Earlier quoted context omitted.
Inferencing neural networks is a big one. It's hard to get near real-time performance without it. Depending on the use case of course.
Why on earth would you run ML on a potato?
inference, object detection for one.
Unihiker, an $80 single-board PC with 2.8“ touchscreen, quad-core ARM Cortex-A35
131–140 of 241 posts
Re: Unihiker, an $80 single-board PC with 2.8“ touchscreen, quad-core ARM Cortex-A35
#132The 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 don't know Rust well and was having trouble the finding the docs I needed, so I asked AI for help. Google Bard, I think. It had real difficulty producing code that ran and worked.
The problem was that there were breaking API changes across versions of the library, but it was just using probabilities of method names being correct, and it didn't ask me or tell me which version of the library it was targeting, so it was just a mismash of incompatible code.
But the code LOOKED good and the AI was confident it was a good answer. Overall, it felt like wasted time sifting through confidently-wrong answers.
Re: Unihiker, an $80 single-board PC with 2.8“ touchscreen, quad-core ARM Cortex-A35
#133Sigh... one more device to buy and put in my shelf with RaspberryPis, Arduinos, eInk devices and ESP32s.
You missed the pine64, great choice.
Re: Unihiker, an $80 single-board PC with 2.8“ touchscreen, quad-core ARM Cortex-A35
#134You flash the OS (okay, admittedly, debian which is nice) onto it from windows with some lugubrious .exe https://www.unihiker.com/wiki/burner No linux/macos tool available. No thanks.
Hah. Way too misread the room, are they serious? Who even develops Windows-exclusive apps these days, anyway? Even the average user these days seems to find it simply abhorrent. It's so simple to create cross-platform applications these days, there's literally no excuse. I can't imagine the thought process that went behind this beyond greed and profit, a little mind-numbing.
Image burning is certainly more involved than your run of the mill cross-platform Electron app. It likely uses lower-level system calls that might not even be possible in most cross-platform frameworks. Additionally, the screenshots make clear mention of a driver, something that would certainly be different depending on the OS.
You simply assumed there is "no excuse" because you couldn't think of one, but you weren't in the room when the decision was made, and don't know the reasonings behind it. My blurb above could certainly have been one of several reasons brought up.
You can choose not to agree with the decision, that's fine, but you're attributing a whole lot of malice to what is ultimately a decision they made based on factors which you are not privy to.
Re: Unihiker, an $80 single-board PC with 2.8“ touchscreen, quad-core ARM Cortex-A35
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
Excuse my ignorance, but what sort of applications benefit from hardware acceleration on limited SoC resources?
You're actually answering your own question here ;-) 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 o…
Is this in the purview of the panfrost driver stack?
Re: Unihiker, an $80 single-board PC with 2.8“ touchscreen, quad-core ARM Cortex-A35
#136"The built-in IoT service on UNIHIKER allows
users to store data through the MQTT protocol
and provides real-time data access via web
browser."
That reads as "comes with integrated backdoor you may not want." It may or may not be any good from a security standpoint, but it's a risk.
> This is designed as an embeddable component for learning, prototyping, and OEMs.
It's trying to be a lot of things at once. It has connectors on all four sides and no screw holes for mounting, which is a headache when you need to build it into something. That layout started with Arduino, continued into Raspberry Pi, and continues to be a headache. It's fine for desktop prototyping, not good for deployment.
Note how vague the site gets when they talk about applications.
Re: Unihiker, an $80 single-board PC with 2.8“ touchscreen, quad-core ARM Cortex-A35
#137Earlier 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.
I’m still trying to get a Rock 5B to boot from NVMe. By all appearances they included a USB Type-C port that doesn’t work, so the system never pulls sufficient power not to boot loop. Apparently even after a firmware update. To be totally fair to the up-and-coming boards, the Pi was pretty poorly supported on day 1 and the community did (and still does) a lot of heavy lifting. I’m still waiting for a contender, but I…
You need to get a dumb brick for that Rock 5B. Looks like you got one of the ones with a bad firmware. When it negotiates the power drops out. There're tons of forum posts.
Re: Unihiker, an $80 single-board PC with 2.8“ touchscreen, quad-core ARM Cortex-A35
#138I'm sorry this is off topic, but I love the homepage design. Have too many rPIs to justify buying this, but something about a nice, light, internet blue, simplistic design really makes me happy. Too many sites with their dark mode BS trying to be super serious and deep toned today.
Makes the cards pop really nicely
Re: Unihiker, an $80 single-board PC with 2.8“ touchscreen, quad-core ARM Cortex-A35
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
m5stack.com
I love M5Stack and in fact just shipped my first project with an M5 Tough. However, those screens are tiny. Even 3" would be a huge improvement.
True that. They do have a phone-size e-reader device which is great, but obviously is subject to the limitations of e-ink. I suggest reaching out to them, they're very responsive on Twitter and @lovyan3 has developed a universal graphics library for the ESP32 stack and works closely with them.
Re: Unihiker, an $80 single-board PC with 2.8“ touchscreen, quad-core ARM Cortex-A35
#140My 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…
Slightly unrelated, but I wonder what is a preferred OS for similar boards: a buildroot or yocto -based system vs a full-blown Debian-based distribution with desktop and package managers?
When I looked into (now deprecated) Jetson Nano I was surprised to find out there was no straightforward and documented way to build your own system and cross-compile for it. Is that because for many people using SBCs means doing everything on the target (e.g. compiling software), or am I missing something?