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Unihiker, an $80 single-board PC with 2.8“ touchscreen, quad-core ARM Cortex-A35

unihiker.com

41–50 of 241 posts

Re: Unihiker, an $80 single-board PC with 2.8“ touchscreen, quad-core ARM Cortex-A35

#41
post #9
post #3

The video says "No coding skills? No worries. Just write your code with ChatGPT."

I'm incredibly curious what the experience of trying to write code with ChatGPT is like, if you have no prior knowledge. Obviously, it's impossible for me (and most others reading this) to un-know everything and approach it with fresh eyes. Are there any good real-time videos of non-programmers using ChatGPT to write code? (seems like the best way to understand what it's like)

[dead]

Re: Unihiker, an $80 single-board PC with 2.8“ touchscreen, quad-core ARM Cortex-A35

#42
post #9
post #3

The video says "No coding skills? No worries. Just write your code with ChatGPT."

I'm incredibly curious what the experience of trying to write code with ChatGPT is like, if you have no prior knowledge. Obviously, it's impossible for me (and most others reading this) to un-know everything and approach it with fresh eyes. Are there any good real-time videos of non-programmers using ChatGPT to write code? (seems like the best way to understand what it's like)

I am an engineer, but not a software engineer. I write python sometimes to help me do engineer-y things in my domain but I am absolutely not very fluent, just enough to get by. chatGPT often transforms a frustrating multi-hour stack overflow session into a 5 minute query.

The result is definitely not something you'd want to maintain and probably has built in inefficiencies and edge cases I don't know about but it did it's job, which was to do the thing I wanted it to do so I can go on with my work.

Re: Unihiker, an $80 single-board PC with 2.8“ touchscreen, quad-core ARM Cortex-A35

#43

Unrelated but trying the HN wisdom here: any suggestion for a cheap touchscreen with a CPU attached and a battery that can be used as a control panel for Home Assistant? Yeah, probably some Android tablet but something that actually works well for this job and costs as less as possible? I cannot power it properly where I want to put it so it needs battery and then I can charge it as needed. Suggestions?

Something like a SenseCap from Seeed Studio?

https://www.seeedstudio.com/SenseCAP-Indicator-D1S-p-5645.ht...

Re: Unihiker, an $80 single-board PC with 2.8“ touchscreen, quad-core ARM Cortex-A35

#44

Where's the schematic? If I want to program and debug real-time routines in the coprocessor, rather than using the built-in userspace drivers, how do I do that?

Just like with many other RPi "killers" from China - you don't. They all suffer from the same issue with software :(

Re: Unihiker, an $80 single-board PC with 2.8“ touchscreen, quad-core ARM Cortex-A35

#45
post #36
post #17

My usual question for small cheap boards is: what will happen to OS support in 3 years? Is it using regular distro or is this a custom fork which will likely be never updated? The website says: > The UNIHIKER comes with a Linux operating system based on Debian and various built-in features, which will be upgraded from time to time. ... don't expect OS upgrades here. If you want to play with it for a while then put it…

Why does it need continuous, perpetual support? Most devices like this get built, software installed, and never updated again. When is the last time you updated the ECU software in your car? I built a small arcade cabinet using an old raspberry pi 2b. Once I built it I've never needed to upgrade anything on it. It works fine and plays all the old games. I have backups of the SD card in case anything craps out.

If it can connect to the internet, it will need security updates.

Re: Unihiker, an $80 single-board PC with 2.8“ touchscreen, quad-core ARM Cortex-A35

#46
post #20

This device is similar to many hacker festival badges from the recent years. Just a bit more expensive. For example: - the Camp 2023 flow3r badge https://events.ccc.de/2023/06/05/camp23-the-flow3r-badge/ - the MCH2022 badge https://wiki.mch2022.org/Badge - the SHA2017 badge with E-Ink https://wiki.sha2017.org/w/Projects:Badge - the Camp 2011 badge R0ket https://events.ccc.de/camp/2011/wiki/R0ket The first three have…

they are very different, esp32 is an advanced microcontroller (with wifi/bt) and is comparable to an arduino on steroids, whereas this board uses cortex a35 and is more comparable to a raspberry

esp32 has 520 Kb of ram, while this board has 512 Mb!

Re: Unihiker, an $80 single-board PC with 2.8“ touchscreen, quad-core ARM Cortex-A35

#47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never done a project using a board like this, so out of ignorance: Does LTS support usually matter, if you're using the device for a stand-alone application such as a lighting controller or front-door camera?

depends on whether you care about vulnerabilities or not, I suppose. Presumably that lighting controller talks to something. If it talks to a local network only and it's impossible for external traffic to reach it, maybe not such a big deal. If that's not true it might be significant. That's also true of all IoT junk anyhow, it's all running some linux variant under the hood and security / updating is rarely a major…

That's what I was thinking.

I was assuming that e.g. the lighting controller would only have 3 modes of access enabled:

(1) USB commections

(2) wired ethernet during admin

(3) ZWave via a USB adapter

Re: Unihiker, an $80 single-board PC with 2.8“ touchscreen, quad-core ARM Cortex-A35

#48
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does it need continuous, perpetual support? Most devices like this get built, software installed, and never updated again. When is the last time you updated the ECU software in your car? I built a small arcade cabinet using an old raspberry pi 2b. Once I built it I've never needed to upgrade anything on it. It works fine and plays all the old games. I have backups of the SD card in case anything craps out.

If it can connect to the internet, it will need security updates.

Why would a connection to internet need security updates?

Re: Unihiker, an $80 single-board PC with 2.8“ touchscreen, quad-core ARM Cortex-A35

#49
post #36
post #17

My usual question for small cheap boards is: what will happen to OS support in 3 years? Is it using regular distro or is this a custom fork which will likely be never updated? The website says: > The UNIHIKER comes with a Linux operating system based on Debian and various built-in features, which will be upgraded from time to time. ... don't expect OS upgrades here. If you want to play with it for a while then put it…

Why does it need continuous, perpetual support? Most devices like this get built, software installed, and never updated again. When is the last time you updated the ECU software in your car? I built a small arcade cabinet using an old raspberry pi 2b. Once I built it I've never needed to upgrade anything on it. It works fine and plays all the old games. I have backups of the SD card in case anything craps out.

All software have many dependencies (IMO for very wrong reason), if you can find a way to build a static system where nothing need to be updated good for you, but I doubt that this is the majority of use-case.

Will this device be able to load any web page in one or two decades? It would likely be slow, but the impossibility would be a pure software limitation.

Re: Unihiker, an $80 single-board PC with 2.8“ touchscreen, quad-core ARM Cortex-A35

#50
post #17

My usual question for small cheap boards is: what will happen to OS support in 3 years? Is it using regular distro or is this a custom fork which will likely be never updated? The website says: > The UNIHIKER comes with a Linux operating system based on Debian and various built-in features, which will be upgraded from time to time. ... don't expect OS upgrades here. If you want to play with it for a while then put it…

It's dead on arrival; currently runs Debian 10 with custom patches and binary blobs. It's an RK3308 so not entirely impossible to run on a normal distro, but you'd have to bring your own firmware and device tree etc.
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