Yet another ARM Cortex board ... The pcDuino com ... getting one to see how compares with the Rpi ...
Atr least I didn't have to wake up in wee hours like a year ago to get one.
Cheers
Jorge
Yet another ARM Cortex board ... The pcDuino com ... getting one to see how compares with the Rpi ...
Atr least I didn't have to wake up in wee hours like a year ago to get one.
Cheers
Jorge
jamodio wrote:
Atr least I didn't have to wake up in wee hours like a year ago to get one.
admit it, you missed the experience :-P
I got a Sabre-Lite with the quad-core freescale chip, and it's rather nice. Also got a Olinuxino-maxi and while it's noticably underpowered compared to the rest it's certainly better on the IO front.
Just waiting for some of these A10 boards to become available in a place that doesn't require three arms and four legs for shipping to the UK 
The Wandboard is indicated as ex-stock at Mouser UK , both the Solo and the Dual versions, and I was happily going through the process of ordering a Dual. Then I got to the delivery options page, and discovered that the GBP price, UK site, and "Stock 182 Can Dispatch Immediately" does not mean that it's in stock in the UK. Everything is dispatched from Texas.
Those with previous experience of Mouser will of course chuckle, but laughter wasn't my response. I cancelled, since I want next-day delivery.and sub-orbital courier wasn't being offered. (Actually, just on principle.)
Sabre-Lite is the obvious alternative and is ex-stock at Farnell UK, but at £128.06 it's well outside my "below the radar" cut-off point for snap purchases. That's encroaching on low-end full PC territory. Atom then enters the picture, as well as fully cased commercial products. A prototyping board at that price requires well considered justification.
So, no i.MX6 for me at this point. 
there's a distinct lack of options for getting hold of a lot of these boards in the UK, the A10S & A13 olinuxino have been a/w delivery for an age, sabre-lite appears to be the only iMX6 available locally. By the time you add shipping cost and time delay to get things from the other side of the planet they start looking much less attractive too.
Sure you can use Mouser/Digikey, but as you've found they really ship from the US. I looked at getting a Boundary iMX6 nitrogen_6x board, they use Arrow and when I finally made it through the impenetrable wall that Arrow puts up in front of non-US customers, a $200 board was working out at around $450 - or twice the price of a sabre-lite from farnell. So you get a board with the connectors all on one side, but still not worth that much ot a price jump.
I'd really like to see farnell stock something like the cubieboard / wandboard / marsboard / odroid etc.
but anyway, for ths price of a sabre-lite, you can get four and a bit BeagleBone Black's, the downside is that you don't get a sata interface. Now a cubieboard with ballpark specs similar to BBB, but twice the ram and a sata port for $5 more sounds really good, just that getting it here is painful.
One option for US sourced stuff is to register with a us-uk forwarding service. You do have to be willing to wait a few days, but can then ship stuff to your US address for buttons and they then forward it to you for a total cost that's a lot less than most direct-ship prices I've seen.
A friend did this recently in order to be able to buy something from Amazon US - $30 part, $100 ship to UK, $5 ship to the other side of the US, $25 to ship all the way back across the US and on to the UK. Totally nuts.
The thing about an Atom board is more about what you want to do with it - want GPIO then it's not the right choice, but if all you want is a cheap PC....
Right now, in the UK, BBB wins. Partly because it's easily available - if you know where to look, they still show stock today 
. Someone making cubieboard available in the UK, next day, could change that playing field again.
selsinork wrote:
The thing about an Atom board is more about what you want to do with it - want GPIO then it's not the right choice, but if all you want is a cheap PC....
Actually, about a billion industrial computers might argue with that assessment. 
Although it has started to change in recent times as ARM application processors have fused with microcontrollers to create highly integrated SoCs, for many decades what is now termed "application processor" was handled by x86 devices embedded on industrial computing boards using a variety of form factors. One very common one is PC/104 which has a very long history and continues to serve the needs of industry well. With I/O boards being separate from CPU boards in PC/104, the industry developed an extremely diverse ecosystem of I/O boards to cover every nook and cranny of the industrial control space, thousands of them. Other form factors inhabited the same niche too.
I still have some of the old PICMG standard enclosures, passive backplanes and plug-in CPU cards gathering dust here. In its time PICMG was a very robust standard for industrial rackmount control equipment, although in my case I was just capitalizing on its redundant industrial power supplies to improve computing availability. It was entirely common for such enclosures to contain 16-20 slots worth of I/O boards controlled by 1-4 plug-in CPU boards.
So really Atom is just the latest member of a family that has been the bedrock of industrial computing and control for a very long time. (Other names in the same space are AMD's Geode and Via's CoreFusion.) "x86 for embedded" doesn't get much press compared to ARM these days, but that's mostly a matter of perception. If one takes a peek behind the forbidding door marked "industrial computing", x86 is very active in the sector.
