VoCore – Coin-Sized Linux Computer
vocore.io
vocore.io
What is interesting about this one is that it has reasonable documentation for a change (but not about the MediaTek SoC) and they might actually be able to move volume on both their main device and extension boards.
Can you suggest any examples?
https://www.friendlyelec.com/index.php?route=product/categor...
The NEO Air in particular is a very compact board using an Allwinner chip, which works pretty well under Linux including such niceties as support for the integrated power management chip.
I also recently got a couple of the Space Cats Jeter Nano boards. They’re more on par with the VoCore, performance-wise, but with a lot of GPIOs on more hobbyist-friendly (read: breadboard-ready) connectors.
Much more powerful though.
Neither one is going to compete with a cheap Atmel or RISC-V MCU in cost, but on the flip side the NEO Core et. al. can run a web server, Docker containers, or a NodeJS app under modest load vs. needing everything rewritten in very tightly-managed C. :)
Do you have a link for this? Your comment is the top result on Google for those four words.
For a significant performance increase, but at a larger size (still very small): https://nl.aliexpress.com/item/10000379696950.html
Most of the RockChip/AllWinner/MediaTek type things are China ODM anyway, and besides some middleman-markup the SDKs and reference designs are all the same across the board.
If you want a product that is going to last a little longer and is a bit more useful beyond the basic physical specs (like size and I/O), you'll also want to know what bootrom, bootloader, devicetree and register documentation is available. Native in-tree Linux kernel support would be a must as well. At that point you can essentially boot any (low-footprint) distro forever until SoC support is dropped from the kernel (which takes a really long time if the SoC is still in use).
--
Updating mostly for my own peace of mind: like most Chinese native manufacturers, they (the SoC manufacturers) generally don't give a crap about other companies, rights or long-term sustainability. I would suspect this is mostly cultural/political and a bit of 'eat or be eaten', not some dunk in the style of "country bad, people bad". This doesn't mean that therefore nobody should use any products anywhere forever, but like the sunxi community for Linux support (https://linux-sunxi.org/Main_Page) you might need to find out if there is enough knowledge and willingness available to you to actually be able to make good use of the products listed. This is why the Pi is so successful, the SoC is fine but Broadcom doesn't allow any public information on how it works and how to program for it; the community and the foundation around the Pi make it possible to make it work long-term regardless, and for any AllWinner/MediaTek/RockChip you'll want to select your parts in a way that gets you a similarly useful ecosystem. Buying a cheap thing and getting an Hello World out of it today is easy, getting a product that doesn't turn into e-waste in a year is a lot harder.
https://linux-sunxi.org/Linux_mainlining_effort
Right now, the latest devices have new chips that aren't supported yet. So if you get one of those, you're stuck using the manufacturer's Linux distro. If you get an older chip with mainline support, you can run a 3rd party distro like Armbian.
It can be a bit of a hassle if all you have is something like "926EJS" as supported core instead of the SoC name "F1C100s", but either way, browse the linux kernel for support for your SoC to at least get a feel for its support status. If a (compiled) device tree for the SBC is available and the bootrom is either super small or open/free/libre, you can expect good integration and long life out of the device.
Even in the worst case you'll be able to follow generic buildroot or yocto instructions to get it running with up-to-date software.
Armbian often comes with the patches you want, their ready-to-use images is great. But porting their patch to your own project will take some effort.
[1] https://www.yoctoproject.org/learn-items/mastering-embedded-...
https://www.friendlyelec.com/index.php?route=product/categor...
https://pine64.com/product/rock64-2gb-single-board-computer/
Example: https://linux-sunxi.org/H3
On the other hand, between then and new many things have changed, yet this VoCore submission is only 8 hours old. Seems like a good idea to point out that it's not the newest, shiniest thing everyone should flock to just because it's on HN.
Tried to reason with them, but they would not budge and got pretty rude about it; they wanted money. So I will never buy anything from them again.
edit: just realized that you meant other projects.
The trade-off to the gain in mechanical flexibility of having a very small size is that you have to put the big (in miniature electronics terms) inductors elsewhere.
[0]https://www.amazon.com/TP-Link-Gigabit-Ethernet-Splitter-TL-...
https://smile.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B07TJ3ZNJ4/
I used it to power a phone used as 5G backup to my Internet connection, combined with this Ethernet to USB-C with power passthrough adapter:
https://smile.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B086SV2FK4/
Works, but way clunkier than a built-in solution.
This thing still allows you to wire 4 Ethernet ports, if you feel like it. But apparently these pins can be used somehow differently, too.
The guys behind VoCore keep updating their software stack, fixing bugs in the Linux WiFi driver. Just read their blog to see the level of attention to detail they're putting into their product
https://octavosystems.com/octavo_products/osd335x-sm/ is probably more interesting for a lot of applications (though maybe not as open... but this is the same chipset as the BeagleBoneBlack).
Then again, all of them have had a good amount of use over the years. But 10 of them (RPi 1B-3B+) are no longer in use.
Tempted to buy a VoCore, but I won't. It'd most probably just join the Raspberry Pis in a drawer.
Years ago i ran quite a lot of stuff on a Raspberry Pi, but despite them growing more and more capable, my computing needs at home have gotten less and less.
I ran a homebuilt surveillance system on them for some years, RPi Zeros for the nodes with motion detection, and a NAS as a storage target and object detection, but i eventually replaced it with UniFi Protect and HomeKit Secure Video.
A couple of years ago i still had a couple running AdguardHome, but after that got replaced by NextDNS, i have only one left, running "power monitoring" and HomeBridge in my summerhouse.
And still, with my computing needs becoming more minimalistic, my RPi3B+ just doesn't deliver.
I'm currently trying to make it run my emacs/cli-based workflow somewhat acceptable, but the darn thing can't even run a shell without noticeable lag. There is a noticeable delay between keyboard entry and things showing up every few seconds. Not cool.
Sell them. There's basically no supply and very strong demand right now, because in addition to hobbyist uses, there are a lot of people who have built products that are based around Pis and who can't sell their products, because they can't get Pis.
Go check eBay prices. 3Bs are selling for $70-$100. The 8GB 4s are selling for $150-$200. It's the best time to unload them you're ever likely to see for older hardware.
:b
Dedicating a Raspberry Pi to running a DNS server is silly.
You could run it on your wifi router instead, or you could run it on the individual nodes. Either of those should be extremely easy. But practical general purpose computing has decayed (or was never really there?) so instead there's this silly PiHole thing where you just buy yet another computer and convert it into yet another special-purpose appliance because general purpose computing is so hard.
You want me to run a full pihole on my TV, laptop, phone, tablet? I have to administer all those and deal with the headaches of installation on all of those (if even possible in jailed envs).
You say it should be easy, have you ever done it?
Who says I'm just running a pihole on that too, you're making a hell of a lot of assumptions here. It's a media server, ssh bouncer, tailscale node and a lot more.
Firstly not all ISP provided routers are even flashable with OpenWRT, so how the hell do you install something on there to start with?
I have a hAP.ac from Microtik, I flashed myself by PXE booting the OpenWRT images, not an underpowered router in the slightest, it just doesn't have enough RAM to load the lists needed, as I said. Connection state tables in SOHO routers don't need to be large, so why need all the RAM, their inteded purpose wasn't soley to run after market, home hacked, heavy memory intensive software.
You know, if you'd actually attempted this and had some valid point, I could take you seriously, but you seem to ignore everything I said, like I run multiple things on the Pi, or I'd have to keep the PC on 24/7 and the idle draw would be more (electicity is expensive here), or how I can just magically install pihole on any router, then why is my router not 'powerful' enough.
Yes, I want my router to be an appliance, not something I need to curate, like updating my PC or laptop with the latest and greatest packages. I want it to be a dumb box in the corner (with security patches when needed) but I don't want to be messing with it.
I have a Pi to mess around with things I want to run 24/7 but not take excessive amount of energy in doing so.
I do in fact run everything on the same machine as my wifi router: http://catern.com/computers.html
PiHole exists precisely because the Pi is a general-purpose computing device: it uses a relatively stock operating system and network stack to perform its task. Its competition here is not a desktop computer, it's a bespoke network appliance with custom hardware/firmware manufactured by somebody like Cisco.
What you lament is that so many of our "PC" systems seem to have wasted processing potential, but I think this is optimizing along the wrong axis. Sure, my desktop PC could run a home DNS server without breaking a sweat, but my desktop PC is not on all the time. Even the idle power draw from the ATX power supply likely outweighs the full-throttle power usage of a Pi-equivalent device.
Home computing (PiHoles, routers, and "smart home" devices) are a devolution of computing to commodity status in the same way that the PC was a devolution away from a mainframe-and-terminal environment. I think further progression along this axis is inevitable, and we should welcome entries like the Pi or this VoCore that keep the ethic of hackable, general-purpose computing even in a commodity footprint.
That's not my lament. I don't care at all about not wasting processing power.
I care about the fact that it's so difficult for people to use their existing computers in ways that were not intended by their manufacturers, that even technically adept people will just buy a new computer rather than deal with it.
It should be easy to install some new software on any of your computers (router or desktop or TV or phone or whatever) and have it do some useful new thing. But it's not.
I disagree. I don't think it's difficult for compute-related tasks (gpio now, that I'll grant). However, installing this sort of think on a desktop PC is more likely to be bespoke just because of the near-infinite range of user configurations and customizations. The PiHole works as well as it does because it's a uniform base without being a walled garden.
For a comparable option, consider one of the Pi-Picos, Arduinos with VUSB, or a USB-Serial board with extra GPIOS.
A Pi 4 costs more than a second-hand tiny i5-4700 series with SSD and 8GB of RAM.
Still the Pi has GPIO and PLLs which Intel-based boards don't have.
I’m always tempted to get one of these sorts of things but I can never think of an actual real-world use that I’d need.