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Comment by wibbily | Hacker News Reader

The buried lede here is that Qualcomm is selling chips to hobbyists now?

https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/qualcomm/QRB-2210...

$20 for something that can compete with a Pi 4 is intriguing, more so if it has a real low-power sleep state like the Pis don't. It's a gnarly chip though: 0.4mm pitch and like two dozen power rails, plus the fanout looks tight even on an eight layer board. I don't see the PMIC they're using anywhere online either... fingers crossed anyway.

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I doubt this is aimed at hobbyists but looking to court developers looking for a quick and dirty hammer to drive their IoT nails. Remember those Spin scooters that were running off a Raspberry Pi? That's the market they are after. People who want a cheap low effort embedded computer that runs Linux. They can run a webthing in a container that talks to a cloud thing and bangs on some IO and you have a product.

That actually sounds good

It does. But my hope is the low effort does not extend all the way through the business decision-making process and we aren't left with millions of vulnerable multi-core Linux computers connected via 5G in random gadgets.

You already know it will lead to exactly that.

We already have that. We call it "smartphones".

The next thing you know, your scooter is overheating because it's mining Bitcoin

Tricks on them! My scooter is steam powered and uses bitcoin mining to produce the steam. ;)

Actually, now I want to build this. Maybe if these Qualcomm chips are cheap enough.

You can buy the chip, but I'm not sure what that gets you. The only publicly available documentation seems to be the datasheet, which only covers its physical and electrical specifications. I don't see any register-level documentation or even a BSP available for it. I don't think you'd be able to actually do anything with the chip without entering some sort of contractual relationship with Qualcomm.

The use case seems limited to "respins of the Uno Q board design" at the moment, but I'm happy to see at least a datasheet with pinouts... most Arm chips with more-than-MCU-level-performance don't even provide that.

Qualcomm even put up a datasheet for the chip, which is almost unheard of. No technical reference manual though, so the usefulness is limited.

> I don't see the PMIC they're using anywhere online either

Historically QC chips require QC PMICs and those are usually a profit center for QC

> something that can compete with a Pi 4

Qualcomm being as hostile to open-source as Broadcom is definitely something in common for both SBCs.

It’s a funny state of the world that the flagship hobbyist “open source” development boards now both contain products from such hobbyist-hostile chip companies as Qualcomm and Broadcom!

i guess that you have to make compromise somewhere

The Fairphone 5 used a QCM6490, a qualcomm industrial chip with a 10y support timeline

The Fairphone 6 uses a Snapdragon 7s Gen 3 with ane stimated 3-4 years of support

At least for the 5 the compromise was motivated, in the second case i just don't feel like the low performance is a worthwhile compromise.

perhaps the idea with the fairphone is to make the motherboard reverse-compatible with previous models, like framework? They changed the naming scheme

Just like the Linux kernel has plenty of contributions from the companies that get as much hate as possible from FOSS communities.

Turns out there isn't adoption success without compromises.

yeah, except Qualcomm's source and hardware is much higher quality ;) (I used to work with a lot of it at a past job).

Although the graphics part is weird: 720 x 1680 @ 60 Hz

Vertical, and a bit longer than 720p? It's probably some standard size in some industry or type of device, but caught me off guard...

1680 x 720 is resolution for ultrawide 21:9 aspect ratio

That display orientation and resolution is likely a carry-over from a phone project. Was probably cheap and easy for them to integrate an existing IP block from an older phone SOC.

Ah, makes sense!

That's not $20 to compete with a Pi 4, that's $20 for the bare chip. You have to buy all the supporting hardware on top of that. Hobbyists want to avoid routing LPDDR like the plague. There's also the inconvenient fact that digikey shows "0 In Stock", so this listing is just that, something you can't get your hands on as a hobbyist.

$13.24 each if you buy 2000 of them. I remember the lead time being shorter than the 8th of December last time I checked, so I assume they're selling.

I think the biggest impact to hobbyists will be cheaper clone boards made with this chip.

The openness of this market gives me home that we could make something like a pinephone with actually decent hardware and open-enough drivers.

$45 to compete with a Pi3*

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