage of the digital signals: You need a $15 VGA cable to transmit a high-resolution signal to your monitor — a cheap one might be of good quality, but without testing the only way to know is to