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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

#181

You 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.

Holy crap, I totally missed that requirement. This product now goes straight in my do-not-buy list. Yes, one could install a Windows VM, set up a passthrough USB port and do everything from there, but seriously, what's the logic behind requiring Windows for a board that runs only Linux?

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

#182
post #36
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 it is not connected to the internet in any way, sure.

But we got of TVs that are now useless because originally they just needed to "display a simple web page" but:

* no new TLS support, near-everything dropped old TLS

* sites that did not, use CA that's not on the device's list

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

#183

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?

It will also need update of CA lists, and if any vulnerability will be found in TLS1.3 it will need to update SSL libs to even access anythign

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

#185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's dead on arrival; currently runs Debian 10 with custom patches and binary blobs. It's an RK3308 so not entirely impossible to run on a normal distro, but you'd have to bring your own firmware and device tree etc.

This is designed as an embeddable component for learning, prototyping, and OEMs. A lot of people here are just sniffily dismissing it as 'DOA' when what they mean is 'I would not want to maintain this.'

Dude, Debian 10 goes out of support in a year. Debian 12 already released.

It's 4 years out of date at release, why would you want that for "learning and prototyping", let alone start a OEM device with soon unsupported software versions.

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

#186

You 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.

Lugubrious: adjective

looking or sounding sad and dismal.

"his face looked even more lugubrious than usual"

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

#187

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…

Assuming it's small enough for your needs, a used Intel NUC can get you loads more mileage than pretty much any ARM SoC at an equivalent price.

Currently available on eBay:

* $49.95 for an i5-5300U at 2.3GHz, 4GB of RAM, and 128GB of SSD storage

* $89.00 for an i3-7100U at 2.4GHz, 8GB of RAM, and 256GB of SSD storage

* $135.00 for an i7-5557U at 3.1GHz, 16GB of RAM, and 256GB of SSD storage

...all loaded with ample driver support, extensive connectivity options, and bog-standard x86-64 instructions.

Obviously, there will always be use cases that call for a tiny ARM SoC and nothing else, but plenty of the applications for which people will buy an ARM SoC (e.g., Kodi/Jellyfin/Plex/Emby media centers, RetroArch gaming machines, Minecraft servers, streaming servers, web servers, network filtering, seedboxes, etc.) are better served by a used Intel NUC.

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

#188

"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 con…

>It has connectors on all four sides and no screw holes for mounting There's three nuts soldered on the back: https://www.unihiker.com/wiki/dimension >That layout started with Arduino, continued into Raspberry Pi Pre-2010 Arduino boards had three 1/8 inch mounting holes, post-2010 ones had four: https://blog.adafruit.com/2011/02/28/arduino-hole-dimensions... The Raspberry Pi 1 had two mounting holes located in stupid…

> There's three nuts soldered on the back: https://www.unihiker.com/wiki/dimension

Oh, is that what those round things are. From the picture it looks like they're big pins.

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

#190

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 blame Arm for never cooking up a PC like spec that defines hardware configuration, firmware and booting.

ARM isn't to blame; it's that no one company was big enough to set the standard (and let others clone it) for ARM systems unlike what IBM did with the x86/PC, which is not surprising given how diverse ARM's cores are.

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