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.

jamodio wrote:

 

I did register for the Wandboard but didn't get any confirmation yet, on their blog they posted that the first batch of validation samples last week. http://www.wandboard.org/index.php/blog

Thank you for posting the Wandboard link.  Impressive that they can price the two boards at US$69 solo and US$89 dual for the two-board sandwich.  I'll be watching that one.

You know, I keep reading Wandboard as Wandaboard, as in "a board called Wanda".  Probably just me -- I once named a board Wamba after the court jester in Ivanhoe.  His full name: "Wamba, son of Witless".

My pleasure. It also happens to me all the time, but if you checked the link I posted some time ago ( http://www.technexion.com/index.php/products/edm/compact/edm-cf-imx6 ) looks like these guys like to brand their base boards with names related to magic (Fairy, Elf, Druid, Seer, Wizard ...) so Wand makes sense and it looks like a new addition to their product portfolio.

Yup, pricing looks very aggresive for the amount of stuff that they have on both boards looking at the pictures.

I didn't check if Freescale released to the public additional info iMX6 yet, as far as I remember these guys are planning to release more documentation as soon as Freescale opens the door. Meanwhile you can take a peak a the Gerber plots for both boards and expansion pinouts, very large and nice number of GPIOs and interfaces to play with.

-J

John Beetem wrote:

 

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.

On past precedent, how are Freescale on the documentation front?  I've never looked closely at Freescale's publications record in this area (nor Motorola's), but I always prefer to back companies that embrace open documentation and support the open software movement.

It would be wonderful if i.MX6 turns out to be friendly to the open hardware/software community.  I'm greatly looking forward to the date of official release when the NDAs are dropped.

It's been a while (ColdFire days) since I've had to look into their documentation, but personally I think they always had quite good documentation, such as for their DSP chips. And they have a forum, so that's a good thing. For their other processors, the CodeWarrior IDE and compiler was quite nice (but again my information is quite old), but was not free unfortunately (nowadays they have free code-size-restricted versions,

so that is very good). Of course, for ARM we have gcc however.

I started looking into the i.MX6 a little more today and am becoming more and more interested in it. Enough that I'm considering taking up our suggestions and trying to create the board we all want. Before I go much further in this quest though I wanted to see if anyone knew of someone already working on this. I'd hate to put the time and effort in this only to be outdown by someone else with a larger team to tackle this. I have all the means to design and build but I'm by no means a software guru.

Thoughts?

My first thoughts are that talking to both Freescale and the Wand[a]board people would be a necessary first step to avoid immediately getting outdone by someone else..

It wouldn't surprise me if Wandboard consider their $69 product to be the lowest spec board they'll consider for their planned range, but Freescale might well be interested in offering a very simple and very cheap evaluation board purely to get their new SoCs into the hands of engineers.  Indeed, GregC suggested that he'd check whether there is anything ongoing among his engineers.

Freescale's Freedom KL25Z eval board for their Cortex-M0+ costs a mere £8.17 from Farnell UK, which highlights that the company is totally happy making zero margin boards just to get SoCs well known in engineering circles.

When eval boards cost so little that it's more hassle to get company expenses approved than to just buy it out of your own pocket, that's a sure sign that the manufacturer is interested in widespread device recognition.  And of course this is excellent news for enthusiasts and students too. :-)

 

On past precedent, how are Freescale on the documentation front?  I've never looked closely at Freescale's publications record in this area (nor Motorola's), but I always prefer to back companies that embrace open documentation and support the open software movement.

 

Freescale has good documentation, application notes and reference code. If you wish you can browse the docs available for the iMX23 family used on the Olimex's boards.

-J

TI does the same with their MSP430 stuff but I haven't seen anyone do it with some of these more powerful processors. I'll check in with Freescale and see what kind of feedback I can get back.

Morgaine Dinova wrote:

 

John Beetem wrote:

 

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.

 

On past precedent, how are Freescale on the documentation front?  I've never looked closely at Freescale's publications record in this area (nor Motorola's), but I always prefer to back companies that embrace open documentation and support the open software movement.

 

It would be wonderful if i.MX6 turns out to be friendly to the open hardware/software community.  I'm greatly looking forward to the date of official release when the NDAs are dropped.

Freescale has been excellent and I haven't heard of that changing.  The only exception I've seen is when they integrate someone else's GPU, e.g., PowerVR.  I did extensive hardware/software design work with QUICC and PowerQUICC, and everything I needed was in the published docs.

Motorola/Freescale is one of those companies that discovered long ago that it's a whole lot cheaper to write good documentation so your customers don't need as much tech support, and you sell a whole lot of chips to customers you never knew existed.  Likewise for TI and as far as I can tell NXP and ST.  Kudos.

Memo to companies who hide their docs behind myriad layers of NDA so it's hard or impossible to design using your parts: You only have yourselves to blame for disappointing sales.

John Beetem wrote:

 

Memo to companies who hide their docs behind myriad layers of NDA so it's hard or impossible to design using your parts: You only have yourselves to blame for disappointing sales.

+1

John Beetem wrote:

 

Memo to companies who hide their docs behind myriad layers of NDA so it's hard or impossible to design using your parts: You only have yourselves to blame for disappointing sales.

+1