Interesting "Competitors" for the Raspberry Pi

The parallela sounds and looks cool but we are talking about a major project that includes sillicon rebake and that probably is 6-12months away from mass production.

Meanwhile while there are other developments that are not exactly comparable to the R-Pi, they are slowly but steady making progress, like the OLinuXino boards from Olimex. I'm testing both the micro and maxi using the Freescale iMX233 application processor SoC (fully documented by the way,) waiting for the A13 one and they also have under development one using the A10. The iMX233 Maxi uses also the LAN9512 and I didn't find any issues with it yet (and BTW the connectors are properly aligned and it has a nice swtiching power supply, the board is slightly bigger than the R-pi, no HDMI/VGA tough.)

I also recently got a TI AM335x Starter Kit, you will start to see more stuff based on the AM335x and TI will get more agressive to dettach the OMAP from some applications and put it on boards similar to the R-Pi.

Still the R-pi continues to be a good idea, unfortunatelly with an associated plan badly executed and with more focus on hype and promotion than really make it a strong and solid "product" with the participation of a community that is eager and able to contribute.

No schematics, no Gerbers, major concern is "cloning" .... I'd not clone something that is not working properly ...

-J

At least it looks like Olimex is taking the problems from people using their boards seriously.

Their Forum is an example of what a forum should be like.

The supply dip when you connect an usb device is a known fact. It might be hard to notice it on a scope, unless you have a good memory scope and are able to trigger it properly. The issue happens more frequently on the newer boards with the usb polyfuses removed. If you look at the Pi schematics, there aren't much buffer capacitors on the 5V supply rail. (just 1 small capacitor). I guess we get what we payed for.

It looks like a lot of the Pi usb issues are caused by timing.

As linux isn't a real time OS, and as stated before that the cpu can become heavy loaded, I doubt they will ever be able to fully fix the issue.

Besides the usb, there are other dissapointing things. One mentionned already is the fact that X11 isn't hardware accelerated.

Another one is the poor quality of the analog audio output. A third one is the fact that you need to properly shutdown the system to avoid sd card corruption. This makes it difficult to use the Pi as an embedded solution. A fourth one is the critical power requirement of the board.

Some of those can be resolved, but all solutions make your cheap solution (not so cheap) anymore.

I know it's a little off topic, but these points are worth checking when seeking for "Competitors" and might rectify a higher price.

John, perhaps the answer is to go non-commercial.  A modular open hardware board could be layed out to enthusiast-level specifications, avoiding the problems of soldering BGA packages by accepting a SoC on a header instead of the BGA device directly.  Separately, we could commission a tiny BGA SoC on a corresponding breakout header to be manufactured for us after a suitable SoC is chosen by community consensus.

It's certainly doable if the open hardware community wanted to do it.  The cost of the unpopulated boards would be minimal, far undercutting Raspberry Pi.  Admittedly it's not a fair comparison, but unpopulated boards are not a disincentive to most electronics enthusiasts, and I'm sure that companies would spring up selling kits of parts as well as fully assembled boards for profit.

PS.  We could even ask competing SoC manufacturers to develop their own SoC-on-a-breakout-header for us.  Very little effort and cost for them, and potentially good PR since it constitutes a form of marketing targetted at engineers and enthusiasts, just like normal prototyping boards but even cheaper.

Morgaine.

The competitors and most commercial products using linux have an on board flash chip used to store the os "read only".

Well you can also treat the sdcard as "read only" and use something like jffs2 instead of ext4, but it does take somewhat more effort to build a useable system with a read-only root filesystem. The obvious problem here is that the current OS images for the Pi want to think it's a 'normal' desktop PC, fill it with essentially irrelevant crap that doesn't need to be running etc.  Frankly I'm surprised it works as well as it does given the choices you make for spinning rust can be so very wrong for sdcard.

@Morgaine Well I'm in a unique position to do start such a project, on the funding, design, and manufacturing. I've waited for years now to find a good solution in the market and I had hoped that the RPi would hit most of the requirements but it just didn't happen. I don't think it's reasonable to find a solution that isn't BGA, besides, how many people really are doing any soldering on parts with pin counts more than ~50, and why would they need to?

Personally I like the OMAP line of parts but all the boards are higher cost than what I want and the BeagleBone doesn't do 1080P and if I was to do anything it doesn't make sense not to support 1080P. Is TI/distribution pricing their boards like standard retail markets so the real cost is sub $50? The last time I spoke with TI the OMAP was still only sold to major OEMs but with recent announcements that might not be the case.

 

Regarding the long-running discussion on Broadcom's closed tech - I don't buy into this at all. Any serious customer will (in return for signing a few non- disclosures) have access to extended technical specs and will hopefully have the brains to do something useful with it.

I tend to agree, and I'm pragmatic enough to realise that the closed nature isn't necessarily a problem. Taken to it's logical conclusion the 'everything must be open' argument means you need the SMT placement machine to be completely OSS along with the CAD programs, design tools, semiconductor manufacturing plant, and eventually the ideas in the designers head. It may be an interesting goal,  but likely an unrealistic one for as long as there's money involved.

Keep in mind though that with the volumes the RPF are building it's unlikely that Broadcom would even have entertained talking to them if the ideas hadn't originated with Broadcom employees.  That sort of problem alone means it'd be hard for you or me as individuals to do what the RPF did using a Broadcom device.

Your chosen software may not even have an ARM port. Obviously this is no barrier for the dedicated geek with access to source code, but it's a faff.

That's the one part that puzzles me. Given we are talking Linux and therefore largely open source stuff, most things will just work and you can train almost anyone to type './configure ; make ; make install' you hardly need to understand what it does or how it works.

But simplistically, if we assume it's still about education then where's the downside to some learning about what the commands mean and do ?

If we assume that the Pi is a consumer toy, then I agree it's different, but in that case it should be an 'iPi' with a fancy touch screen etc..

but as ARM is so splintered I really don't see the situation changing any time soon for consumers who want an ARM P.C. for general duties and want it to work out of the box without having to constantly *** around in terminal.

 

Maybe one day it will be as easy as x86 and I'll wonder what all the fuss was about.

It will change, and probably sooner than you think. Mostly driven by something called Windows 8 which will drive crap like ACPI into the Arm arena and force some degree of standardisation.

x86 isn't really all that easy, possibly actually much worse. The difference being that it's better understood. To quote something you said earlier "if something is clearly broken and fixes are not forthcoming then don't keep it on life support - just toss it out and make room for something better" but that's exactly the opposite of what x86 has done - it's still carrying most if not all of the mistakes of the past 30 odd years all in the name of compatibility and standardisation.

Take for example my shiny new i7 laptop that still has this:

00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation QM67 Express Chipset Family

'ISA' being a throwback to the very early days of the PC - the physical slot has gone, but the logical part of the architecture remains.

how many people really are doing any soldering on parts with pin counts more than ~50, and why would they need to?

Well I certainly do.  It's becoming less of a problem these days as lots of stuff is moving to being connected serially meaning that pin counts are coming down.

You're right though, until something can challenge the Pi in terms of cost with a roughly equivalent set of features it's kind of pointless. The $25/$35 is some sort of magic number that boards costing many times more really can't compete with, people aren't looking beyong the headline price - it doesn't matter if the more expensive one is somehow 'better'.

Separately, we could commission a tiny BGA SoC on a corresponding breakout header to be manufactured for us after a suitable SoC is chosen by community consensus.

Not exactly the same, but that's effectively what that Rhombus-tech EOMA thing is trying to do, and as far as I can tell we'll all be old and grey by the time it goes on sale.

It probably needs another RPF-alike group to actually go produce some and show the ODM's that there's volume/demand similar to the Pi behind it before it'll take off.  There's plenty of other candidate boards - beaglebone for one - that don't seem able to gain the momentum.

There are even places doing exactly what you describe - producing a module with all the bga stuff on it. One I found recently http://bluetechnix.at/rainbow2006/site/i_mx_family/__core_modules/i-mx31-/387/i-mx31-.aspx but go check out the prices and you see why they don't gain the momentum to challenge the Pi either.

My comment about the sodlering of parts was aimed more at the comments made earlier about "needing/wanting" a board that didn't have a BGA. I just don't see that as a requirement even for a hobbist board. Are any of the Arduino users even replacing the processor on those boards? Morgaine's comments about utilizing an add on module for the main CPU is what I'm seeing more and more of with a 200-pin SO-DIMM being rather common. The problem with what I've seen though is that those aren't cheap. Even the Variscite AM335x SO-DIMM board is priced at $39 which seems nice but then you need a baseboard and all the connectors which brings you right back the BeagleBone cost.

George, it's no different to hobbiest suppliers often providing a semi-populated board containing only the SMT components for the design already placed, in order to support those enthusiasts who like to construct but for whom soldering SMT is difficult.  There are many such people, even today with the wide presence of SMT.

Likewise, soldering BGA would be problematic for the majority of hardware enthusiasts, so providing the BGA part on a plugin module would play a similar role.  The rest of the board would be constructable by the majority of enthusiasts using their more common building skills, which does not include handling BGA.

selsinork wrote:

 

Not exactly the same, but that's effectively what that Rhombus-tech EOMA thing is trying to do, and as far as I can tell we'll all be old and grey by the time it goes on sale.

Very good point.  I'd forgotten about them, because as you say, the (visible) rate of progress seemed near zero.

There are even places doing exactly what you describe - producing a module with all the bga stuff on it. One I found recently http://bluetechnix.at/rainbow2006/site/i_mx_family/__core_modules/i-mx31-/387/i-mx31-.aspx but go check out the prices and you see why they don't gain the momentum to challenge the Pi either.

Two outfits that love making breakout boards (judging by the high rate at which they release them) are Adafruit and Sparkfun, and instead of price gouging they seem to have a business policy of extremely reasonable pricing.  I wonder if they'd be interested in the concept.

And their respective heads are more than open and willing to be spoken to about ideas, which is wonderful.

@Morgaine I agree, Adafruit and Sparkfun (and maybe Pololu) have done well. I think Limor might be more advanced and open to this idea and with the amount of exposure she draws could really help. She is heavily invloved the RPi though so to a certain extent this might be seen somewhat as a conflict of interest.

Right now we don't have anything to propose. Should we form a group that investigates and creates a solution? Mounting the main processor on a plug in board could be a good way to go to gain more overall support but understand that this adds to the cost and trying to "compete" with RPi the first thing looked at is going to be cost. I think if you're able to come in at around a $50 mark you could generate a lot of interest. Like I said before, I am more than willing to help in more ways than one. There are already quite a few projects on Kickstarter that are nothing more than different modules, and they are getting quite a bit of attention. If something like this evolved and was ready to launch, a Kickstarter project could be a good way to help get it going and my tag line would be that money is needed for HDMI licensing, FCC testing, etc. All those big ticket up front costs that many people don't seem to factor into the bottom line.

@Morgaine I agree, Adafruit and Sparkfun (and maybe Pololu) have done well. I think Limor might be more advanced and open to this idea and with the amount of exposure she draws could really help. She is heavily invloved the RPi though so to a certain extent this might be seen somewhat as a conflict of interest.

Right now we don't have anything to propose. Should we form a group that investigates and creates a solution? Mounting the main processor on a plug in board could be a good way to go to gain more overall support but understand that this adds to the cost and trying to "compete" with RPi the first thing looked at is going to be cost. I think if you're able to come in at around a $50 mark you could generate a lot of interest. Like I said before, I am more than willing to help in more ways than one. There are already quite a few projects on Kickstarter that are nothing more than different modules, and they are getting quite a bit of attention. If something like this evolved and was ready to launch, a Kickstarter project could be a good way to help get it going and my tag line would be that money is needed for HDMI licensing, FCC testing, etc. All those big ticket up front costs that many people don't seem to factor into the bottom line.

I think if you're able to come in at around a $50 mark you could generate a lot of interest.

http://cubieboard.org/ supposedly going to be $49 plus shipping etc. So that's your competition. 

Realistically, today, an A10 board of some description is probably the best all-round SoC to base a design on. Notice that Olimex, CubieBoard, Rhombus-Tech and others are all choosing it.

Also as it uses the off-the-shelf from Arm  Mali GPU and there's already an effort to produce OSS drivers it's likely to be a better bet than the bcm2835 GPU. It doesn't matter that it's slower than the broadcom device as there's no drivers for the broadcom anyway..

selsinork wrote:

 

Realistically, today, an A10 board of some description is probably the best all-round SoC to base a design on. Notice that Olimex, CubieBoard, Rhombus-Tech and others are all choosing it.

I think that an important part of doing something interesting and open in this area would be to harness some of these companies, instead of competing with them.  If they can provide parts of the puzzle and the concept enhances their business instead of competing with it, this builds buy-in to the idea.  It can even create synergy with their existing product lines and bring an ecosystem into being, as happened with Arduino and shield suppliers.

For example, Olimex offers to sell A13+PMIC pairs for those who want to clone their new A13-based boards.  With that kind of remarkably open attitude, they would probably also be willing to be involved in an open enthusiast project such as we're discussing, because they could manufacture industrial range versions of it.  And of course, they are very much in the business of making small volume industrial and enthusiast boards with very tight profit margins already.

Adafruit are undoubtedly annoyed at not being a primary supplier of Raspberry Pi because of RPF's manufacturing and distribution cartel, so it wouldn't surprise me at all if they would be interested in a plan do something similar using a more open SoC and an open hardware design that they could manufacture.

Morgaine.

The CubieBoard is interesting and I would have to think that it's the closest competitor to the RPi at the moment. To be honest though, I get nervous with products that are produced in China. I have had some boards built there and I also procure some parts from there BUT on MANY occasions they have been known to change components at will and I'd bet that is a primary reason for the recent move of the RPi manufacturing.

@Morgaine, maybe you're right and Adfruit would be interested in something like this or maybe the CubieBoard will evolve at a more rapid rate. For me the longest part of the product bringup after the design has been finalized is the testing and approval of the prototypes. Once that's done it should just be a matter of ramping up production at a controlled rate.

I guess I'll shoot an email to Limor and see if she's interested...

Earlier in this thread I mentioned that if you're intending to create an open board, it is helpful if you can encourage an ecosystem to develop around it so that the concept doesn't wither and die through disinterest, and that one way of achieving this is by riding on the backs of existing open hardware companies so that you are broadening the audience for their product lines.  They often like that, and it may even result in some direct support for your cause.

I mention this because on Olimex's blog I found this recent post which describes their very inexpensive MOD-IO2, an "Input Output expandable board with UEXT".  This nice stackable design is the kind of approach to I/O  that I think should feature in all open hardware ARM boards, since its inherent expandability would allow a single community board to address a very diverse range of requirements that naturally appear in a large community.

Indeed, any computer board is made more flexible when it features a generic I/O connector, as Olimex described in their reason for UEXT ,which covers I2C, SPI and RS232.  Without generic I/O, you would have to offer different computer boards for different I/O requirements, which makes little sense.  This is obviously preaching to the converted here, but while it's normal to have expandible I/O connectors on the PC, it's far less common in the ARM world, other than through user-level USB.

I like what Olimex is doing in that area for microcontrollers, and it's very notable that they are continuing that flexible I/O concept on their application processor boards as well:  their A13-OLinuXino-WIFI-DEV features a UEXT connector.

Among application processor boards, TI's BeagleBone and Olimex's A13-OLinuXino seem to be in the lead for good I/O design.

Morgaine.

So far I'm happy with some of the tests using the iMX233 OLinuXino Maxi and Micro. I just added the headers to the Micro to set it on a protoboard, I'll post some pics later. Wating for the A13 that is expected to start shipping around Oct 20, and they are already testing the first prototypes for an A10 based board.

Not doing much yet with the iMX233 boards, just making sure the basic stuff works, that they don't crash, the Arch Linux images still need some work.

I agee with your assesment that BeagleBone and the OLinuXino have good I/O design.

-J

Morgaine Dinova wrote:

 

I mention this because on Olimex's blog I found this recent post which describes their very inexpensive MOD-IO2, an "Input Output expandable board with UEXT".  This nice stackable design is the kind of approach to I/O  that I think should feature in all open hardware ARM boards, since its inherent expandability would allow a single community board to address a very diverse range of requirements that naturally appear in a large community.

 

Indeed, any computer board is made more flexible when it features a generic I/O connector, as Olimex noted here as their reason for UEXT ,which covers I2C, SPI and RS232.  Without generic I/O, you would have to offer different computer boards for different I/O requirements, which makes little sense.  This is obviously preaching to the converted here, but while it's normal to have expandible I/O connectors on the PC, it's far less common in the ARM world other than through user-level USB.

 

I like what Olimex is doing in that area for microcontrollers, and it's very notable that they are continuing that flexible I/O concept on their application processor boards as well:  their A13-OLinuXino-WIFI-DEV features a UEXT connector.

 

Among application processor boards, TI's BeagleBone and Olimex's A13-OLinuXino seem to be in the lead for good I/O design.

 

Morgaine.

That looks similar to Digilent's (sp?) module. I think you need something a little more generic with more I/O defined on the interface. Then the bigger issue comes in getting a driver written and supported. If that could be done then you are really talking about something that would be useful for all of us.

I'm not worried about not seeing any pictures of boards from Freescale because we're talking about a "major" company with the funds and engineers to get things done. What Olimex is doing looks very promising too but I don't think they've been around as long as Freescale. If I had to sum up what I'm looking for it would be an embedded board with the processing power of a computer (i.e. dual core Arm), community supported OS and drivers, and the flexibility of an embedded board that provides direct access to GPIO and buses.

It seems that almost all of the current boards are leveraging off of the mobile phone markets and that ends up limiting the flexibilty

Sounds good, but put a microcontroller on the board alongside the applications processor.  Except for the most trivial of slow-speed applications, expecting Linux to handle low-level I/O without high response latency and jitter is a design mistake.

Microcontrollers cost next to nothing.  Use one, or indeed several.  The Linux kernel has better things to do.

George Ioakimedes wrote:

 

I'm not worried about not seeing any pictures of boards from Freescale because we're talking about a "major" company with the funds and engineers to get things done.

I wouldn't be worried about a Freescale board other than Freescale's habitual tardiness in delivering new ICs, a tradition they inherited from Motorola.  But I haven't seen any indication that Wandboard has any official relationship with Freescale other than as a customer for Freescale ICs.  For example, if I do a search at https://community.freescale.com for "Wandboard" I get no results.  (Plenty of results for i.MX6 Sabre.)  Just sayin'.

The Wandboard is not a child of Freescale. Check the company I posted the link before ...

And if you are smart enough and a good observer you will notice the names of the other main boards they produce: fairy, elf, druid, seer, wizard ...

-J

Yeah, I just noticed that this wasn't a Freescale project, in fact I can't even find any company name on that Wandboard web site which is odd...