Vocore2, a ridiculously small Linux PC | Hacker News Reader

Vocore2, a ridiculously small Linux PC

vocore.io

218 pointsHappyAlbatross66 comments

Oh dear - no HTTPS on that page. But, it does host a store section that lets you add stuff to your cart and then click a checkout button. That button takes you to PayPal (unless an attacker re-directed you elsewhere). Its not clear to me that there would be any real way to verify that what you are paying for the stuff from that website - it seems relatively straightforward for an attacker to modify the PayPal link to send you to pay for stuff on their store.

Basically, this seems like a pretty irresponsible way to run a web store.

I e-mailed the support email about it. I got a response back - I think I convinced them to do it: "Thank you. You are correct, I will go to godaddy and get one :) it is fashion. Regards Chin"

Or he is telling me to get lost.

It seems a full day has passed since you've posted the message. I've just checked the store and it's still served through a plain old unsecure HTTP connection.

It seems you were told to get lost.

This is something similar that's about to get released and way faster: https://neutis.io/

The Neutis is $49, the VoCore2 is $18. They seem to have different power consumption as well. While it might be similar in size, the cost difference is substantial. The best choice as usual depends on the project.

I’ve recently been experimenting with this board, which looks to be quite similar (Allwinner H5): https://www.friendlyarm.com/index.php?route=product/product&...

Overall it’s an impressive little package, however I’ve been finding that you need to underclock the CPU to make it stable. Or possibly use a giant heat sink, but that would somewhat counteract the benefits of such a tiny board. Do you know if Neutis have found a good solution for keeping the H5 stable?

However, in broader strokes, I’m pretty excited that we’re starting to see these boards with open hardware designs (the vocore and the beagle, for instance). Being able to use this to bootstrap more complex board designs feels a bit like how web apps became a lot easier once the so-called LAMP stack was robust enough to build on top of. There’s additional hurdles with hardware, for sure, but each barrier removed is meaningful progress.

That is 64-bit ARM based and quad core, Vocore2 is MIPS. Neat.

That thing is a beast.

and triple the price.

I was interested when the campaing came up and ordered a VoCore2 + Ultimate Dock (42$) back in november 2016. Never received it (must have been lost somewhere).. so I lost all interest in it.

Looked promising, though.

I have one from the original crowdsourcing campaign, with an audio dock. Interference makes the sound quality is so bad it's unusable for any practical purposes. Support was useless.

http://forum.vocore.io/viewtopic.php?f=16&t=3500&p=5185

HappyAlbatross is right: you definitely have a grounding problem, either due to missing proper ground or having a ground loop somewhere. Also if you're using a switching power supply and/or a class D amplifier (that is, a switching amplifier [1]), they can be real nightmares if not properly filtered, and cheaper ones almost never are. Grounding and ground loops, filtering and decoupling are complex issues which would need entire articles, but there's a lot of stuff on the net to get you started. Long story short: don't throw away your board, the problem could disappear just by changing a power supply or rewiring ground connections.

[1] They use the same identical principle behind switching power supplies but applied to driving speakers: performance is fantastic compared to current draw, but they tend to produce lots of harmonics and RF noise just like switching power supplies.

Would you be able to test to see if your problem is power-filtering related by powering the board from a battery rather than from the wall?

It sound like you havent grounded it, speakers are complicated but crackling can usually be fixed by connecting it to an earthing wire

Related: The Octavo systems system-on-package: https://octavosystems.com/

It's a TI AMxx series linux computer in a package on package module like a raspberry PI is.

It comes in two variants, a regular pitch BGA and an ultra wide BGA so that it is actually possible to hand solder it! (or with hot air or a toaster.)

It is what is used on the Pocket Beagle.

It saves you the need to to most high speed signals and really the hard parts of building a higher-performance board.

The thing just is that TI didn't exactly retain the people that know the internals of the OMAP series. If you hit any bugs you're on your own unfortunately. (Your milage with the existing documentation may vary also).

OMAP's been dead a long time. Sitara is OMAP with the media blocks stripped out, and it sure looks like it's on their roadmap for a while to come.

https://training.ti.com/sites/default/files/docs/TI%20Missio...

Of course it will be produced for as long as customers want it. But the roadmap makes it also crystal clear where they are going: More DSP cores. We likely won't see anything newer than the Cortex-A15. TI builds what enough customers want, and if you're not locked in enough to their DSPs or general ecosystem, you'll move away. That in return means there won't be anything new. No single customer is big enough to warrant bigger cores alone.

A nice quote I remember "I'd rather buy TI stocks than their products".

Nice spec. 2x Ethernet?! Custom router possibilities abound.

More expensive than Pi however. I can get an entire pi for the same price as this module,

The 2x Ethernet is a little quirky in implementation: Internally, the CPU only has one ethernet MAC, which is connected to a switch on the same die. In practice, linux sees two ethernet ports, but this is implemented by VLAN tagging on the internal switch. So if you think you have two actual ports and want to interact with VLANs, you're gonna have a bad time.

And the performance isn't very good either from what I have heard. It is a good candidate if you want to try and make something cheap, but few (none?) of the offerings really are (olimex has one if anyone is interested). Personally I am pretty tired of the Linux ecosystem in general. It is pretty well known that you can ship broken stuff by slapping an open source sticker on it.

Thanks for the heads up.

Lots of compromises in the sbc space. A lot aren’t required but cost is the most common factor.

Similar to the Omega2+: https://docs.onion.io/omega2-docs/omega2p.html ... except Vocore2 is slightly smaller and the Omega2 is ~30% cheaper and has an SD card slot.

Vocore2: MT7628AN 580 MHz MIPS with 128MB DDR2 and 16MB NOR: $18

Omega2+: MT7688 580 MHz MIPS with 128MB DDR2 and 32MB flash: $13

Both have b/g/n Wifi and are 10/100 ethernet ready. Omega2 software is based on LEDE.

Note that there is a SMT version SoM of the Omega2+, the Omega2S+ which is around $10 per unit when buying trays of 50.

Smallest linux computer I've seen was Transcend SD card (the wifi one). There are more manufacturers and I think Electric imp uses the same chipset.

I looked at what you meant, and first found this article

https://hackaday.com/2016/06/30/transcend-wifi-sd-card-is-a-...

which links this article:

https://jamesone111.wordpress.com/2014/03/19/exploring-the-t...

So this is a Linux server in the size of an SD-Card that has 16 GB of storage. And Wifi. And lets clients connect to download whatever's on them.

I was thinking, wow, this must be some pro photography thing costing like $399 or something.

The cost (given in the second article) is £25 (which is $32.19 today.)

That is pretty cheap for a tiny Linux server of this size. With WIFI.

And it made the rounds 5 years ago: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Transcend%20Wifi-SD%20card&sor...

What is the world coming to.

By the way here is the one where HN discussed it the most:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7647434

And note the comment that Transcend released the firmware (though that link is offline today.)

However I guess there really just aren't all that many use cases for this kind of a server. Or maybe it has been superseded? One page[1] lists it as weighing just 2 grams, compared with the weight of 2.5 grams for a U.S. penny. That's gotta have some sort of applications. Why isn't this more popular at $30, or what are people using instead? Is it like, impossible to get any ports out of it, even a single serial debugging port via soldering, so you can't connect it to anything else?

It just seems so hackable!

[1] https://www.extremedeals.com.ph/products/transcend-16gb-wifi...

My use case would be to turn a 7 years old camera (which is still better than most phone cameras) into a WiFi networked camera so that when I shoot photos of items I'm selling on Ebay it directly uploads them to my home server (NFS/SMB). For that use it wouldn't even need the flash storage: just buffer in RAM until the image is uploaded.

Sounds like the Toshiba FlashAir or Transcend WiFi SD cards might suit your needs.

My experience is that SD-cards don't last very long when used as the `/` directory.

Use a read only root fs and overlays in ram, this will keep your sdcard based Linux server running much longer, though it is a bit tedious to set up.

For those curious about how much RAM it has, the bottom comment in the more active HN discussion links here:

http://dmitry.gr/index.php?r=05.Projects&proj=15&proj=15.%20...

At first I thought it referred to just 3 MB of RAM (ouch!!) - but it has 32 MB. That's enough to do quite a bit in a stripped-down embedded Linux.

To quote that page:

>An exciting time indeed - now this WiFiSD card is a perfectly working ARMv5 computer with a kernel and ramdisk we can build, and 16GB of storage. Pity it only has 32MB of RAM. Well, we do have ability to modify the kernel now. I added support for swap, ext4, sysfs, loop, and a few other modern conveniences we all know and love. Once again the card booted. Now I was able to swapon a file on the SD card, loop-mount a 2GB ext4 filesystem and chroot into a version of ubuntu in there. Once inside, it is the nice and comfy environment you'd expect. I was able to bring up sshd with X-forwarding, and even run firefox on the card (it was slow). Modifying the card's boot scripts again, I tried to get it to do all this on boot and succeeded. SWEET!

....for about $30 and in the size of an SD-card and weighing less than a penny. With WIFI.

Interesting. How does this sort of set up handle updates?

You could ab update using dd to write to the other partition(s)

I'm pretty sure I gave away my original Vocore - the pins were simply too small for me to solder.

The Vocore2 looks like a considerable step up, but without mainline Linux support it's of limited utility.

Ditto on the pin size. I wasn’t able to find utility out of it

You may find interesting the NanoPI Duo: https://www.friendlyarm.com/index.php?route=product/product&...

Not in the same league (faster + more RAM but bigger + more power hungry), but the breadboard friendly form factor makes it very close to be the ideal minimal Linux module.

This thing is dense!

From 2016: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11397638

I take a major issue in their usage of OpenWRT. It seems to me that every hardware I touch with OpenWRT included is out of date - or "well aged". As soon as you try to modify something in the OpenWrt interface and/or update the system, half of the features do not work anymore - luckily the reset button usually works. At least the OpenWRT variant they are choosing looks recent. Good luck!

I'm at the point where I only get Raspberry PI-based hardware. This way I know that I'm able to update/or reinstall in a year or two.

This project looks awesome. I can imagine it being used instead of the ESP8266 in many of my IoT projects. That would be a huge time saver.

It will start to become competitive once it is actually cheaper than Raspberry Pi Zero. Especially as the Vocore2 is MIPS-based.

My main issue with using a full-blown linux device for IoT is that it's a full blown linux device. Not only is it harder to get up and running IMHO (vs just flashing your code to esp8266), you need to maintain a full OS which is a hassle security wise in the longer term. I get that there are some advantages, but overall I think IoT is better off as simple as possible.

Also, it's not possible to take the RPi zero seriously until they start shipping in any serious quantity - I don't like the play they've made by keeping it scarce.

> Also, it's not possible to take the RPi zero seriously until they start shipping in any serious quantity - I don't like the play they've made by keeping it scarce.

What do you consider to be serious quantity? You can order 250+ of them off Digikey right now or go into any Microcenter and buy them.

Simplicity-first is a good point.

By choosing more complex, extendable system, the manufacturer can deliver extra functionality.

But on the other hand, every bit of additional complexity requires maintenance (both security and as standards evolve).

IoT companies rarely seem to care about the latter, which ultimately only impacts the customer (unless there's a recurring service model of revenue).

Something like the digital hazardous waste idea should be mandatory in the IoT space. Either: (a) you provide timely security patches for all shipped code and a way to apply them to your product, OR (b) you freely offer such tools, keys, and source as are necessary for users to self-patch.

Don't want to be responsible? Don't include unnecessary functionality.

Website says: "It will help you to make [...] the tiniest router in the world." Got one of these and I'm pretty sure they're quite smaller: http://amzn.asia/d/idyKhjN

Makes me wonder if I could turn those Japanese routers into computers (they're dirt cheap at £8.50)...

Yours are thinner, not smaller overall I think. The Vocore is basically the size of an ethernet port, judging by screenshots.

Still, in the end, you're correct that it's not real news that the size of a full Linux-capable computer is now entirely dictated by the type of physical interfaces you need. There is nothing you can do with a Vocore that you couldn't already do with other similarly-sized boards.

TP Link has the N300 available too, powered by USB Micro:

https://www.amazon.com/TP-Link-Wireless-Portable-Travel-Rout...

Only downside is they're $29.

If you want tiny, the Elecom WRH-583BK2-S is as wide and high as two RJ45 jacks (yes it has two RJ45 ports) and like 2.5" deep (65 × 35 × 20.5 mm). If there's a smaller dual Ethernet wifi router I have yet to learn of it. Please let us know if you know of a smaller one!

http://www2.elecom.co.jp/products/WRH-583BK2-S.html

For those wondering what SoC it is, as it's unfortunately buried 2 links deep, here's the page with the information.

http://vocore.io/v2.html

> 128MB, DDR2, 166MHz

This is small supercomputer!

My first distribution (Slackware 2.0) was running on a P75 MHZ with 8 MB.

Do you know the fischertechnik toy line? It's a little bit like Lego technic (fischertechnik fans will hate me for this comment because fischertechnik appeared in 1964, while the first Lego technic was introduced only in 1977).

They have a programmable controller for their robotics models: 600MHz ARM CPU and 256MB DDR3 RAM. We are talking about a toy line here :)

No, thanks for the heads up.

Yep pretty crazy nowadays, although if I would be playing with electronics, I guess I would just use the ESP32 instead.

The problem with Linux in these applications is that it's not a realtime OS.

You can get pretty fantastic latencies on stock linux with some tuning, with the kind of processors embedded linux runs on you only really gain some microseconds by going to realtime variants. The main reason to prefer a true RTOS is because it will generally be simpler, and thus a bit more predictable and reliable in its behaviour, which is important for high-reliability systems.

> The main reason to prefer a true RTOS is because it will generally be simpler, and thus a bit more predictable and reliable in its behaviour

I mean... you just defined real time there.

You don't actually need RTOSs for most practical applications. Even SpaceX used stock Linux.

That said, Linux can be built in a realtime mode.[1]

[1] https://wiki.linuxfoundation.org/realtime/start

RT Linux is only soft real time.

SpaceX uses Linux but also uses VxWorks for the real time pieces.

Nothing prevents you from using U-Boot to boot FreeRTOS.

>MT7628AN

Be prepared for a surprise when you try making wifi work on that thing

If it had USB-C I'd have insta-bought at least 2. Why are we in Q3 2018 still releasing new products with micro usb? Otherwise looks very cool though.

Because USB-C is still a mess.[1]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17285411

I could not make out from the documentation - are there are GPIO pins as on the Raspberry Pi?

Click though to product page, full specs are listed: http://vocore.io/v2.html

“Around 40” GPIO pins

that's a weirdly non-specific number...

That's because a lot of pins are configurable (there is a muxer on them), so you could have a maximum of 40 GPIOs but if you want say, an SPI port, then you get less GPIOs.

Can a USB 4G Module be connected to this ?

Might as well get a cheap Chinese android phone as the USB 4G is going to cost more than the device.

TL;DR: this is based on the Ralink processors that are widely used in consumer routers, wifi light switches, etc.

RT5350, 360 MHz, MIPS 24K, with 32MB of RAM.

CPU datasheet: https://www.mouser.com/ds/2/813/RT5350-1022839.pdf

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