CHIP Vs. Pi Zero: Which Sub-$10 Computer Is Better? | Hacker News Reader

CHIP Vs. Pi Zero: Which Sub-$10 Computer Is Better?

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107 pointsdcschelt70 comments

I'm surprised that nobody's mentioned the elephant in the room: CHIP's real cost. Sure, CHIP "sells" at $9, but "shipping" costs $20. This "shipping" cost remains the same per unit even for multiple items, even when they ship together. Given that shipping from China is subsidized such that actual CHIP shipping costs should be under $1, the "shipping" is clearly paying for the CHIP.

Sure, CHIP is a solid device at $29, and the fact that the CHIP manufacturers pulled off a successful hardware Kickstarter is a feat of its own. But claiming that CHIP is a $9 computer is ridiculous. Additionally, as another commenter mentioned, the CHIP's cost total didn't include a display cable, $13. Re-run the comparison... and the costs come to $46 CHIP, $24 Raspi Zero.

Here from US. Element 14 charged shipping + tax = $6.55 + $3.69, total almost $46 for model B. I ordered B+ from MCM (which I believe is also under the same parent company as Element 14) and came at $9.99 shipping without tax.

Does CHIP order charge tax?

I don't think the elephant in the room is just the shipping cost, the overall cost of getting this tiny computer up and running is beyond just some tax and shipping cost. You have to get an SD card, power adapter and an HDMI. Tons of people still run DVI or VGA. If you have a monitor without HDMI you are fucked so you have to buy a converter. I didn't have these so I got them off Amazon and the final cost probably came at about $100? I didn't even get the case, because I made one out of cardboard.

If you have more than one Pi, you need another SD card, another charger, another HDMI cable, so again you are back to full price. There should really be just a way to connect all PIs to a single USB-powered portable drive. SD card is such as poor choice and a poor design decision choice. Sorry.

PI is great for small project, but if there weren't fund for schools to buy all the accessories, I don't know if Pi would take off at $35 price range. It is never $35. Let alone in Zero's case, agree, definitely not at $5.

Fair enough, marketing stun and it may be true that the computer itself is $5, but the fineprint "you have to get the rest yourself at another $30+" is assumed to be common sense.

Oh not to mention the cost of waiting to get one of these tiny computers.

$100 for an USB power adapter, an SD card and an HDMI cable? You got ripped off. You can get the three for less than $20.

16GB Kingston card: $5.26

AmazonBasics USB charger (2 Amp): $5.99

AmazonBasics high-speed HDMI cable: $4.82

It reads " the final cost probably came at about $100", which means including model B+, shipping cost and everything.

Sorry. That said, it's still way too much. Adafruit sells the B+ with tax + shipping for $40.26. Adding up, it's still less than $60.

1. Because it shows how much one have to spend for the more expensive model.

2. I don't not know Adafruit, but most people I know got their PI from one of the partners. If we got ripped off, that's a fault on RPF (https://www.raspberrypi.org/).

I actually mixed up model B and model B+, I owned both. Model B is the more recent one is more expensive. But I got both when they first came out, so equally just ordering from the approved distributor the cost was pretty much the same.

I am not going to argue cent by cent with you, the final bill for each setup came around $100, and at the time they were the cheapest and most reliable. Also, there have been many reports on which SD card is better for the model, so I didn't just pick a random cheapest SD card. Your mileage varies. Whether I got ripped off any $10, $20 or not, the end result is still the same. The overall cost is larger.

> I actually mixed up model B and model B+, I owned both. Model B is the more recent one is more expensive.

"Raspberry Pi Model B+" (renamed to "Raspberry Pi 1 Model B+", when Raspberry Pi 2 came out) is more recent than "Raspberry Pi (1) Model B":

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raspberry_Pi

* Raspberry Pi Zero

* $0.74 USB OTG Cable -Adapter -Converter | Free Shipping by eBay

* $1.49 HDMI cable HDMI mini -Adapter | Free Shipping by eBay

* $1.17 USB AC Charger 2A -eu -uk | Free Shipping by eBay

* $3.41 Kingston 4 GB Flash Memory Card SDC10/4GBSP | Free Shipping by Amazon

= $6.81 Peripheral Cost

Watch out for cheap USB chargers. They can be a safety risk. Google "cheap usb charger teardown". For example http://www.righto.com/2012/10/a-dozen-usb-chargers-in-lab-ap...

I completely disagree. SD cards are dirt cheap nowadays - you can get a pack of five 8GB Sandisk cards for ~$16 on Amazon - and they allow the users to carry their own computer home instead of being stuck in the classroom.

<strike>You do know the price is a discount for Prime right?</strike>

And the price is never the same day to day.

[edit]

I take it back. The price is for both prime and non-prime.

Isn't an HDMI to DVI cable a passive cable? That is, are there any DVI monitors that don't also support HDMI over the same connector? Or is that only a standard on newer monitors?

DVI is interesting, because it supports both analog and digital signaling. The analog signaling (DVI-A) is the same signal as VGA, and can be done with a passive adapter; the digital (DVI-D) is the same signal HDMI, and can be done with a passive cable. So, there are monitors that support DVI-A but not DVI-D, and therefore no HDMI; though these are rare.

DVI uses the same digital video signal as HDMI, and passive cables or adapters make it easy to switch between them. I have an older graphics card, one with 1 HDMI port, 1 VGA port, and 1 DVI port. I've got the HDMI and DVI plugged into 2 HDMI monitors.

DVI can also carry an analog video signal. The DVI out on my graphics card can use a passive cable/adapter to VGA. I think DVI was intended as an intermediate standard, so people could use their existing VGA monitors with the possibility of upgrading to digital in the future.

They actually lowered their shipping costs at the end of the campaign. I had the option to add $3 to my initial order for an additional C.H.I.P. Still expensive, but better.

According to Ars Technica shipping starts at $6 to the US:

http://arstechnica.com/business/2015/11/remember-that-9-comp...

While the CHIP comes out looking good, it's important to note the horrendous AllWinner software stack. Last time I checked, Linux support meant using an out-of-tree sourcedump that was tied to a specific version of Linux (I think 3.0.x?). The sunxi project[1] was trying to mainline a bunch of stuff, but not sure how far that is now. In general, working with the AllWinner chip is much more of a pain if you want to do non-trivial things. Perhaps the CHIP will help improve that situation.

[1]: https://github.com/linux-sunxi

I've run into this with all the AllWinner-derived boards. The software stack requires more work to set up, has more small bugs that are harder to fix (mostly because there aren't a thousand blog posts and forum topics on the exact fix, like there are with anything Pi/Broadcom-related), and has often incomprehensible documentation that's buried in forums or outdated and slow-to-load sites.

FWIW, if anyone missed it, the author of the article here does say that the CHIP will soon be using mainline Linux, but he (unfortunately) doesn't go into detail and doesn't link to a source.

If you're just using it as a headless server, you can run standard Debian on this generation of Allwinner hardware. You download a Debian Jessie installer image from the Debian website, load it on an SD card, hook up a serial console and go through the install process as usual with the standard Debian-packaged kernel. Debian doesn't have the device tree specifying how hardware is hooked up on the C.H.I.P yet because it's new, so this won't yet work on it, but in theory I think that's all that's missing.

Actually, this has lead to an extensive mainlining effort [1] which has resulted in better mainline support than many other boards.

[1]: https://linux-sunxi.org/Linux_mainlining_effort

This piece strikes me as downright dishonest. The table purports to be apples to apples, but while the HDMI adapter added in for the pi zero, the $13 HDMI add-on board is not included in the cost section of the CHIP.

An honest comparison would be $23 vs $24 with HDMI, or $10 vs. some lower cost for the pi zero subtracting out the HDMI cable. I'm also skeptical of including the OTG adapter. Maybe it's needed for some purposes, but it's not a generally needed component.

The CHIP appears to be better for IOT experimentation, but the PI is intended to be a general purpose computer, which also includes some hardware integration tinkering capability.

For this class of gadget, ok to leave out parts that a large percentage of users have lying around or otherwise won't need.

You need the OTG adapter if you want to connect it to a network, or a keyboard and mouse, or anything really. The only USB port on the Pi Zero is the micro-B OTG one. There are lots of interesting applications for the Pi that don't use HDMI at all, but few that don't use networking or a keyboard

Imo, a built-in wifi module on the Pi0 would have made it massively more attractive. That way it can be put anywhere with just some sensors added. The SD card is ok, it requires no extra stuff and can even be handy for experimenting, but just adding wifi (which you want in >90% cases if you ask me) means adding a powered hub. Armv7 would have been nice for Ubuntu (Snappy Core or not).

Agreed on a cheap board with wifi capability. It would be nice to have a board stuck in the attic without having to run wires.

You don't need a powered hub, just a split USB cable that runs the power pins to the charger and the data pins to the Pi.

Example: http://www.amazon.com/Insten-Micro-B-USB-Cable-Black/dp/B005...

I would not bet on this without a schematic for the new Zero to check against, or a shipping device to test it on. I suspect that the D-/D+ lines of the PWR port are not even connected to the SOC.

The linked cable is probably not appropriate anyway since it is USB 3.0. The 3.0 "B" plug is not compatible with a 2.0 "B" receptacle.

Edit: As far as I can tell from this information about the SOC http://elinux.org/RPi_BCM2835_Pinout there is only one pair of USB D-/D+ lines. I don't see another IC that could act as an onboard hub, so I think it's hardware limited to supporting a single USB port.

Oh, I'm not talking about reusing the Pi power port to connect the Wifi, I'm saying that you could connect the Wifi to the single data USB port, but use a Y cable to connect the VCC/GND lines of the Wifi adapter directly to the charger.

EDIT: Like this (the right one is the Y-cable):

  +--------------+       +------+
  |              |       | WIFI |
  |   Rasp Pi    |       +--+---+
  |              |          ^
  +--+------+----+          |
     ^      |               |
     |      |               |
     |      | D-/D+         |
     |      +-------------->+
     |                      ^
     |              VCC/GND |
     +                      +
  Charger                Charger

The thing they seem to be missing here is that the CHIP isn't a sub-$10 computer. They did a sub-$10 Kickstarter as a marketing effort, but their BOM on this chip is over $10, so it's apparent that they were doing the Kickstarter at a loss just for publicity.

https://olimex.wordpress.com/2015/06/05/how-to-get-in-the-ne...

The C.H.I.P. manufacturers disagree, and say that it really will be $9 when shipping, but given that it's still vaporware at the moment, it doesn't really make sense to compare to something that has already shipped tens (hundreds?) of thousands of units.

Vaporware !?!?

I have two of them sitting next to me on my desk...

He meant $9 CHIP at scale, after the kickstarter orders have been shipped is vaporware

The CHIP (which really exists) can be ordered for $8 at the moment: http://getchip.com/

I understand the company and its product are not as well known as Raspberry Pi. But calling it vaporware while they actually have shipped what they promised and seem to continue doing that is unfair. Sure, they have less of a history and track record but so far there is absolutely no reason for any doubt.

Even the mere fact that Rasberry Pi (which he obviously trusts) can make a 'pc' for $5 makes it feasible for another company to make something for $9...

You can not order anything on that page. Besides, there is absolutely reason for doubt when the BoM is estimated to be more than $9.

They'll make it up on "Shipping and Handling"

Yeah, this page gives no indication about how much that will be. And no product info either, no list of specs. They have an almost hidden link to their kickstar, which greetz you with a wall of text, and the only 'specs' shown are of their attachable screen+keyboard.

how much did two $9 computers cost you total? postage and tax included?

I bought it as a Kickstarter package with some extras like the upcoming pocketCHIP. Also, I live in the EU.

great, great, so HOW MUCH did two "$9" computers cost you? postage, tax and all the bundled garbage included?

    Reward: $150

    Shipping: $30 (Europe)

    KERNEL HACKERS ONLY: 
    1x C.H.I.P. pre-release “alpha” model,
    Get the earliest access and help us develop C.H.I.P.’s software! 
    ~plus~ 
    5x C.H.I.P. 
    1x PocketC.H.I.P. 
    and get your C.H.I.P.s and PocketC.H.I.P. from the earliest shipments of release models as soon as they are available.

I received two Alpha's in two separate shipments. The rest still has to come, but should be on schedule. Did not (yet) pay anything extra (like taxes).

So, right now you've paid $180 for two $9 computers.

Assuming they do actually fulfill their rewards, you will wind up with 6 or 7 $9 computers (unclear if the second alpha was just an extra, or if that counts towards one of your 5), plus a $40 screen/keyboard/battery (based on the Kickstarter pricing of the C.H.I.P. plus PocketC.H.I.P.).

So, using a $9 price for C.H.I.P. and $40 for PocketC.H.I.P., that should cost $103. You spent $150 on it plus the shipping. Now, sure, that gets you pre-release models and "earliest shipments of release models", but it's not a very good demonstration that they can actually sell these for $9 at scale.

I dunno. They seem to have every intention of selling these for $9 at scale, but unless their BOM has changed substantially in the production version, it doesn't seem like that would be possible. Since the production version is not actually available yet, and no specs have been posted, it remains to be seen how closely it resembles the alpha version. So, that's why I say it's vaporware. Yes, the alpha models have shipped, but if those aren't the same as the production models, then the production models still are vaporware. It seems that at scale, they're either going to have to increase the price, ship something with a different BOM, Allwinner is going to have to drop their component costs substantially, or for some reason Allwinner is quoting substantially different prices to Olimex as they are to the C.H.I.P. guys.

But anyhow, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. They say they will launch their $8 sale tomorrow, and if they do that and actually ship more than a few at that price without exorbitant shipping, then we can say that it's not vaporware. But until those actually ship (and remember, tomorrow's sale is still a pre-order, and are supposed to ship after all of the Kickstarter rewards ship), the $5 RPi actually exists today, while the only people who have a C.H.I.P. today spent a lot more than $9 on it.

I've tried several similar systems, as well as a couple of Cubox's and I'll include the Ouya here. All of which had some promise, but really failed to deliver.

In the end, today, my htpc is an i3-5010U brix that I've been pretty happy with. It does cost a lot more. I'm hoping the x86 compute sticks will become more available at the sub-100.

I do hope that things improve, but in my own experience, I have not enjoyed these little arm boards which have left me feeling far more locked in than the more proprietary and expensive x86 stuff has.

Though gpio seems cool, I haven't had as much need for it so much as a desire for a cheap general platform to run stuff with video out from.

Who else thinks the built-in wireless capabilities are really making a difference here ?

I'd much rather have a little wifi-connected board that I can SSH into than a little board that I can plug into a monitor.

Same here, I would like have IoT than a media center. I would even argue that more of Zeros will have a wifi or ethernet adapter than a HDMI connected.

I think it makes a huge difference. I'm shocked that there isn't a cheap Broadcom chip on the Pi Zero with 802.11n 2.4/5Ghz and BLE.

Lack of built-in networking is a deal breaker for me. At my house, we've been playing around with RPi for quite some time now. We haven't come up with any profound applications, but we're learning things like the Linux command line, Python, and some basic hardware hacking. Two things about networking:

1. We often go out to "sudo apt-get install" etc., to drink from the fountain of free modules that are out there. Just getting anything running seems to require network access.

2. For anything that might benefit from keyboard, mouse, and display, it turns out that the cheapest and easiest source of these things is just an old PC and PuTTY or Remote Desktop.

Excited as I am by the new boards, the original Pi does what I need right now. Most of my projects are conceptual: By the time I've convinced myself that it could run on tiny iron, I'm satisfied and ready to move on to the next project.

Who would ever have thought that we'd be debating about the relative merits of two $10 computers?

Good point. Even for free I'd nitpick ... maybe a wifi kit would be enough.

Yes, that would be satisfactory. My only qualm is that I've experienced drop-outs with wi-fi on the RPi.

Now I wonder if it's possible to bit-bang some sort of low performance Ethernet using the GPIO's.

I have a mesh network of atmel 328p using nrf24l chips. The connection isn't super fast but the chips are cheap (~$1 ea. at 10 on a board ready to go), and I doubt there's anything I could/would do with a 328p that would max the data rate. They'd probably work pretty well for a low speed link on the pis.

Only caveat I've found is that they're extremely picky about getting clean power on the +3.3V rail.

Have you tried Banana Pi? Their boards are cheaper than RPi and often have a differently balanced set of peripherals, e.g. a SATA port.

Someone bodge hacked wifi onto it http://www.hackerspace-ffm.de/wiki/index.php?title=Raspberry...

Hey, at least the Pi Zero is secure. It takes the I out of IoT :P

and you can always add networking whenever you need it

For those of you expressing thoughts on the actual, "got it working now" cost being significantly higher than $5, you are right, but that's not the point.

Hobby people will pick up 5 of these things and burn though them like components, building this and that with stuff they largely have laying around. I'm in this camp, and I really could plug the $5 unit in and do something meaningful with it.

Besides, $5 isn't much. Anyone exerting any effort at all to package it, kit it, etc... is going to need some margin for that to all make sense. $50 kits are perfectly reasonable. It's plug 'n play that way. If you want to do your own plugging and playing, that's $5, straight up.

Nothing of concern.

Which one is better?

To me, it's all about the ecosystem. That puts the Pi on top by a mile. Tons of support, software, etc... plus there is a high chance of friends being into it, or finding the same, if learning is the goal. No brainer.

Personally, I think this is awesome!

Long ago, I got into a discussion about hand calculators and school. I was young, but I was mouthy and said, "these things will be in the Freddy's Five Dollar Bin right as you walk in the door soon." A few years later, there they were. $4.99, in that bin, right by the door.

These things will end up somewhere like that too. Not quite the same as the calculator, but they are basically disposable compute units for cheap. Get a 10 pack, and use 'em. Get another 10 pack, and use those.

For people in developing places, that low cost matters. For people in poverty overall, it matters.

It's all great to see.

I bought a "banana pi" which had specs that made it look like a rpi2 killer, but cheaper.

You get what you pay for. 2/3 usb ports never worked. The support was pretty much non-existent.

If the CHIP is anything like that, I don't care if it has 16 gigs of ram. The hardware doesn't matter if you cant figure out how to use any of it.

I've tried a lot of different development boards, and my experience has been that the OS, drivers, and available software resources make more of a difference for the kind of projects most people use these for. RPi and their community did a great job of making it straightforward to setup and connect things, even when some extra hardware was necessary. I had the opposite experience with multiple versions of the Beagle board, where there were numerous software driver issues and endless half baked guides on using the hardware. I hope that the CHIP boards follow their example, otherwise I'd be very wary of touted benefits like pre-soldered headers and a newer ARM chip instead of "our mission requires it to be easy to use".

Picked up an RPi0 yesterday at MicroCenter in Cambridge MA for $5+tax. The power supply was $7.99+tax, $6.99+tax for an 8GB µSD card and I'll have to buy a 40-pin header for it and solder that on, not to mention time to find a ARMv6 distro and burn it ... and still no connectivity (Linux Wifi? Yuck!) ... so yeah, TCO rules!

Not sure the C.H.I.P. will be much better (I am a Kickstarter backer) so I will probably stick with the BBB @ $55/ea or RPi2 @ $40/ea (both not including PSU); at least they both run Ubuntu Snappy and have ethernet built in.

Does anyone know if the CHIP has analog audio output through a 3.5mm jack? If not, can anyone recommend a cheap ($50 or below) single-board computer that has WiFi and analog audio output?

I have a board in front of me. It in fact does.

Have you played audio on it? How's the quality and reliability? For example, does it have background noise or limited volume like the Pi model B/B+ (which actually uses pulse width modulation rather than 16-bit PCM)?

I'm also curious on this front. My interest in the C.H.I.P. or one of those interests would be to have a tiny computer for music experiments. The Pocket add-on would make this a very nice little chiptune machine, if it has some sort of audio output that can be worked with. Running existing Linux compatible trackers, or building a small custom thing, would be reasonably easy if it has 16 bit PCM that is reasonably clean. Even one channel would be sufficient for this purpose, though stereo is fun, too.

Just curious, is innexpensive a requirement, and would one of the nuc/brix setups work for you?

Nah, I like the PocketCHIP thingy which has a screen and keyboard. I currently mostly use a Gameboy (the original style in a grey box, running LSDJ) for portable music fun. But, a more realistically programmable toy with the same basic form factor (pocket sized computer with a hardware keyboard) running Linux would be ideal. I could use a programming environment I'm familiar with, and work directly on the device itself (no need for cross-compiling and such). I don't really think of my Gameboy as programmable, despite knowing vaguely how to put together system to build for it and how to run an emulator for testing. I just don't want to program within those limitations, even though I appreciate the art that goes into doing so (and think very highly of the author of LSDJ).

The very small PC form factor (like a NUC or brix) requires a monitor and a keyboard. A tablet with a keyboard more closely fits the bill, but also isn't ideal. I have a tablet, but can't really develop directly on the device, as far as I know. I want a self-contained pocket sized toy for tinkering with, without need for an external build system. CHIP with the Pocket add-on fits that bill perfectly, at a great price.

This is why I loved the original Motorola Droid series, and wish we could get another modern Android phone with the slide-out, Sidekick style keyboard.

I had a Sidekick II, I which I liked a lot for the time. And, I miss my G1 for the same reason. I had two of them; the original G1 and the original Google Devel phone. Loved them both, but sold the G1 when I got the dev phone for free, and gave away the dev phone when I got a Nexus One. Have missed having a keyboard ever since. I've finally found that a 8"+ tablet has a large enough soft keyboard for me to be able to type at a reasonable speed without ridiculous numbers of typos.

If the platform itself were more hackable, I'd just go grab an old Droid or similar. I don't really need modern for this particular task (though building Android apps has only recently gotten nice on a level comparable to building for Linux). But, running an unmodified Linux is non-trivial, and running an old Android version is also challenging. But, maybe I shouldn't worry so much about it, and just pick up and old Android phone that's known to be root-able and can run CM, disable the radio, and build the stuff I want to play with for Android. Unfortunately, there aren't any competent existing music trackers written in Java that I'm aware of.

The Allwinner SoCs not only have an actual onboard audio DAC (up to 24-bit, 192ksps I think), they even have a built-in headphone amplifier. Haven't had a chance to try the C.H.I.P, but the Allwinner-based board I have seems pretty respectable. You'll need Linux 4.4 to use audio though, or one of the Allwinner-specific kernels.

I'm not really wowed by any element of the Pi0, the drastic component count and associated feature reduction make both the small size and cost unimpressive.

I hate to play this old tune: bit I can't imagine an application that doesn't push the cost up past the £15.50 of the A+ just to reach feature parity.

I look forward to using it in hobby projects.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/kenburns/tiny-arcade-a-...

perfect for micro cabinet running quake

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