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

unihiker.com

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

#71

Post by StillBored »

__void wrote: post #46
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…

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!

"comparable to a raspberry"

Well, slightly worse, as A35's are smaller and lower power than the A53's in something like the pi zero-2, but also slower. The devices slight clock advantage probably doesn't make up the difference.

So, its probably a great embedded system, but it should be running something lighter weight than a normal linux distro. Otherwise it becomes like all these gas station pumps, point of sale terminals that all seem to take 10+ seconds to do things that older devices didn't lag and pause with.

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

#72

Post by scheeseman486 »

snarfy wrote: post #36
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…

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 there's a vulnerability in any of the software or firmware that connects and interfaces with anything over a network, there's the possibility of something worming it's way in or out of it.

For something intermittently used like a game box that might not matter. For IoT-focused hardware that is connected to the internet continuously by design where, say, a malformed TCP packet could cause a buffer overflow in the network stack that wiggles it's way into root code execution by chaining through a bunch of unpatched vulnerabilities on a "never updated again" system? That's a problem.

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

#73

Post by VyseofArcadia »

gizmo686 wrote: post #53
kyberias wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But a "critical security vulnerability " depends on the use. My daily driver? Yes, I want all of the security updates. A raspberry pi for playing arcade games that I occasionally scp a ROM over to? I really don't care if someone hacks in.

We, as an industry, are bad about pushing "every device that is on the internet needs to be as up to date as possible all the time" when it reality there is a lot of unimportant stuff on the internet.

It's like locks. I wouldn't secure my house with a bike lock, but it's fine for my bike. My bike is less full of important stuff.

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

#74

Post by [deleted] »

oneplane wrote: post #52

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…

[deleted]

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

#75

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

VyseofArcadia wrote: post #73
gizmo686 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But a "critical security vulnerability " depends on the use. My daily driver? Yes, I want all of the security updates. A raspberry pi for playing arcade games that I occasionally scp a ROM over to? I really don't care if someone hacks in. We, as an industry, are bad about pushing "every device that is on the internet needs to be as up to date as possible all the time" when it reality there is a lot of unimportant stu…

> I really don't care if someone hacks in.

At best, that means you're externalizing the costs, i.e. now your device is part of a botnet and becomes a problem for other people. But of course that assumes that it doesn't become a problem for you as well; a compromised device on your network is a great launching point for local attacks and a way to send illegal traffic out through your internet connection.

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

#76

Post by Matsta »

deeesstoronto wrote: post #67
ethanpil wrote: post #66

I love to see one of these come with the ability to fit into a gang box on the wall... to use in a place where one would usually have light switches, etc.

Have you looked at the Sonoff nspanel?

This is a good idea. You don't want to have a full-on Linux distro controlling your lights. You want something you can set up and forget.

You will feel a world of pain when there is some bug, and it will take you 8 hours to figure out the issues so that you can turn your lights on. The simplier, the better for these kinds of applications.

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

#78

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

CoastalCoder wrote: post #47
idiotsecant wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

This is actually one of the reasons I like bluetooth/zigbee/z-wave/IR/etc. so much - it puts a significant barrier to attacking devices even if they don't get patches. Of course, you still should pay attention to security and update them if possible because local and/or proxied attacks are still a thing, but it's much less likely to get hit.

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

#79

Post by RobotToaster »

dotnet00 wrote: post #45
snarfy wrote: 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.

Won't the firewall on most domestic routers stop any incoming connections?

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

#80

Post by hawski »

FlyingSnake wrote: post #69

Sigh... one more device to buy and put in my shelf with RaspberryPis, Arduinos, eInk devices and ESP32s.

So do not buy it.

Sell the stuff you are not using. It is ok to leave one thing that you wish to tinker with in the future, but it is not advised. While we're at it, a clean up of files on your computer is also way overdue. I should not mention hundreds of opened tabs in your browser.

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