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Earlier quoted context omitted.
If it can connect to the internet, it will need security updates.
Won't the firewall on most domestic routers stop any incoming connections?
https://medium.com/@brannondorsey/attacking-private-networks...
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 hundred…
> they are microcontrollers optimized first and foremost for cost and power efficiency
ESP32 is only optimized for cost. Other wireless MCU are significantly lower power... they are just more expensive (and tend to have worse docs then ESP32).
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…
I purchased a few ARM boards in the past and won't do it again. All became e-waste. Rockchip notably, great hardware on paper. Try developing something that needs hardware acceleration and it's a paper weight. It's a common cycle of broken promises to provide drivers by manufactures, rinse and repeat. The exception being raspberry pi or expressif. Depending on the application.
I think I too was drawn in by the performance claims made by those other manufacturers. I realized though that raspberry pi are very powerful computers. We just take the scale of modern computing for granted and our software is the real problem.
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…
I purchased a few ARM boards in the past and won't do it again. All became e-waste. Rockchip notably, great hardware on paper. Try developing something that needs hardware acceleration and it's a paper weight. It's a common cycle of broken promises to provide drivers by manufactures, rinse and repeat. The exception being raspberry pi or expressif. Depending on the application.
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I purchased a few ARM boards in the past and won't do it again. All became e-waste. Rockchip notably, great hardware on paper. Try developing something that needs hardware acceleration and it's a paper weight. It's a common cycle of broken promises to provide drivers by manufactures, rinse and repeat. The exception being raspberry pi or expressif. Depending on the application.
Excuse my ignorance, but what sort of applications benefit from hardware acceleration on limited SoC resources?
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I purchased a few ARM boards in the past and won't do it again. All became e-waste. Rockchip notably, great hardware on paper. Try developing something that needs hardware acceleration and it's a paper weight. It's a common cycle of broken promises to provide drivers by manufactures, rinse and repeat. The exception being raspberry pi or expressif. Depending on the application.
Excuse my ignorance, but what sort of applications benefit from hardware acceleration on limited SoC resources?
Because a SoC with limited CPU-core resources can't do everything in software, the chip contains many system components (hence System-on-Chip or System-on-a-Chip) that handle things the CPU cores then no longer need to do.
Think protocol handling or memory; instead of spending many clock cycles on handling the USB bus, you can leave that to the USB controller and only deal with what is actually relevant to your USB device. Same with the VOP (Video Output Processor) block, instead of spending many clock cycles on putting the right bits in the frame buffer you tell the VOP that you'd like the background to be orange and then only spend time setting the right bits for black text (for example). So instead of having to deal with many millions of bits, you only have to deal with less than 1% of them because every bit you don't set becomes orange. For other things like I2C, I2S, DMA, networking, cryptography, SD-IO, GPIO, PWM etc. the same applies. Instead of constantly spending time setting the right bit at the right time many times each second, you just tell a dedicated block on the SoC to do a thing in a certain pattern and it will do it for you, consuming on CPU core resources.
This also allows slow CPU cores that wouldn't be able to decode video in real time to offload the entire decoding to a video decoder block, and then tell the GPU part of the SoC that you're drawing a green rectangle somewhere and that's where it has to put the decoded video frames. Why would one do all of this? Because it's cheap and power-efficient, and that's how you make a big pile of money.
I have no idea how accurate or up-to-date this PDF is, but it should at least give you some idea as to what a SoC can do without bogging down the CPU cores: https://dl.radxa.com/rockpis/docs/hw/datasheets/Rockchip%20R... Check chapter 9 for example, all of those boxes are things you don't have to spend CPU cycles on. If you did use the CPU, it would be super slow.