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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

#141

Post by 3np »

CommanderData wrote: post #89
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…

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.

Armbian is a saving grace for boards that it supports.

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

#142

Post by theamk »

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.

Few years ago, you built your arcade cabinet, and decided to put some nice launcher like RetroPie. It works fine for a few years, and then your friends tell you about Pico8 support.. nice, it is supported by RetroPie release! not nice: retropie requires ubuntu 18.04 or later.. let's hope your device supports it.

Few years ago, you built a weather station. Sadly, the weather backend you had was discontinued. You found a great new one, and it even comes with SDK and sample code! Sadly, the SDK requires python 3.8 or later. Does your device support it?

Few years ago, you built the home automation server. But recently, you got the set of remotely-controllable disco balls for each room which use FOOBAR protocol. Good news: Linux kernel supports FOOBAR protocol since 5.14. Bad news: your device kernel is much older.

Few years ago, you built the smart controller. You don't want to manage your infra, so you decided to go with AWS IOT, it is super each if you only have a few devices. But AWS announced they are dropping AWS IOT.. does your OS support newer system?

There are definitely cases when you set up the device once and never have to touch it again, but there are also a lot of networked things out there, and you often want to control them..

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

#143

Post by lelanthran »

mynameisvlad wrote: post #134
lostgame wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> It likely uses lower-level system calls that might not even be possible in most cross-platform frameworks.

So? I made a Qt-based low-level flashing utility at a previous job. Or do you consider C++ callign C functions not low-level enough?

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

#144

Post by microtherion »

chaxor wrote: post #124
sosodev wrote: post #97

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?

To give one example, Raspberry Pi are often used to control 3D printers and attached webcams, and there are ML systems that supervise the webcam feed for evidence of a print failure. Being able to run these systems on the SBC would be an advantage, but that's typically not realistic today.

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

#145

Post by lelanthran »

shadowpho wrote: post #92
spicyjpeg wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

One small addition... > 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).

> ESP32 is only optimized for cost.

Are you sure? I'm plaing around with the deep-sleep mode of an ESP32-3C and it appears to sip almost negligible current.

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

#146

Post by steve918 »

anigbrowl wrote: post #102
shadowpho wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One small addition... > 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).

ESP32 is great for low power apps, you can switch off most of the chip subsystems, rely on watchdog timers etc.

Compared to what?

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

#147

Post by progman32 »

anaganisk wrote: post #119
BlackLotus89 wrote: post #114

I remember a few sites that had arm soc comparison lists. This would check none of my boxes... Basically I'm looking for 1) a homeserver board with low energy consumption, m.2/sata, maybe a usb3 port and fast ethernet 2) a lightweight desktop with hdmi/dp, usb c, m.2 and good software support (media codecs anyone?) 3) something cheap for projects the "cheap" pis, esp32 and so on are my go to option For 1) and 2) I'm…

Used Lenovo think center I bought off eBay has, Intel 7th gen with vPro, 8GB ram, 256GB nvme, all of that for 76$ including shipping, pi can even beat that price.

What's the power consumption like?

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

#148

Post by schreiaj »

chaxor wrote: post #124
sosodev wrote: post #97

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?

What should we run it on if we want to deploy it on mobile systems with limited access to network and extremely restricted power budgets?

For a hobby project I'm trying to find a solution - Power budget for multiple is sub 200w. Need to run inference on a lower resolution video stream (or multiple, that be nice) to do object detection. Cost is a factor because I need to have multiple angles to determine where in relation to a mobile platform the target object is. I'm looking at the Coral.ai board because RPi like boards lack the ability to do ML tasks at reasonable FPS and NVidia seems to have abandoned the lower cost side of the market since the Jetson Nanos seem to be less and less available. (Not that Coral.ai boards are available at all...)

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

#149

Post by Retr0id »

MisterTea wrote: post #109
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…

> As usual, looks good on papier but no ecosystem and the current stack that it comes with is dead on arrival. There is no standard Arm ecosystem to boot on which is the real issue - every board needs a custom kernel and booting. I blame Arm for never cooking up a PC like spec that defines hardware configuration, firmware and booting. This is why x86 is going to stick around for a while - its dead simple to bootstrap…

I naively assumed that device trees had solved this problem, but clearly they haven't in practice. How come?

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

#150

Post by ianburrell »

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.

First, this advertises this as a PC which have longer lifetime and higher security requirements than embedded.

Second, embedded systems have reliability requirements. Something will not work and will need support and updating to fix. The big advantage of normal distribution is that somebody has probably already fixed it.

Third, devices get repurposed. My five year old Raspberry Pi has had multiple jobs, and when it is done running Home Assistant, I'll find some other use. Plus, with normal distribution, I can easily install the packages I need.

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