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CHIP Pro

nextthing.co

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Re: CHIP Pro

#41

Post by inlined »

stop1234 wrote: post #38
platz wrote: post #22

I have the chip, esp8266, rpi, teensies, trinkets, arduinos... I studied electronics principles and built various circuits.. yet I have no idea what I can practically use these devices for in my life. They all sit in a box and I have a hard time justifying buying more of them.

You mean like going to the super market without having a shopping list, buying everything that attracts your attention which all goes out of date in your fridge because you forgot you had all that food and not having any time to plan your house hold duties?

I think that's overly harsh. It's closer to wanting to learn how to make cocktails, taking advice from a friend on how to stock a basic bar, but not really feeling comfortable enough with the domain to experiment beyond fixed recipes.

Re: CHIP Pro

#42

Post by duskwuff »

leggomylibro wrote: post #28
durkie wrote: post #13

How is it optimized for SMT? It seems like the PCB that you mounted it to would need to have a hole or milled pocket in it to accommodate the backside thickness of the CHIP. Not sure how feasible a pocket is, but a hole would mean you then lose all your layers/backside in that area.

The edges of the board have round plated indents near the through holes, which makes them easier for machines to place and solder.

There are parts on the bottom of the board, including the NAND flash. How does it sit flat?

Re: CHIP Pro

#43

Post by willvarfar »

Animats wrote: post #40

Great hardware, but do you really want to run a full Linux system on low-end IoT devices? That's what made the recent massive DDOS attack possible - lots of little machines with way too much network-side functionality. Linux just has too much attack surface.

Its not Linux that was being attacked, it was the apps that were running.

From https://blog.cloudflare.com/say-cheese-a-snapshot-of-the-mas...

> While it's not possible for us to investigate all the attacking devices, it is fair to say that these attacks came from Internet-of-Things (IoT) category of devices.

> There are multiple hints confirming this theory. First, all of the attacking devices have port 23 (telnet) open (closing connection immediately) or closed. Never filtered. This is a strong hint that the malware disabled the telnet port just after it installed itself.

> Most of the hosts from the Vietnamese networks look like connected CCTV cameras. Multiple have open port 80 with presenting "NETSurveillance WEB" page.

> The Ukrainian devices are a bit different though. Most have port 80 closed, making it harder to identify.

> We had noticed one device with port 443 open serving a valid TLS cert issued by Western Digital, handling domain device-xxxx.wd2go.com suggesting it was a hard drive (Network Attached Storage to be precise).

So its not Linux, its the apps. The insecurity of the boxes has nothing to do with their choice of OS, but rather their shoddy apps. Its a general pattern for IoT devices to be configured with default passwords and internet-facing admin pages etc, and using another OS doesn't directly address any of this.

ADDING: I'm a big fan and watcher of everything from OpenBSD to QubesOS to the Mill CPU to CHERI and all the rest, and I'm reluctant to say that right now the OS is immaterial to security :( ;)

Re: CHIP Pro

#44

Post by geomark »

platz wrote: post #22

I have the chip, esp8266, rpi, teensies, trinkets, arduinos... I studied electronics principles and built various circuits.. yet I have no idea what I can practically use these devices for in my life. They all sit in a box and I have a hard time justifying buying more of them.

While not as big as security and media devices that were already mentioned, seems like a lot of effort is going into DIY 3D printers and CNC machines. Having a lot of those kind of machines around could enable the rise of guilds that produce a lot of useful things.

Re: CHIP Pro

#45

Post by Sanddancer »

IgorPartola wrote: post #33
platz wrote: post #22

I have the chip, esp8266, rpi, teensies, trinkets, arduinos... I studied electronics principles and built various circuits.. yet I have no idea what I can practically use these devices for in my life. They all sit in a box and I have a hard time justifying buying more of them.

Raspberry Pis and CHIPs: good for a home automation hub of sorts or a thing where you want a portable computer capable of working with video, audio, or large volumes of data. Arduino et al: need to have buttons do more complicated things than buttons can actually do: slowly change light colors, actuate things, CNC, etc. ESP8266: sensors and remote controls for switches and such. Anything Arduino does above, except th…

I'd say the Teensy is in the Arduino++ camp there. It uses the same libraries, etc, just has more power processing, a pretty nice price, and some interface bits and pieces that are very nice, like being able to act as a usb device and host. A lot of hardware, I'd argue is better to be treated as a library -- there are libraries and hardware that have definite feature sets, some of which overlap, that allows you to choose the best tool for the job.

Re: CHIP Pro

#46

Post by greglindahl »

andycjw wrote: post #14

I order the original CHIP at end of May, and I still haven't received it today, it was supposed to ship by June. They kept getting delayed. Latest update is that the shipping is for November. Can't help but suspect they are doing this on purpose to wait for price drop on the components to sustain the business.

I was a part of the Kickstarter, got mine roughly when promised.

If you've ever been involved in electronics manufacturing in moderate volumes, it usually ends up being more episodic than planned.

Re: CHIP Pro

#47

Post by wyager »

Animats wrote: post #40

Great hardware, but do you really want to run a full Linux system on low-end IoT devices? That's what made the recent massive DDOS attack possible - lots of little machines with way too much network-side functionality. Linux just has too much attack surface.

Agreed. Bare metal programming is vastly preferable for many, if not most, realistic embedded applications. I hope they have a convenient gcc-arm-none-eabi setup available. It's not just about security; it's also a lot more work to do hard realtime systems with any sort of OS, even an RTOS.

We're even starting to see a bit of this on the high-level non-embedded side of things; projects like HaLVM and Mirage OS allow us to write bare-metal non-embedded code using extremely high-level languages. The idea is that you write a program that runs on bare metal (no OS or any OS-provided features) and you use standard library abstractions to get features that you would normally get from the OS. Then, if you want to run a bunch of these things, you run them in efficient hypervisor systems like Xen. This approach has many interesting benefits (and costs) compared to traditional OS-based high-level programming.

Re: CHIP Pro

#48

Post by pmontra »

A typo on the home page

    Powered by a chip you can actually buy.
    R8 SoC + 256MB DDR3
    1 package. 1 price.
    $6 in any quantity.
All the other references to the price are for $16, not $6.

Re: CHIP Pro

#49

Post by Sanddancer »

wiradikusuma wrote: post #37

i own the original chip. i don't understand what this thing is about, a higher-spec chip?

A chip with a design more suitable for embedding in a device. After you make the initial outlay, SMD components become much more easy to deal with than pth, for example.

Re: CHIP Pro

#50

Post by wyager »

LAMike wrote: post #30

Is it possible to make use this as a starting point for an open source smartphone?

You can use any SoC as the starting point for an open source smartphone. I don't think this is appropriate, though, given the inability to break out high-bandwidth busses from the board, e.g. for a video display or LTE networking.
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