OLinuXino A20-Lime2 ?

Further kudos for Olimex, from an entirely different angle.

They're a progressive and forward-looking outfit, and so their shop (link to A10-OLinuXino-LIME) is on IPv6.

All my Firefox's multiple 6's light up nicely:

Olimex is getting there through a Hurricane Electric tunnel, which demonstrates how anyone can get onto IPv6 even if their ISP doesn't support it natively.

Morgaine.

You know, I never even noticed they were on IPv6... I just take it for granted these days that IPv6 works seamlessly.

So how many did you order then ?

selsinork wrote:

 

You know, I never even noticed they were on IPv6... I just take it for granted these days that IPv6 works seamlessly.

It does indeed work seamlessly.  I only keep a deckful of IPv6 indicator lights because I'm an IPv6 advocate.

So how many did you order then ?

Hehe, none yet, because only the 50 developer boards were put in the shop.  As Olimex wrote, the first production batch won't be available for a fortnight, so any order placed now could end up as a pre-order and/or may hit the Xmas postal chaos which is already starting.  You know me, I hate pre-orders, and international pre-orders even more.  (I guess I'll have to use Olimex's vendor on eBay UK.)

But 2014 will see Olimex getting my money, and I'll probably end up with as many base-model LIMEs as I have BBBs.  Their later A20 models will add to the family here.  2014 is looking to be a fun year.

Morgaine.

Morgaine Dinova wrote:

 

Hehe, none yet, because only the 50 developer boards were put in the shop.  As Olimex wrote, the first production batch won't be available for a fortnight, so any order placed now could end up as a pre-order and/or may hit the Xmas postal chaos which is already starting.  You know me, I hate pre-orders, and international pre-orders even more.  (I guess I'll have to use Olimex's vendor on eBay UK.)

 

I looked at the uk ebay stuff, not too impressed, missing some recent stuff and I didn't think the prices were that great.

At this time of year, those 50 might last a while as lots of people will be thinking about other things..  When I read the bit about the run of 2K happening in two weeks I was somewhat confused since they're closed from the 23rd right through, so they're being built while they're closed?  Doesn't really matter I suppose, unless you get one of the 50, it'll be next year anyway.

Talking of postal chaos, my Wandboards were delivered last week in approx 33 hours from leaving their warehouse in the US to being with me in the UK, while stuff sent through the post from farnell in leeds took three days...

Morgaine Dinova wrote:

so any order placed now could end up as a pre-order and/or may hit the Xmas postal chaos which is already starting.  You know me, I hate pre-orders, and international pre-orders even more. 

Next day delivery from Olimex HQ in Bulgaria to me in the UK      Xmas is early this year !

I'd not read the post about there only being 50 available when I placed the order, so wasn't hopeful when I did read it. Checked my email at that point and I'd already got the shipping confirmation. So thanks to both Olimex and UPS for a very painless experience!

Isn't 'Micro' supposed to mean small though ?

The LIME is marginally larger than the Pi.

I'm going to have to order a load of uSD cards now. I'll bet it ends up with those getting lost in the xmas post chaos

They look great! The microSD is nice, you could use the one for programming the BBB temporarily!

Did you get any LiPo for it too? Actually personally I'd desolder the connector and either replace with vertical type, or place the existing one on the underside so it is oriented in the reverse direction so it was facing in if the battery will be in the enclosure but that's an easy mod!

My xmas gift to myself is just some tools. I badly need a magnifier for all the tiny SMDs so I've purchased a couple of handheld ones until I can stomach the cost of a decent desk version.

selsinork wrote:

 

Next day delivery from Olimex HQ in Bulgaria to me in the UK      Xmas is early this year !

Awesome!!!

The LIME is marginally larger than the Pi.

Not if you include the Pi's connectors sticking out in all directions and covering half a football pitch.

And yes, the "-MICRO" field in various OLinuXino names was probably a mistake which they're regretting, haha.

Anyway, very cool, and as shabaz suggested, an excellent Xmas self-gift.  I'll just have to survive over Xmas on my BBBs --- I'll manage.

Morgaine.

shabaz wrote:

 

Did you get any LiPo for it too?

I didn't.. figured that with a battery in the package it woud go by road and if I was lucky it'd turn up in about March

Not sure if the one you used between the connectors on your BBB would fit or not. If not it'll be marginal though.

I may get one locally, or just wait to a slightly less insane time of year

Ah, good point, batteries do complicate delivery. I'm sure it is the same connector, because the Olimex page under 'Related Products' shows the same LiPo model I used. It is JST 'PH' series, which is on a 2mm pitch.

Morgaine Dinova wrote:

 

selsinork wrote:

 

Next day delivery from Olimex HQ in Bulgaria to me in the UK      Xmas is early this year !

Awesome!!!

 

Very.  Olimex say it could be up to three days for them to ship something depending on how busy they are, then 2-3 days UPS within Europe.

The reality was that I had the tracking number about 90 mins after placing the order. Took a while to show up on the ups tracking page, and then a while to show the scheduled delivery date.. Very surprised when it said it'd be here today, I'd been expecting the second half of next week.

The downside of course is that the shipping on a single 30 euro part ends up being a significant percentage of the end cost, so you'll want to get a few things to make it worthwhile, not that you should have any problems with that!  But with interesting products and excellent service, I'm liking Olimex more and more

To @e14, you've missed out on a sale, again. Please start stocking more Olimex SBC's. Wandboards too.

Morgaine Dinova wrote:

 

selsinork wrote:

 

Next day delivery from Olimex HQ in Bulgaria to me in the UK      Xmas is early this year !

Awesome!!!

 

Very.  Olimex say it could be up to three days for them to ship something depending on how busy they are, then 2-3 days UPS within Europe.

The reality was that I had the tracking number about 90 mins after placing the order. Took a while to show up on the ups tracking page, and then a while to show the scheduled delivery date.. Very surprised when it said it'd be here today, I'd been expecting the second half of next week.

The downside of course is that the shipping on a single 30 euro part ends up being a significant percentage of the end cost, so you'll want to get a few things to make it worthwhile, not that you should have any problems with that!  But with interesting products and excellent service, I'm liking Olimex more and more

To @e14, you've missed out on a sale, again. Please start stocking more Olimex SBC's. Wandboards too.

selsinork wrote:

 

To @e14, you've missed out on a sale, again. Please start stocking more Olimex SBC's. Wandboards too.

Well now that we know about their MarS board, it's looking like a conflict of interest between Farnell the distributor and E14/Embest the board manufacturer --- they're pushing their own product by omitting others.  When a distributor isn't agnostic to the products it sells, it's no longer working in the best interests of its customers.

Morgaine.

Although it's not an area that sparks our interest much here, OLinuXino is definitely invading the Pi's media consumer territory.  This Olimex blog "QtAV running on A13-OLinuXino-WIFI with hardware acceleration" shows good video performance even while applying effects, and mireq's Github page shows how easy it is to work with that toolkit.

The LIME series is going to be popular for all kinds of reasons.

Morgaine.

PS. A few days ago a related blog post showed "Qt5.2 running on A13-OLinuXino-WIFI OSHW Linux computer", and while the eye candy effects were a bit excessive in my functional view, they certainly demonstrated the power and flexibility of Qt5.

Morgaine Dinova wrote:

Well now that we know about their MarS board, it's looking like a conflict of interest between Farnell the distributor and E14/Embest the board manufacturer

That's somewhat to be expected, sell stuff you can make a bigger margin on first....  Stuff you manufacture yourself may also skip the queue and be something you'll have in your catalogue earlier.

If it was that simple, you'd expect the MarS to be a lot more prominent here, but it really isn't. The other problem with MarS is that the community around it is going to be tiny. There's decent enough communities around Boundary/Wand that it may not matter though.

Morgaine Dinova wrote:

 

Although it's not an area that sparks our interest much here, OLinuXino is definitely invading the Pi's media consumer territory.  This Olimex blog "QtAV running on A13-OLinuXino-WIFI with hardware acceleration" shows good video performance

I was watching that earlier...  From what I've been reading, it's still somewhat of a black art to get CedarX and all of the pieces working together. I've not investigated fully yet, but it seems that some parts are binary blobs too.  Very impressive demo anyway!

LIME + sata drive taped to the back of the TV running something like this is going to catch a lot of attention from the media player crowd I'd think.

Maybe the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing?

Certainly Embest building a board but Farnell not promoting it for them makes no business sense at all.  And you're totally right that without a community around it, it's going absolutely nowhere, which means that there won't be significant profits from it and so the development costs went down the drain.  And that in turn means that if this were a reason for not selling Wandboard / A20-OLinuXino then they'd be losing on the left hand as manufacturers and losing on the right hand as distributors as well.

The whole thing looks like mismanagement.  Maybe Farnell has gotten too big, and employees now no longer care?

Morgaine.

Morgaine Dinova wrote:

Maybe Farnell has gotten too big, and employees now no longer care?

Possibly, but just as likely that SBC's are a tiny part of their overall business and that's why they don't get the resources.  They're certainly much more complicated to sell and support compared to reels of SMT resistors or whatever, so someone makes a business decision on what makes more sense.

Morgaine Dinova wrote:

 

Maybe Farnell has gotten too big,

and as someone who has a day job working for a company many times larger than farnell, I agree that getting too big is a problem. getting things done starts to require committee meetings and meetings to discuss the previous meeting etc..  That then leads to the possibility of the behemoth being too slow to react at times.

selsinork wrote:

 

They're certainly much more complicated to sell and support compared to reels of SMT resistors or whatever, so someone makes a business decision on what makes more sense.

The counter-argument to that though is that Farnell sell quite a number of SBCs, including earlier members of the OLinuXino range and BBB and SL and now MarS, so there's no sign of them optimizing for products that require less support.  And MarS is quite new, so there hasn't been a decision of that kind made only recently either.

Morgaine.

selsinork wrote:

 

and as someone who has a day job working for a company many times larger than farnell

Uh oh.

I'm just a minion    that's where things get problematic though, it's very difficult for normal workers to make a difference when everything requires sign-off five levels above my managers head