smitthhyy
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- Dec 19, 2012
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Thought I'd share my first impressions of the **broken link removed**. (And for those in Australia & New Zealand, I got my **broken link removed** from **broken link removed** at the AU$ equivalent to what you buy in US$, but with local shipping costs).
A Raspberry Pi on steroids running PC like OS that can use Arduino shields
Taking it out of the box and plugging in, it starts up with Ubuntu straight out of the box. No need to first get an OS image loaded. It certainly felt much quicker than the Raspberry PI which is not surprising when looking at the specs. The processor runs at 1GHz. The ARM Cortex A8 has both the Mali-400 GPU and the ARM NEON instruction unit. The NEON does audio/video codec decoding on hardware. Give the board 1GB of RAM instead of 512k and you have something quite generous from a horsepower perspective especially for the hobby electronics space.
Looking around Ubuntu (or Lubuntu, a cut down Ubuntu for embedded systems), I noticed an Arduino folder with a number of examples. This board has Arduino headers on it. Do note they are not in the right position to be able to plug a shield directly into it and the board is 3.3V so some voltage level translation is required with 5V boards. So I know what I'm doing this weekend. Trying out Arduino sketches on it.
Had a go at putting Android on the device to see how that worked. Downloaded the image from pcduino.com downloads page, put it onto a SD card, started the pcDuino and waited for the OS to install onto the board. Then pull the SD card and restart. I had Android running, so off to Googles app store and install some stuff. YouTube ran excellent in high def.
It doesn't have SATA or IDE style ports for HDD though, but not sure if that matters now days with high speed SD cards and having the OS run on the board instead of from an SD card. Would be good for mass storage though.
**broken link removed** product page has a number of links to useful information so was very quick to find what I needed.
In summary, I'm quite impressed. I think this is going to be a good base for a number of projects.
A Raspberry Pi on steroids running PC like OS that can use Arduino shields
Taking it out of the box and plugging in, it starts up with Ubuntu straight out of the box. No need to first get an OS image loaded. It certainly felt much quicker than the Raspberry PI which is not surprising when looking at the specs. The processor runs at 1GHz. The ARM Cortex A8 has both the Mali-400 GPU and the ARM NEON instruction unit. The NEON does audio/video codec decoding on hardware. Give the board 1GB of RAM instead of 512k and you have something quite generous from a horsepower perspective especially for the hobby electronics space.
Looking around Ubuntu (or Lubuntu, a cut down Ubuntu for embedded systems), I noticed an Arduino folder with a number of examples. This board has Arduino headers on it. Do note they are not in the right position to be able to plug a shield directly into it and the board is 3.3V so some voltage level translation is required with 5V boards. So I know what I'm doing this weekend. Trying out Arduino sketches on it.
Had a go at putting Android on the device to see how that worked. Downloaded the image from pcduino.com downloads page, put it onto a SD card, started the pcDuino and waited for the OS to install onto the board. Then pull the SD card and restart. I had Android running, so off to Googles app store and install some stuff. YouTube ran excellent in high def.
It doesn't have SATA or IDE style ports for HDD though, but not sure if that matters now days with high speed SD cards and having the OS run on the board instead of from an SD card. Would be good for mass storage though.
**broken link removed** product page has a number of links to useful information so was very quick to find what I needed.
In summary, I'm quite impressed. I think this is going to be a good base for a number of projects.
