New kid on the block the pcDuino ...

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

OK I checked the Wandboard and the only ones that seem to have stock in the USA is DigiKey but they are jacking up the prices, the dual is about $115 USD + SH when the regular price listed on the wandboard site is $99, which is pricey but still acceptable but $115 is too much.

I've three Olinuxino's, the maxi and maxi and micro with the Freescale chip and the A13-WiFi. Love them !! Not easy to compare with the Rpi but as you say for IO stuff they are good enough and reasonable priced by distributors, Mouser sells the micro for $29.

The pcDuino arrived few days ago but didn't have a chance yet to test it, in person looks bigger than I expected. I like that they used a AXP209 for power management, but I do not like (as I still do with the Rpi) the idea of using the microUSB connector for input power, I still believe is a bad idea.

Since it runs Android it has a couple of pushbuttons for Home, Back, Menu, but where they placed them is kind of awkward, Back and Home are right between the USB host connectors. Has some I/O but not much better than the Rpi, but is a plus that there are some analog inputs, but don't get too excited according to the user's guide two of them are only 6 bit.

I have to go to Austin tomorrow for SXSW Create and a hardware Meetup and probably family will keep me out of the office/lab on Sunday, so I'll probably have more comments during next week when I get a chance to fire it up.

Cheers

Jorge

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.

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.

Morgaine Dinova wrote:

 

Actually, about a billion industrial computers might argue with that assessment.

I don't disagree with any of what you said, it's just been my experience that when you start talking about industrial computing you either have a very expensive custom industrial board that just happens to have enough passing resemblance to a PC to be able to run windows.. Or, you have a cheap commodity PC with a card in it that likely costs many times more than the PC itself.

(In my line, this could often take the form of something like a GPIB card connected to a bit of equipment worth several millions of times the cost of the PC).

So I'd suggest that, while you're correct, you've also went way past the point of an Atom based PC that costs less than a Sabre-Lite.

selsinork wrote:

 

So I'd suggest that, while you're correct, you've also went way past the point of an Atom based PC that costs less than a Sabre-Lite.

Intel isn't predisposed to making CPUs cheap, so you're probably right that prices are going to be at the upper end of what the embedded market will bear.  However, ARM is applying immense pressure there, and Intel doesn't have too many options --- they'll have to  make Atom prices acceptable or they might as well abandon the embedded market altogether.  There's no point bringing a device to market at a price where it won't sell.

I think that they're going to make the price acceptable, even if only marginally so.  Here is some evidence that they realize their predicament in the embedded space and are prepared to price their embedded CPUs less outrageously than is usual in their other markets --- the open hardware Minnowboard, expected release in July 2013.

The price is not yet fixed, other than "less than US$200", but I rather doubt that it's going to be $199 because the market wouldn't take that too kindly in these "Pi days", and they know it.  Also, the board provides gigabit Ethernet, SATA, PCIe, GPIO, CAN, I2C and SPI, a combined feature set that is quite uncommon in the ARM ecosystem at present so the spec isn't unreasonable.  It's quite likely to be a better candidate for some applications than Sabre-Lite, depending on price, particularly when good networking is required.

Atom isn't the only game in embedded x86 town though, as I mentioned earlier.  I expect AMD and Via to respond as well, and others.  There's quite a number of smaller x86 players in this space as well.  I don't expect embedded x86 to disappear just because these are great days for ARM.  It'll respond and adapt.

Morgaine Dinova wrote:

 

 

Intel isn't predisposed to making CPUs cheap, so you're probably right that prices are going to be at the upper end of what the embedded market will bear. 

Well you can get an atom based board for around 50 quid today. The catch is that it won't have all those useful IO options, you probably get VGA, 10/100 network and a pci slot.  But is it just a cheap PC, economies of scale and all that.

I did a quick google for PCI CAN & I2C cards, I forget which way round, but something like $499 for CAN and 200 euros for I2C. Both found pretty much exclusively in the embedded/industrial sorts of sites - no economies of scale, silly prices.

Looking at your minnowboard, that feature set could be copied verbatim from sabre-lite, apart from it's a single core.  So it needs to be a lot less than $199. Sill there are all sorts of advantages to being in familiar x86 territory - just being able to build/debug the code on your normal PC then copy it over is a surprisingly useful thing.

I already have a couple of Geode embedded systems and the catch is that they're not quite enough like an ordinary PC. So you end up compiling special versions of things specifically for them, they're also twice the cost of that Atom board, slower than the Pi etc.  So outside some niche uses there's no particular advantage.

selsinork wrote:

 

Looking at your minnowboard, that feature set could be copied verbatim from sabre-lite, apart from it's a single core.  So it needs to be a lot less than $199.

The Minnowboard offers gigabit Ethernet, Sabre-Lite only 100Mbps.

That factor of 10 can make a colossal difference in a network-intensive application, and can place the Sabre-Lite totally out of the picture.  Indeed, it's pretty bizarre I think that a new i.MX6 board pitched at a fairly high price point should choose not to provide gigabit when the SoC supports it, especially when the designers chose the quad core SoC which is the top of the range device.  The design choices don't seem to be consistent..

Also, since Wandboard offers gigabit Ethernet even in their cheap Solo version, the incremental BOM cost of gigabit clearly cannot be much, reinforcing the oddity of the choice in Sabre-Lite.

The end result of this is that if the Minnowboard were to be released at the same price as Sabre-Lite, I'd choose the Atom board without hesitation because I consider networking so important.  The only question in my mind is how much higher the price could be before I decide it's too much.  Even then though, my money wouldn't be spent on the Sabre-Lite.  Instead, I'd grit my teeth and order a Wandboard from Texas.

Although I accept that not everyone feels the same, for me the attraction of gigabit is immense.  All of my current machines use gigabit NICs with the exception of the ARM boards, and I want to correct that.  Even my main Internet link is faster than 100Mbps, although not by much (120Mbps).

For a specific application, the slower network speed might not matter of course, as the requirements dictate what is satisfactory and what isn't.  But when buying a general purpose prototyping board with no specific application in mind, over 100 quid for 100 meg LAN is just not good enough for 2013! .

Morgaine.

Morgaine Dinova wrote:

 

The Minnowboard offers gigabit Ethernet, Sabre-Lite only 100Mbps.

No, SL does Gigabit too. I just logged into one of mine to check.

I agree that 100Mb is no longer good enough, and I'll point out that there's an errata for the iMX6 that means you'll not get gigabit throughput (approx 400MB/s aggregate IIRC), and that's going to apply to the wandboard or anything else with an iMX6. At least until it's fixed, but we have no way of knowing when or even if that'll happen. There have been improvements in more recent versions of the chip, see http://boundarydevices.com/i-mx6-ethernet/

selsinork wrote:

 

Morgaine Dinova wrote:

 

The Minnowboard offers gigabit Ethernet, Sabre-Lite only 100Mbps.

No, SL does Gigabit too. I just logged into one of mine to check.

Arghhh!!!!!  Entirely my fault.  The Ethernet speeds are quoted (very oddly) as "10/100/Gb", and my mind parsed that as some kind of typo and noted that "1000" was not mentioned.  It's entirely my fault for not adhering to the principle of "Be flexible in what you read but strict in what you write".

I will point out to marketting copy writers though that "10/100/Gb" is at the very least dimensionally incorrect, and you're writing for engineers.

Cool, so Sabre-Lite does gigabit.  That puts a completely different perspective on it, for me.  Let me re-evaluate.

Morgaine Dinova wrote:

 

The Ethernet speeds are quoted (very oddly) as "10/100/Gb",

Oh... Where did you read that.. I may just have to return mine since it can't do 10Gb or 100Gb

selsinork wrote:

 

There have been improvements in more recent versions of the chip, see http://boundarydevices.com/i-mx6-ethernet/

That site is awesome --- measurement and numbers are the essense of engineering, everything else is wishful thinking and guesswork.  And yes, I'm looking forward to updated tapeouts.