Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

unihiker.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 241 posts

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

#51

Post by Narishma »

Dnguyen wrote: post #32

I wish the RAM could be a bit more, at least 1G or 2G, so I can have a database on there without having to ship my data to the cloud. Then the system can really run isolated as much as possible, for security and privacy.

It has 16GB of flash. Can't you put your database there?

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

#52

Post by oneplane »

As usual, looks good on papier but no ecosystem and the current stack that it comes with is dead on arrival.

Boards need to come with mainstream distro support or with an ecosystem (or both), otherwise it will just die. And with internet connected devices, you can't set-and-forget, so it needs to have live support.

Edit: a RockPi S (same SoC) can be had for $35 and a touch LCD for $11... Granted, it doesn't come with the same integration and headers, and doesn't have a microphone by default, and no RISC-V MCU. But the point of integration is a useful product that stays useful, and it doesn't if there is no ecosystem.

As for 'adding' mainstream support, it takes quite some effort and active ownership. Out of the many rockchip boards and add-ons this is the set that made it to some level of standard inclusion: http://ftp.debian.org/debian/dists/stable/main/installer-arm...

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

#53

Post by gizmo686 »

kyberias wrote: post #48
dotnet00 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Why would a connection to internet need security updates?

Because as an industry, we are bad at our jobs. The network facing software has critical security vulnerabilities. Even security folks accept that as the way of the world.

At the point the software is released it has (hopefully) no known security vulnerabilities, which is a reasonably secure situation to be in.

However, eventually some of them will become known, and that is not safe.

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

#54

Post by wongarsu »

Dnguyen wrote: post #32

I wish the RAM could be a bit more, at least 1G or 2G, so I can have a database on there without having to ship my data to the cloud. Then the system can really run isolated as much as possible, for security and privacy.

SQLite would still be a good option. It's incredibly lightweight, and if you set the database to WAL mode it also works well for a database file accessed by multiple applications on the same device.

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

#55

Post by bee_rider »

kyberias wrote: post #48
dotnet00 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Why would a connection to internet need security updates?

This question doesn’t really make sense, did you forget a couple words?

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

#57

Post by spicyjpeg »

Tepix wrote: 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…

The ESP32s belong to a completely different category of processors, they are microcontrollers optimized first and foremost for cost and power efficiency rather than raw performance or the ability to run Linux. The Rockchip SoC used here, on the other hand, is more akin to what you would find in a cheap Android tablet or set-top box: it has Cortex-A cores, a proper GPU and can use far more memory than the mere hundreds of kilobytes of SRAM built into ESP32 chips. Of course it also requires far more external components and draws significantly more power when running at full speed, so it's in no way a drop-in replacement for microcontrollers in products where Linux is not a hard requirement but BOM cost and battery life are.

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

#58

Post by doctorpangloss »

darkwater wrote: post #14

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?

You can find used iOS devices that run iOS 15, and therefore modern safari, for like $80.

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

#59

Post by squarefoot »

theamk wrote: 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…

In my opinion the vendor supplied OS distros are to be taken as just a starting point, nothing to rely on more than the time needed for the port of one of the well established distros (Armbian, DietPI, stock, etc) to appear for a given board, which often happens quite fast when driver blobs and lack of documentation don't get in the way (the RK3308 used here is well supported along the WiFi chip). My usual approach when looking for a board is to check first if there's some support from the above distros, or wait. It may seem odd, but it's just the same reasoning we're used to in the PC world translated to the embedded world: whoever would expect Gigabyte, Asus, etc. to create and supply the Linux distribution that runs on their PC mainboard?
Post reply on HN