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Comment by Timethy | Hacker News Reader

Sounds like the CHIP guys are desperate for use cases. That LePai amp already plays MP3 off USB and SD card.

The user interface on that LePai amp appears to be rather lacking though - it's apparently limited to a numeric LED display and an IR remote that lets you skip through one song at a time. Probably not much fun with a large collection.

Since the CHIP is similar to other single chip SOC platforms like the Raspberry Pi, beagle bone, etc, the use cases are very similar. The CHIP has the advantage of being smaller in size than the other small cpu's but also much cheaper.

It's only much cheaper if you get it without any of the adapters. I Kickstarted it and paid $24 for one w/ an HDMI adapter and $19 for one w/ a VGA. That being said, now that I have both adapters, any proceeding purchases go back to being much cheaper if I don't need the display adapters full time.

The thing that really got me was their aim of being entirely open source. I like the Pi, but there's a lot of stuff closed off.

It's also cheap to go from HDMI to VGA now, a "Ugreen" HDMI to VGA converter (with 3.5mm audio out) is about $8.50.

I think the popularity of the Pi has helped there.

(The adapters are great, but depending on what you're plugging in, you may need to supply power as well. A microUSB cable is included in the box. If what you want to display has HDCP, that needs to be removed before the adapter.)

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