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.

I don't like hand-soldering below 1mm on a regular basis, but it is possible to do 0.5mm and possibly smaller just with a conventional iron, so maybe higher-density connectors are possible if needed. But there are some high-speed serial interfaces for comms, even gigEth ; )  I (like many people I guess) use the solder-wick method (i.e. just solder conventionally with a normal iron and solder, but just have lots of flux on the board first. Then, suck up the bridges with the solder-wick wire. However, most processors are BGA of course : ( This was 0.5mm pitch with a normal antex iron (with a larger bit than I should have really used).

Morgaine Dinova wrote:

 

More seriously, what are the major options in high pinout connectors these days without dropping below 0.1" pitch?  While DIN41612 is still available and viable, I assume that there are more modern alternatives, not to mention cheaper as well.  "Industrial strength" is probably not needed here.

I think Cubieboard does a good job with their connectors.  They have two 48-pin 2mm pitch connectors, so it's easy to make a base board with low-profile Samtec 2mm sockets (e.g., CLT and SMM series).  Not as low profile as EOMA-68 but you do get 96 pins.

http://linux-sunxi.org/Cubieboard

QFN-68 0.4mm pitch, hand soldered

-J

Hehe yes QFN is certainly a skill!

Hey Everyone, I just saw this, http://wandboard.org, at first glance it's looking pretty good but I haven't read the details...

Looks interesting, the iMX6 series of SoC holds promise. I continually wonder about the compromises though - why do I have to buy useless (to me) wifi and bluetooth in order to get dual core and 1Gb ram ?

I see from their google group that someone has already asked the 'accelerated X ?' question, I wonder if he has an RPi

So $69, but what isn't really clear is whether that includes the 'interface board' or if the interface board is a seperate $150 item.

Also at 314 pins I expect the unspecified 'EDM' connector is going to be fairly fine pitch.

The iMX6 will be quite an interesting series of SoC, among other things integrated 1Gbps Ethernet and 3Gbps SATA, etc.

Expect other boards starting to pop up here and there.

-J

George Ioakimedes wrote:

 

Hey Everyone, I just saw this, http://wandboard.org, at first glance it's looking pretty good but I haven't read the details...

Shipping at end of November 2012 and they don't have photos of prototype boards?  Not a good sign IMO.

Well we had plenty of photos of the Raspberry Pi, even X-Rays, and it took them some time to start shipping.

-J

FYI, one of the producers of EDM modules ... Most probably the wanboard will be just another "mainboard" for the compact modules.

http://www.technexion.com/index.php/products/edm/compact/edm-cf-imx6

-J

FYI, one of the producers of EDM modules ... Most probably the wanboard will be just another "mainboard" for the compact modules.

http://www.technexion.com/index.php/products/edm/compact/edm-cf-imx6

-J