The Upgradeable Allwinner Dev Board That's Laptop-Compatible Raises $50k So Far

[ljones]

>i've been around computers for a long time, i remember running libreoffice and firefox on pentium III 800mhz systems... compared to those, this is quick!

It is compared to those, and I've been around computers for a long time as well. FIrst one I had was a commodore 64 back in the 80s; a whole 64 kilobytes of memory on a ~1Mhz CPU! Most people would use something faster to flash LEDs with these days(!).

Good to hear there is 2D acceleration btw. That's pretty much a relief. Not good when you want to move a window on the screen and get laggy sloooooow performance because of only framebuffer video. That's a show stopper for quite a few arm based devices out there.

BTW does the "Card computer" (cannot afford the laptop alas) come in a metal case (pcmcia-style?). If so does that form the heatsink for the A20 CPU?

I must confess though to date experiences of ARM based computers is well ... to be frank - a bit naff. Not really had much success with them. Here's a quick rundown;

- Cubox I4 Pro - released from memory a couple of years ago. Unfortunatly the software wasn't even remotely ready so it used (and I think does still use) lots of propietary bits and pieces to make it all work. Which makes upgrading to the newest or clean (for example) debian ..... not really possible or at best very hard.

- RKM Mk902 II - Small arm based rikomagic device which runs some sort of weird version of ubuntu. I put up everything I could find about this device myself a while back. But yet after poking about a lot on the internet the device seems to be almost unknown - not even the boot loader is known.......answers on a postcard please!

- Efika MK Smartbook - Originally this was and looked just like the ideal device. It had similar specs to the open pandora but with a larger screen, bigger keyboard etc). But then efika lost intrest after a couple of years and walked away leaving everyone with a choice - either stick with unupdatable software, stop using the device altogether or use newer software but (because of propietary drivers) be fored with painfully slow X and other bits 'n' pieces not working. I guess .... you learn your lessons :-( .

- Mobile phones and tablets - Say hello to spyware, monitoring, survellience, rubbish battery life, ugly software locked up the hills and back - who knows what is going on. To be frank I'm pretty fed up with it all so my next phone once the current one I'm using dies will be an old "dumbphone".

- BQ Aquarius M10 "Ubuntu edition" tablet. From what I've read a) it's not even really ubuntu, but android and b) you have to use *their* (ubuntu) app store for everything apparently you can't even do a basic apt-get update. Avoid!

(Un)honerable mention - Intel based "mini computers" and tablets based on the bay trail/Z3735F CPU. From what I read intel aren't even intrested in supporting this device on linux and in particular, sound and wifi do not work correctly on a lot of systems. Reamins unfixed - note: Avoid these things like the plague!

I must admit I like the idea of the "card computer". Right now the best I can do is to repurpose thin clients in order to get a small semi-portable x86 machine. The good points? They can be cheap if you poke about on ebay long enough. And they're relatively easy to repurpose. The bad? They are most certianly not free as in freedom, and since they are all second hand there's always the risk of the device turning up its toes on you.

The point I guess I'm trying to make is that ARM overall right now just feels like a bit of a mess. I guess the only real way around it all is to make a completely new CPU from scratch on some sort of FPGA, but that would be a hugely complicated and slow task and FPGAs aren't anywhere near fast enough yet. This is probably something that might be possible in a decade or two from now but not in 2016.

I can only count two good experiences on ARM to date. The most recent is the open pandora which works well :-) and I am looking foward to the forthcoming Dragonbox Pyra too. The other one? The old "tin" acorn archimidies computers from the late 80s that I used at school running for its OS Arthur, then Risc os 2. They were significantly faster for graphics than the Amiga/Atari ST Machines of the same era. Mind you those old machines did cost a fortune.....

ljones

[lkcl]

I'd imagine that webpages loading in a full blown browser such as firefox would be painfully slow to the point of unusability :-( .

ok, basically this is a low-cost "tablet" processor. it's not a pentium 4 quad core 3ghz with dual hyperthreading that could cook eggs and do 80 GFLOPs/sec. you should be considering looking up the User-Agent strings for mobile browsers, installing User-Agent-Switchers, and pretending that it's a mobile web browser.

with iceape (this is parabola) and using the 3.4 kernel, i just tried going to google.com - no problem, really quick. google detects the user-agent string and dramatically simplifies the page that's displayed. slashdot: mmm... not so much. took a loooong time, had dozens of adverts both at the top and on the side. yahoo.com: bleeeeerrrk, full-screen advert for a credit-card company!! m.yahoo.com: really fast! very simple, very effective, quick to load. bbc's web site: had all sorts of stuff about other people killing other people, i was so disgusted i shut it off before it finished loading. youtube: taking a while.... tried going to m.youtube.com and it redirected to desktop. it's currently struggling its way through a video advert for google services which i didn't ask for (i'm still working out how to use the hardware acceleration video playback in web browser engines)... ok whew done.

even on the slower 3.4 kernel, basically when you go to significantly-less complex web sites, such as the qupzilla home page, response time is great and/or tolerable. the effect however of the advertising that you normally mentally block out and are not concerned about because you have a quad-core pentium, and the sheer overwhelming comprehensiveness of the "top" web sites like yahoo, facebook, youtube and news sites (even the techie ones), you *REALLY* should be going to their mobile variants, unless otherwise unavoidable.

[lkcl]

ljones, currently uploading, http://lkcl.net/MVI_0176.MP4 i'll be deleting that in a few days and replacing it with an update but i wanted you to be able to see in advance the *significant* difference between viewing mobile web pages, standard "desktop" web pages, "simple" vs "complex" web pages, and using an ultra-light-weight web browser that has a total size of *UNDER* six megabytes (!!) of disk space for its entire installation including documentation. i could have installed u-block to massively reduce load time but the video turned out to be around 12 minutes so was already a bit long.

[lkcl]

>i've been around computers for a long time, i remember running libreoffice and firefox on pentium III 800mhz systems... compared to those, this is quick!

It is compared to those, and I've been around computers for a long time as well. FIrst one I had was a commodore 64 back in the 80s; a whole 64 kilobytes of memory on a ~1Mhz CPU! Most people would use something faster to flash LEDs with these days(!).

i know... and i do! i'm a big fan of the STM32F072, which is nomenclatured "crystal-less" (it PLLs to the incoming USB to gain higher-accuracy). $1.70 in 10k volumes. 72mhz and 48k of on-board NAND and 128k of RAM, something like that. amazing...

Good to hear there is 2D acceleration btw. That's pretty much a relief. Not good when you want to move a window on the screen and get laggy sloooooow performance because of only framebuffer video. That's a show stopper for quite a few arm based devices out there.

surprisingly if you disable G2D it's really not _that_ bad, but it does make a difference, and in particular having G2D enables the Cedrus (libre CEDAR) library to optimise hardware-accelerated playback. that's where you really really notice a difference, especially with 1080p60 playback. without that people have reported only getting 8fps.

BTW does the "Card computer" (cannot afford the laptop alas) come in a metal case (pcmcia-style?). If so does that form the heatsink for the A20 CPU?

it's a 0.1mm stainless steel case, answer yes, and yes, but honestly the A20 is so low power i'm running with an open PCB right now and it's fine.

I must confess though to date experiences of ARM based computers is well ... to be frank - a bit naff. Not really had much success with them. Here's a quick rundown;

- Cubox I4 Pro - released from memory a couple of years ago. Unfortunatly the software wasn't even remotely ready so it used (and I think does still use) lots of propietary bits and pieces to make it all work. Which makes upgrading to the newest or clean (for example) debian ..... not really possible or at best very hard.

yehh the advantage of the A20 is, it's been around a while: OS support is now damn good.

- RKM Mk902 II - Small arm based rikomagic device which runs some sort of weird version of ubuntu. I put up everything I could find about this device myself a while back. But yet after poking about a lot on the internet the device seems to be almost unknown - not even the boot loader is known.......answers on a postcard please!

RK3188. there's a community based around it. the bootloader apparently has to be digitally signed but they released (accidentally or otherwise) the key. look up the rocklinux community on freenode. it's a quad-core Cortex A9 - quite good, bit power-hungry though.

- Efika MK Smartbook - Originally this was and looked just like the ideal device. It had similar specs to the open pandora but with a larger screen, bigger keyboard etc). But then efika lost intrest after a couple of years and walked away leaving everyone with a choice - either stick with unupdatable software, stop using the device altogether or use newer software but (because of propietary drivers) be fored with painfully slow X and other bits 'n' pieces not working. I guess .... you learn your lessons :-( .

aiyaaa, i forgot about that one - probably because of the really rather violent reaction of their lead engineer when i discussed the possibility of collaboration and turning the product into a modular upgradeable device, *precisely* to solve the issues that you raise. the CEO was - is - a really nice guy, he's known for being very amenable. we talked and he loved the idea of modular upgradeability, so cc'd in his lead technical engineer, and that's when it all went to shit. *man* that guy was aggressive.

anyway the rest as you say is history - you have to bear in mind that freescale commissioned them to create the efika smartbook as a demo of the capabilities of the iMX processor that was in it. it was *not* about actually creating a marketable product... and even if it was, the expected lifetime was WAY too short, thanks to the "Supernova" effect on SoCs these days.

- Mobile phones and tablets - Say hello to spyware, monitoring, survellience, rubbish battery life, ugly software locked up the hills and back - who knows what is going on. To be frank I'm pretty fed up with it all so my next phone once the current one I'm using dies will be an old "dumbphone".

ahead of you, there - i have a nokia 3310 and am happy with it if i use a smartphone it will be one that i made.

- BQ Aquarius M10 "Ubuntu edition" tablet. From what I've read a) it's not even really ubuntu, but andro:id and b) you have to use *their* (ubuntu) app store for everything apparently you can't even do a basic apt-get update. Avoid!

oh maaaan, no wonder you're wary of this project. well, if you've seen "crazy people" with dudley moore https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crazy_People you'll see where i get the inspiration from for not doing glossy marketing. in other words, what you see is what you get... but you'll be able to upgrade at a fraction of the cost. it's about the ideas, not about the actual devices themselves. that's what crowd-funding is really about: that you can follow along and actually get involved. it's about empowering people to gain control over their hardware.

all of the stories that you've told, basically there were a massive disappointment... because there really wasn't a way for you to get involved. canonical: delivered something that you didn't want. efika: walked away because freescale's money ran out. MK902: not a big enough community, delivered with android anyway... likewise the Cubox.

(Un)honerable mention - Intel based "mini computers" and tablets based on the bay trail/Z3735F CPU. From what I read intel aren't even intrested in supporting this device on linux and in particular, sound and wifi do not work correctly on a lot of systems. Reamins unfixed - note: Avoid these things like the plague!

yeahhh... i'm going to be looking at the SoC with the collaboration between rockchip and intel... the 3230 or something like that. if the full firmware's available (and no spying backdoor co-processor) i'll keep on investigating... but... yeah, honestly, intel's track record is pretty shit. they're really struggling to understand their own mindset right now.

The point I guess I'm trying to make is that ARM overall right now just feels like a bit of a mess. I guess the only real way around it all is to make a completely new CPU from scratch on some sort of FPGA, but that would be a hugely complicated and slow task and FPGAs aren't anywhere near fast enough yet. This is probably something that might be possible in a decade or two from now but not in 2016.

we'll get there. $5m to $10m and i can get a SoC made.

I can only count two good experiences on ARM to date. The most recent is the open pandora which works well :-) and I am looking foward to the forthcoming Dragonbox Pyra too. The other one? The old "tin" acorn archimidies computers from the late 80s that I used at school running for its OS Arthur, then Risc os 2. They were significantly faster for graphics than the Amiga/Atari ST Machines of the same era. Mind you those old machines did cost a fortune.....

ljones

coool..

[ssam]

Last few days for people to get there pledges in. Currently at 75%

[ljones]

Well I did decide to fund that project btw. Got one of the "Libre Tea Computer Card" devices in the end. The project seems to have been funded successfully as well; 114%!

ljones

[liam]

They aren't using Allwinner software and Allwinner is basically the only manufacturer where you can find low amounts of chips on sale (from third parties) too.
Support for Allwinner hardware is added (and mainlined) by team sunxi (not affiliated with Allwinner in any way) and it's relatively good.

This project is flawed on many other aspects.

They would have to be running allwinner's DT files, at a minimum, and allwinner's BSP.
Freescale, for one, lets you but socs in lots of 1k. Considering this device's pricing, they could easily afford these chips.

[starshipeleven]

They would have to be running allwinner's DT files, at a minimum, and allwinner's BSP.

The violations aren't in that, but in the drivers usually.

Freescale, for one, lets you but socs in lots of 1k. Considering this device's pricing, they could easily afford these chips.

That's interesting, also because Freescale/NXP's politics on open documentation and drivers. Where do they state this?

[liam]

The violations aren't in that, but in the drivers usually.

Well, in the drivers and the kernel itself (most of these soc companies make changes to the scheduler, at least, and probably lots of other changes).
The drivers might not be an issue b/c of either: 1)they target the android HAL, and/or 2)they are generic and make use of gpl'd shims. I genuinely don't know if either of those apply to allwinner.

That's interesting, also because Freescale/NXP's politics on open documentation and drivers. Where do they state this?

http://www.ti.com/lsds/ti/processors/sitara/arm_cortex-a15/am57x/products.page#p941=Personal%20Electronics

http://www.nxp.com/products/microcontrollers-and-processors/arm-processors/i.mx-applications-processors/i.mx-6-processors/i.mx6qp/i.mx-6solox-processors-heterogeneous-processing-with-arm-cortex-a9-and-cortex-m4-cores:i.MX6SX?&cof=0&am=0&tab=Buy_Parametric_Tab&fromSearch=false

Amlogic may be an option as well since they are used in the odroids, but I wasn't able to find a pricing sheet for them.

[starshipeleven]

Well, in the drivers and the kernel itself (most of these soc companies make changes to the scheduler, at least, and probably lots of other changes).
The drivers might not be an issue b/c of either: 1)they target the android HAL, and/or 2)they are generic and make use of gpl'd shims. I genuinely don't know if either of those apply to allwinner.

Well, making changes and even ugly ugly ugly hacks to kernel isn't forbidden as long as they release the source.

For allwinner hardware all the above is irrelevant as the sunxi team (not affiliated with Allwinner) has mainlined most stuff already, the video decoder works partially, their 2D acceleration driver works well but is a ugly framebuffer affair, and Mali needs a blob (this is from ARM so not Allwinner's responsibility)

Amlogic may be an option as well since they are used in the odroids, but I wasn't able to find a pricing sheet for them.

Dunno, they are known for going their own way with things like hardware acceleration for media, and things like that. I don't know how well supported they are on actual linux (i.e. not stuff made with their SDK).