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This is, foremost, not at all too good to be true.

The Mele A1000 http://rhombus-tech.net/allwinner_a10/hacking_the_mele_a1000... is $70, a mere $20 more: it's 2x the board real-estate, another $4 in connectors, it has a case, and it's been around for ~1 year now.

What's interesting is how lagged the development world is from the consumer electronics world. If you want an Allwinner A10, or a Marvell Kirkwood/ ARMADA 300 piece of kit, and you want it at the best possible price, possibly before dev kits show up, you need to scope out consumer electronics, not dev boards. The Mele was a product, this lack's the consumer experience of a product, is just a platform, and it, like many dev kits, show lag v.s. what the consumer boys are up to.

This is simply a small board exposing a very cheap ARM A8 SoC that does everything (just add ram+flash): hold on to your fucking pants and get used to the future. Course, may not materialize. My OpenPandora hasn't. ;)

I have two Open Pandoras that say you Just Need To Wait A Little More (tm). ;)

And yeah, seems like every few years we get more and more college grads who seem to be surprised that there is, in fact, a lot of very cheap hardware out there to be had. I've been running and using micro-scale Linux hardware like these new-gen things for decades. Gumstix, BananaBoard, et al.

Okay, the <$50 pricing is pretty nice, but not entirely unexpected given the trend over the last 10 years of having these things get cookie-cut around. The whole point of ARM in the first place was to get to this position ..

Dev hardware, *board, is for suckers: cheap hardware now a days is consumer gear.

Wow. As someone who is actually active in the A10 community, I know Tom and this is not a scam. Some people focus more on developing cool shit than on their website.

Well if people want to sell their cool shit, they probably aught to spend 20 minutes making sure all the media around their product doesn't look like a giant con.

Seriously other than the handle hipboi/hipboy in an email address that was removed from the site yesterday, there's nothing definitively linking Cubietech/Cubieboard to Tom Cubie.

And I can't see anything about the Cubieboard on Tom Cubie's Facebook or G+. That also strikes me a little odd.

Mostly because he hasn't actually announced it yet. The website is still in process and cnx-soft found it recently. Thus all the hubbub.

He has shared the info with people who are friends on G+. But ripping in to someone for their choice of nickname? Seriously? I've seen many worse nicknames by people in this so called startup community that seems to be more and more filled with cynicism and negativity.

Apparently if you don't use a Mac/rails/js it isn't worth looking in to.

Don't see anyone ripping into him for his nickname. You seem to be overreacting . . . a lot.

> Address was visible yesterday (now encrypted) as mr.hipboy@gmail.com. lolwut? What a handle. Very professional. ...This guy really likes hips.

Hip is also a synonym for cool in some circles.

I'm pretty sure he was making a joke and knows that...

I didn't take it as a joke based on his phrasing of all the other criticisms of the site. Perhaps I over reacted, but immediately jumping on it being a scam because the site isn't pretty enough (and isn't ready to actually take orders) seems rather odd to me. Perhaps because I work with ARM devices all day I'm just used to sites that look like that and it doesn't scream scam to me.

If you're right, you did everyone a favor by pointing it out. But if you're wrong, no amount of arguing about the quality of this guy's website is going to make you look less dumb. The way you wrote that comment, you've gone "all in" on the prediction that this is a scam.† I think that was imprudent, but either way: let's let it play out instead of wasting time backpedaling.

† Message board nerd pro-tip: avoid the word "lolwut" if you want to maintain the pretense of evenhandedness.

Who's backpeddling? I'm certainly not. This isn't just about this website — it's about any website that is (or will be) asking you to hand over money or details. My analysis will stand, regardless of the actual situation here.

Gather round children! This is what a two-minute scam website looks like. No effort, discrepancies everywhere (specs), technical inconsistencies (domain whois). But look somebody in a forum said it's a real person, it must be real! No.

If you charge into a site like this and trust it, you're an idiot. Your idiocy is not dependent on this one being a scam. Put the card back in your wallet and wait until the product actually exists.

And the lolwut was in keeping with the style of the handle and the website. I thought that was rather obvious and certainly wouldn't have thought it needed a sidebar conversation... But here we are.

Umm... the site isn't taking orders, which you would know if you'd bothered to make even the most cursory investigation before putting finger to keyboard. So if it is a scam, it's one with no way of making money at present, which would seem a very strange form of fraud.

Would you like a spade at this point?

Sir, you need to apologize or delete your comment. It's wrong and misleading. And it's the top comment on the thread.

And yet he's selling it. So he obviously does care somewhat - otherwise it would be just a video of it working and maybe some assembly instructions. (Something my grandfather did with the Williamson Amplifier: He published how to create it in Wireless World rather than patenting it and making tons of money from it.)

The point is: he built a business, whatever his intentions before he started, his intentions are now in selling.

Minimum. Viable. Product.

Erm. That doesn't work the same for a web app as it does for a product site. If you start off with absolutely zero trust and have a shitty first launch, your next few ones will notice a difference.

I don't know anything about these guys, but I don't think it's too good to be true.

Ever since the Raspberry pi shipped, credit-card sized computers have been coming out the woodwork. As expected, now there are projects on vWorker (ex RentACoder) asking for engineers to design such computers with state of the art specs with a maximum bid of $499. I can't make this shit up! $499! At least toss us a bone and add a zero so we don't laugh quite so hard!

Anyway, aside from that rant, this is a Great Thing. I predict an array of products that are now possible due to a flood of dirt cheap, physically small computers that can run Linux. One off industrial controllers that would have taken a week of development time can now be pushed out in a day, etc.

"Ever since the Raspberry pi shipped, credit-card sized computers have been coming out the woodwork"

No, they've been here all along in the SBC and industrial spaces. They're just on your radar now because they're cheap.

Is Gumstix a line of "one-off industrial computers"?

http://www.gumstix.com/

Having lived in the SBC and industrial space my entire career I'd probably take issue with that statement if I could be bothered to.

I'll amend it to "cheap credit-card sized computers" if it makes you feel better.

Gumstix have been around for what, about 10 years IIRC? They are more expensive than what I'm talking about. The point I'm making is that CPU boards on the level to run flavors of Linux easily are approaching "jellybean" component status and that will enable applications that simply weren't feasible before.

I agree, this is fantastic price point and an awesome trend. Try hitting this price point with a COTS Arduno + ethernet shield!

Exactly my point!

Ever since the Raspberry pi shipped, credit-card sized computers have been coming out the woodwork. As expected, now there are projects on vWorker (ex RentACoder) asking for engineers to design such computers with state of the art specs with a maximum bid of $499. I can't make this shit up! $499! At least toss us a bone and add a zero so we don't laugh quite so hard!

[citation needed]

I'm thinking it would cost at least $150-$200 to prototype, per PCB revision. If it was design only, I wouldn't trust a random freelance designer to get it working first go.

I remember one weird case where bunch of EEG units acted weird, well noisy. The highly experienced MSEE couldn't explain it, because it wasn't the high sensitivity input amp or anything on the board. I eventually figured out it was the off-board battery, and it turned out to be the impedance would climb causing a noisy EEG, as the battery was wearing out in fairly short time from abuse (excess low discharge in SLAs will damage them). Perhaps a few extra capacitors might have help.

It would be the same for these A10/A13 clones, weird glitches can crop up, and even with an experienced engineer, the design could require a PCB revision and a new prototype.

You need a citation that idiots are asking engineers to design complex CPU boards for $499? Just head over to vWorker and search.

In case it's not clear, the $499 is the price they are offering to pay an engineer to do the design, not the price they want the end product to sell for. Hence the reason they are off by close to two orders of magnitude.

I was curious for details, as I didn't think anybody would be that dumb and still be serious. I did search for requests for a board design related to Android or Cortex class CPUs on the site, or similar freelance sites (or eLance or Freelancer.com)

You'd be surprised!

I think on vWorker and some of the others, people just post projects with what they can afford -- a few hundred $$$ -- and see what sticks. There's always someone who will take them up on it, even if only to disappear forever when they realize how difficult it is.

I have received at least one personal invite to design just such a board in the last week (max bid $499), but I already deleted it.

Raspberry Pi is just the new, "hipster", eval board.

There have been cheap, affordable, fun eval boards like the Rpi out there for years. Gumstix, Beagle, and so on. Prices are coming down, sure, but don't kid yourself that the RaspberryPi is something new and ground-breaking: its just a surface feature of a rather larger industry.

Yes, I know. I have a drawer full of evaluation boards stretching back 15+ years.

The point of the pi and its copies/lookalikes, etc is that they are made in production quantities not just test & evaluation quantities.

Go ask Atmel for 10,000 of a random AVR evaluation board. That's probably half of all the boards they ever intended to make.

Olimex is working on an A10 design, and is already shipping A13 based board. This would be quite doable for another small team.

http://olimex.wordpress.com/ or http://goo.gl/5v26a to the post.

Allwinner will reduce minimum shipping quantities for open hardware projects. Closed development OEMs have a 100k minimum order quantity.

You do realize basically all these rules applied to the ras. pi when it was first announced too? Considering that was over a year ago, and comparable parts have been regularly available from China (e.g. Allwinner A10) for many months, it's quite hard to find any surprise in this project at all.

They look like a hardware company, not a web design company. Why do you care about their-not-the-latest-hip-web-theme website? I rather they save the web design money to deliver a lower priced product. Every company starts with no corporate history. You are welcomed to buy from Intel if so choose. Hardware price drops all the times. The price point is not too far off.

HN has been big on launch early and get feedback. How shallow it is to have negative feedback based on look. Let's wait and see how the product turns out, rather than commenting on their web design.

The main homepage doesn't look all that bad, does it? A nice product shot, some specs, and a buy button.

Clicking on things gives varied results though. For example clicking the buy button brings you to a page that indicates you can't actually buy it yet.

You obviously have absolutely no idea what a true startup is. Do you understand the concept of most viable product? How long did you spend collecting all this information? Are you a disgruntled competitor with a bit of jealousy perhaps?

The guy is working on physical hardware. Do you know how difficult that is? To ship a device like this? A lot of the issues you mentioned are the last of his worries.

I'm a bit suspicious, too. Googling the name of the board turns up maybe 10 results all in the same domain. Immediately following are things not related to the Cubieboard. I'm probably gonna sit this one out for now.

EDIT: Using some different terms brings up a ton of articles about the board from popular sources, yet they're all new within the past few days. I dunno, it might actually be real, but it me a bit uncomfortable, but that may just be me.

This is typical of the technology-journalist-circle-jerk you see when a new product is announced but nobody has hands on yet. No news older than a few days old. Same photos over and over again.

How can you have a technology-journalist-circle-jerk without anybody having hands on?

"more" link goes to an incomplete page.

They are probably just small, idealistic, and prioritize producing actually working hardware over producing marketing fluff.