$35 Atomic Pi Cherry Trail Linux SBC | Hacker News Reader

$35 Atomic Pi Cherry Trail Linux SBC

cnx-software.com

117 pointswatchdogtimer85 comments

I've never been keen on SBCs using "Pi" in the name to ride on the Raspberry Pi's coattails. I'm surprised the Raspberry Pi foundation aren't more protective of it, if I'm honest.

At least in the case of the Banana Pi etc the board is the same form factor and fits into existing RPi cases, and even runs on the same architecture. This thing has literally nothing in common with the RPi apart from being another SBC.

Agreed, I saw $35 and "Pi" in the headline and immediately thought there was already a successor to the Pi 3B+. I'm not exactly disappointed to see a $35 Cherry Trail SBC, that's a phenomenal price point for such a device, but it's definitely misleading.

Totally agree, though reminiscent of the early days of PC's with IBM (the OS and PC name..) and again naming conventions with Intel (they wanted to trademark 386 etc and was told they could not do that with numbers - hence they started using the Pentium brand they could trademark along with a massive campaign of Intel Inside...).

Lucky the more savvy consumer see's right thru this tailgating and more so in the realms of arm SBC's.

But equally, Raspberry could not trademark "Pi" or indeed "Raspberry", though they could trademark "Raspberry Pi" - https://www.raspberrypi.org/trademark-rules/

Though, as they wanted to recreate the early fun days of computing, this whole `plagiarism` angle sure does rekindle some nostalgia.

They could absolutely register "Pi" or "Raspberry" as trademarks. Well they could have anyway - might be too late now to do it retroactively.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn21597-us-judge-rules-t...

Along with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berne_Convention

Play a factor in trademarks and copyright.

Then the variations in each country of what you can and can't trademark/copyright.

That's copyright. A totally different thing.

>But equally, Raspberry could not trademark "Pi" or indeed "Raspberry"

One very close counter example would be "Blackberry". You absolutely can trademark common words for use in specific markets. Another infamous example is "Apple" as both a computer company and a music label. Had there been other computers already using "Raspberry" or "Pi", they likely would have run into issues using "Raspberry Pi".

Yes, though in Apples case they fell foul of Apple records and eventually settled that they would not do anything music related. That changed, though they financially better placed to handle and settle that issue than the initial conflict.

Just checked for a wiki entry and good to see my memory of that era not that bad: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Corps_v_Apple_Computer

At this point, I kind of feel like the "Pi" moniker is useful for conveying a sense of size & I'm not really offended by the fact that a bunch of companies are bringing their own products to the market and doing stuff like "Orange Pi" or "Banana Pi" or "Cherry Pi" or "Atomic Pi" or "Vanilla Pi" or any other name with Pi in it, or Google's AI thing that has a different size but incorporates the Pi HAT spec.

I do agree though, it would be nice to see some more cohesiveness in the system, but the Pi that started it all isn't perfect for everything either.

This thing seems to be 2x the size though (more if you include heatsink height). Of course even rpi has a smaller version... so, meh.

I think it seems like a really powerful board for the price, though I do wish they full kits (+case and power) were a bit closer to the raw board price. After you add them it's often 2x the price.

Not that it would actually get me closer to done any faster. I have a kit by my desk I haven't even opened for 6 months. The last one is running various emulators in the living room. This board seems to do well enough for Playstation and Sega Saturn emulation from a couple youtube videos that came up yesterday.

And, in contrast, there is an ineluctable attraction to finding a new name for daughterboard for each one of these new SBCs.

The price to performance is crazy. If this had an extra ethernet port it would be the go-to router.

What is really lacks is a easy power supply option. No barrel jack and it needs up to 20w so more than regular usb can supply. The breakout board, which I assume as a barrel jack, is not for sale on amazon yet.

I don't think antennas are included, and I don't know if they are absolutely required.

Edit: I don't see any sata or pci interfaces which is disappointing. Also the power breakout board has screw terminals not a barrel jack.

Ordered four of these last week and planning on running them as a K8s cluster. You are correct about the power interface not being ideal. My current plan is to hook my cluster up to an old computer power supply. For those who are curious these things can draw around 4A at 5V.

Wouldn't it be cheaper in the long run to run it from one PSU's 12v line and buy two (or four) 12/5v step down converters? 10A versions aren't even that expensive and the loss of running the PSU on only 20W will be huge (below 50% efficiency for sure).

Meanwell makes a relatively inexpensive, but nice, 5V 16A power supply that could run all four. $22 plus shipping. https://www.trcelectronics.com/View/Mean-Well/RS-100-5.shtml

Less than half the price of an Asus Tinker board. Similar specs. 2 GB RAM isn't much though. If you want to run something like Splunk it won't work. My GPD Pocket 2 has 8 GB RAM. What kind of antennas are you referring to? Raspberry Pi with WLAN doesn't have any either. As for ethernet port you could probably use one via USB.

Anything wireless will require an antenna. The Raspberry Pi has an antenna that's integrated in the PCB. It's rather interesting really.

https://www.raspberrypi.org/magpi/pi-zero-w-wireless-antenna...

The Atomic Pi Amazon page spec list says antennas not included. That could well mean external antennas are not included (I can see there are connections for them) but there might be PCB antennas (copper tracks on the board itself that act as an antenna, like on a rpi or ESP8266).

It's an attractive offer. The Pine64 RockPro64 (RK3399 based) may offer even more bang for the buck if you're ok with spending $60.

Keep in mind that all the Pine64 hardware has a 3 month warranty [1] that requires shipping the faulty device back. This made me very hesitant to buy any of their stuff.

[1] https://www.pine64.org/?page_id=443

Not sure if this applies as the country it's purchased from or purchased in. I thought if they take a payment from a european and ship to europe then this law applies https://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/consumers/shopping/gua...

"All single board and accessories sold on the Pine Microsystems Inc. (PINE64) store are entitled to a 30 days Limited Warranty against defects in materials and workmanship."

I searched the linked page for "90" (days) and "3" (months) with no results, other than the "30 days" mentioned above. Where do you see 90-day warranty?

Yeah these boards are a pain to get certain apps working, for example retro games. GPU support also may not exist depending on the board.

Yep. Their software support is terrible too.

There's also the new-ish Odroid-N2 which offers similar (supposedly better) performance for a similar $ premium. It's based on an Amlogic S922X rather than Rockchip.

Does a router need that much compute? I've just moved and the walls here attenuate wifi signals dramatically. Was thinking about building my own router and bumping up the signal power. That or some sort of repeater.

Routing gigabit with a stateful firewall does require a fair bit of computing power. But that is not going to solve your wifi signal problem. Use a mesh wifi setup to solve that one.

Thanks mate, been weighing up the options. Was not prepared for how bad it can be with thick rebar concrete walls. Only a few meters away from router and yet terrible signal. Far outside through a glass door has perfect signal. Ethernet over power and a mesh of AP's seems to be the best way.

You might consider checking out r/homelab if you're considering something big- the community is really large and supportive.

It depends on the functionality. A VPN router (although it's likely not your case) has a ceiling of 2 MBit/s on an RPi 3b (with a standard, single-threaded, OpenVPN configuration), which is relatively little.

This can't be right.

Granted, I've not been running OpenVPN lately, but with WireGuard I'm saturating the internal USB-ethernet adapter of the pi long before I'm running out of CPU power.

You're correct. I confused MBit with MByte - the correct number is 20 MBit/s.

Important correction: 20 MBit/s, not 2.

No, routers do not require much CPU power. Typical consumer routers often have really limited CPUs. The biggest issue is getting enough bandwidth out of the Ethernet ports. For example, a Pi 3B+ can only handle 200Mbit or so. Whether that is enough for you will depend upon your WAN speed.

Having said that, I'm less sure about your use case. You might could load OpenWRT on it and set it up to relay a wireless signal, but I doubt the performance would be great.

I'm not sure why you would need anywhere near this level of CPU for a "go-to" router. Many of the ARM-based systems with gigabit and USB3 are perfectly suitable as routers.

Because you maybe want something like pfsense to run with some filter rules, or you may want a long term VPN connection, which even with AES-NI Instructions still requires substantial CPU power for high speed connections.

VPN is a good point. I don't think that I could get anywhere near 100Mbit with my Pi on OpenVPN, though in practice it is enough for what I need it for (access to home automation and maybe a couple of cameras).

Many routers are hardware accelerated. So they don't need as much cpu

I guess that is possible, but I think it is just as likely that people just overestimate the requirement. My Pi is practically idling while pushing ~100Mbit between the builtin Ethernet and an external dongle. Routing really doesn't take as much CPU as people think, even with a few rules for things like bandwidth monitoring on a per IP basis.

The consensus in the comments seems to be that these boards were designed for another product that was scrapped and now being sold off as a SBC. So stock is likely to be extremely limited.

Wasn’t that true of the SoC on the original Raspberry Pi, too? There is a pattern of “offcuts” becoming productized if they stumble into a niche.

Videocore 4 processors were also used in a bunch of phones and media boxes. The fact the Raspberry Pi was built on it was more because Eben Upton had worked on it.

But it is fair to say they wouldn't have fabbed anywhere near as many had it not been for the Raspberry Pi.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/VideoCore

... and it's no longer listed on Amazon. Link no longer works, search finds nothing:

https://amzn.to/2IV6tKN

The page/link comes up for me... afaik it sold out really quickly.

I got one of these as an emulation box because a retropi couldn't handle the N64 games I wanted to run, and for that purpose it's worked brilliantly. It's pretty cool that it's x86-I plan to try and do some WINE gaming on it as well which isn't possible on, say, a retropi. I haven't tried the official images, but it runs fine with the standard Ubuntu image.

Setup notes: http://blog.eamonnmr.com/2019/04/atomic-pi-emulation-setup-n...

WINE will run on the Pi albeit you need to run it on top of x86 emulator. I've seen examples using qemu but there are guides online using other tools too. I've not tried it myself but from what I've read it's still fast enough to run some Windows games.

Obviously if you have an x86 box then that would be better suited. But the above is worth mentioning just in case anyone else should read your comment who doesn't have any besides a Raspberry Pi but still wants access to retro games for IBM-compatible machines.

Performance should totally suck when doing that, doesn't it?

You would expect so but I haven't tried it personally because I had a spare NUK laying around anyway.

I think the real question is how old or recent are the games you're wanting to play? Games consoles would have to be emulated too and the Pi can still pull of some N64 and PS1 games.

Some N64 games are too much for the Pi, which is why I got one of these things. I imagine other games from the 90s/very early 00s should run on it. Will probably update the post if/when I do.

> Some N64 games are too much for the Pi

This is why I said "some" in previous post :)

> Will probably update the post if/when I do.

Please do. I'd be interested to know

Does it have enough power to run reicast (the Dreamcast emulator)?

I was fighting with setting that up on my laptop but discovered that there was a PC port of Rez before got it working.

What about power consumption? I have a RPI 3B+ at house that runs Docker containers, these would be a major step up in terms of image compatibility, but I'm worried about a major step up in terms of electricity cost too.

It says in the article. 5v at 4a is 20w max.

Reading the comments . It seems almost half the power requirement is needed to power the amps for the audio . So if ur not using it u won't reach that power use

... and it's gone already from Amazon lol.

Just a fair warning to anyone thinking about backing anything on Kickstarter: You have absolutely no legal recourse to against a company that doesn't deliver your goods. You pay Kickstarter, Kickstarter pays the company. Kickstarter is the only one who can enforce their terms against the company, and they're notoriously famous for refusing to do so. There is a long list of Kickstarter campaigns where the founders just took the money and ran. Even ones where the founder appears to have all of the best intentions fall apart.

Not saying to never back any croudfunding, but know what you're getting in to. From what I've seen, you get better odds at a casino.

I wouldn't put kickstarter odds THAT low... I've backed dozens of campaigns now and so far had exactly one that has totally failed to deliver (the company went flat out bust after getting royally screwed by all of their supply chain - Next Thing Co, the people that made the C.H.I.P and pocketCHIP - in themselves successful KS projects) and one that is in forever development - Star Citizen, but at least they drop regular alpha versions... For everything else I have alt least gotten my product eventually. though I do pick my backs very carefully. I admit there is a lot of obvous vapourware though, but it's easily balanced out by genuine people trying to get a product off the ground, and are usually smaller in scope with much more realistic targets. They don't usually make headlines though ;)

I actually got my CHIP, though I ordered it on their website and not Kickstarter. I got screwed on the Peachy Printer. While I technically didn't get screwed on the M3D Printer, it was delayed so long, cheaper and better printers where available by the time I got mine. The closest I came to backing another was the "ABC of Connection" book. It was supposedly a book that was already done, and just had to be printed, so how could that fail? He never delivered the printed material, but eventually delivered a PDF. The PDF showed it was far from complete, and the dates in it showed he hadn't done any real work on it since taking the money. The whole time he was claiming issues with the printer, when it was no where near ready for printing.

It wasn't the actual CHIP... I got my CHIP and a pocketCHIP. I had a great e-mail relationship with one of the founders prior to pCHIP release, and the community was excellent. I was actually talking about voder though which was mid development when the financial rug was pulled out and NTC just quietly vanished with all the cries of "where's my CHIP?" in the forum... That's unfortunate about your printer and book. I've backed book (Bitmap books visual commpendium series) and music projects (Chris Huelsbeck Turrican anthology and SIDologie - Sidology took a while to complete but the end result has been stellar) and to date they have all been excellent.

Would these things be grunty enough to play x265 10bit encoded video?

Not natively by the hardware but possibly software decoded[1]

[1] https://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=307065

If got an Up Board. It struggles with 1080p x264

From my experience the Z8350 should be capable of decoding 1-2 1080p60 through VAAPI and rendering with OpenGL. Have you tried using mpv from the command line without XOrg running? i.e. something like: mpv --hwdec=vaapi --opengl-backend=drm --drm-connector=1.HDMI-A-4 ...

No, only has 8-bit hw decoder and this thing would prob not be able to software decode 1080p h.265. 1080p h.264 10-bit (also would need to be sw decoded) would be rough.

Minor nitpick but "10-bit HEVC" or "10-bit H.265" would be better terms. x265 is just an encoder for HEVC/H.265 and devices don't decode x265 output specifically, they decode HEVC/H.265.

Not x86, and no idea how the driver support is, but the Jetson Nano has a pretty "grunty" GPU for a $99 board: https://developer.nvidia.com/embedded/buy/jetson-nano-devkit

The jetson nano is an interesting device: with Windows 10 on ARM and Parsec, it could provide a great terminal server.

I'm not aware of any remote desktop supporting H265 or VP9 encoding on Linux, and offering a matching low latency (cf https://flickstiq.com/2018/05/nvidia-gpus-outperform-amd-for... )

I've always been curious - having a x86 chip in a this form factor - is this a big deal? Hasn't ARM already saturated this segment of the market?

The possibility of running old windows apps is a nice feature. Also you can use the usual images of your favorite Linux distro rather than needing an ARM build.

> Also you can use the usual images of your favorite Linux distro rather than needing an ARM build.

Can you though? It depends on what kind of BIOS/UEFI this thing runs with. I'd be curious to see if it's a standard x86 BIOS setup or something more proprietary/less common that requires a special bootloader.

It worked fine with the x86 64 bit Ubuntu images, I didn't try any other distros.

I've got a tablet[1] that uses almost the same CPU. When I got it they were $80 and it's better than it has any right to be at that price, but it performs about like a 2002-ish Pentium except with hardware video acceleration. If I wanted maximum performance for the dollar I wouldn't go with an Atom.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01MYZEPGP/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b...

The Atom C3000 series is a beast with 10G Ethernet, up to 16C and support for ECC DDR4.

Yes, I can think of a couple applications where my Pi has hit walls. Emulation like an N64 or some old OS/Windows App.

Official product page: https://digital-loggers.com/api.html

Thank you! The Amazon listing is gone.

Hell yes. This is a cheaper looking latte panda... though the panda you can get 4GB RAM (~$149)... I’m really hoping to see more x86 based single board computers. The ARM manufacturers I think have gotten a bit lazy and could use some competition... plus running x86 chips does make life a lot easier for more complex applications.

Is there a similar thing, but with more RAM? 4GB seems to be the minimum for what I'm thinking about :/

There are, like the UDOO x86 or LattePanda, but they get fairly expensive.

A used Asus Chromebox is often a better route. You can flash the bios and run regular Linux. Then you get a nice case, power supply, and regular dimm slots.

I've never seen a real Raspberry Pi with such an enormous heat sink.

6000 units max apparently.

I have an itch to cram as many as possible into a 2U or 3U rack case just to get a massive cluster of compute going. It would certainly be an interesting project.

have somebody found a PSU that can power this board? 5v 4amp is not something available cheap. also, custom power connector?

Mean Well RS-25-5 is $10 and it's a good quality manufacturer https://octopart.com/rs-25-5-mean+well-3991989?r=sp&s=rB_LI6...

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