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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

#231

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

nick__m wrote: post #171
HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just got a couple of ESP32-S3 devices direct from China (AliExpress), one with a 5" TFT screen and the other with a 7". I don't know what home assistant is, but these will run C++ or MicroPython just fine. My application is an industrial controller and they are really nice. Dirt cheap at around $30 each shipped (arrived in just over 2 weeks) to USA. [edit] They have very little I/O since the display is driven in pa…

I use an stm32f103 as an io extender for my esp32-a1s, they cost about 2$ per board and the chip programmer cost about 10$. I use I2C to communicate between the esp32 and the stm32. I do my development in VSCode using platformio with the Arduino framework and FreeRTOS. It is really convenient to have the same os and framework used for all the MCUs of a project. That's why I use the 2$ stm32 instead of a 1$ stm8.

Yeah, I decided to use an "Arduino" 10MT "PLC" board as my I/O extender since it comes with optically isolated inputs, 4-20mA analog input and a 24VDC power input, all of which I can use. At the improbable price of $22.75!

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

#232

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

sbierwagen wrote: post #156
Animats wrote: post #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 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…

Heh!

That's a very accurate description of DFRobot. I like their products though. My philosophy for my freelance gigs is that if I have to custom-design hardware, I'm doing something wrong. Hardware development has become a sucker's game. So companies like DFRobot that basically give me "a function on a PCB" get my money. That $10 product can save me days of work!

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

#233

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

numpad0 wrote: post #213

This seems like a purported industrial HMI(human-machine interface) unit, a kind of a Pi that are one-off customized to fit on front faces of giant beige metal boxes of all kinds. And there seems to be trend of HMI devices from Chinese market. I wonder who's buying these and for what...

Ha. I just bought two ESP32-based ones: with a 5" & a 7" TFT display cuz I wanted to try both.

My application was an HMI (using LGVL) for a device I'm building to order, but I've since decided that I don't need touch input and thus can use a much smaller display.

The devices however, are cheap and really nice for the $30 price tag. Having such capable, easy to use hardware at such a low price point opens up markets that couldn't feasibly be served before. There are a lot of people who need one-offs or very small quantities of devices that can't withstand a 5- or 6-figure development cost. When that cost drops to low four-figures because you can use the Arduino ecosystem, then the cash flows.

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

#234

Post by [deleted] »

HankB99 wrote: post #202
yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I'm reminded of the aquarium thermometer used to launch an attach on a casino. https://mashable.com/article/casino-smart-thermometer-hacked > I have a couple Raspberry Pi Zeroes that monitor aquarium temperature. I keep them updated.

[deleted]

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

#235

Post by pxmpxm »

HankB99 wrote: post #202
yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I'm reminded of the aquarium thermometer used to launch an attach on a casino. https://mashable.com/article/casino-smart-thermometer-hacked > I have a couple Raspberry Pi Zeroes that monitor aquarium temperature. I keep them updated.

Ah yeah, I need to stop working at random notice, because some CVE bros have to immediately update all my things to hedge the risk of organized crime targeting my $0 value data like I'm that casino.

Meanwhile in reality, no one gives a f about the rPi you use for your Guinea pig feeder.

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

#236

Post by pipeline_peak »

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…

This, I bought a Cubieboard back in 2013 because everything looked good on paper.

It didn’t take long to realize how useless the thing was with ARM Debian and absolutely no driver support…

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

#237

Post by frontierkodiak »

lelanthran wrote: post #145
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 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.

Various hibernation modes are great, but 300ma@5v sometimes feels too hungry for the amount of computation in there. I bet things would be better if it wasn’t 45nm ‘pitch’. They are great chips, but require more power than you might expect if you’re doing something network-heavy or, god forbid, using the camera. Unfortunately there’s no competitive alternatives for the hobbyist.

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

#238

Post by nick__m »

HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #231
nick__m wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use an stm32f103 as an io extender for my esp32-a1s, they cost about 2$ per board and the chip programmer cost about 10$. I use I2C to communicate between the esp32 and the stm32. I do my development in VSCode using platformio with the Arduino framework and FreeRTOS. It is really convenient to have the same os and framework used for all the MCUs of a project. That's why I use the 2$ stm32 instead of a 1$ stm8.

Yeah, I decided to use an "Arduino" 10MT "PLC" board as my I/O extender since it comes with optically isolated inputs, 4-20mA analog input and a 24VDC power input, all of which I can use. At the improbable price of $22.75!

Thank you, I did not know about those PLC, it's incredible what you can obtain for that price.

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

#239

Post by snvzz »

sosodev wrote: post #158
Klinky wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even Raspberry Pi has struggled with GPU/HW acceleration, but at least its distro is maintained & updated.

The pi4's GPU at least supports OpenGL ES 3.1 and Vulkan 1.2 now. That's decent even if not powerful.

rpi4 is massively memory bandwidth starved. It can't even keep up with drawing the screen in general, much less run games.

VisionFive2's GPU (from Imatech) is supposedly at least 4x as fast.

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

#240

Post by Dnguyen »

wilonth wrote: post #196
Dnguyen wrote: post #32

I wish the RAM could be a bit more, at least 1G or 2G, so I can have a database on there without having to ship my data to the cloud. Then the system can really run isolated as much as possible, for security and privacy.

Dude database is supposed to be on disk not RAM.

Yes, I understand the content of the database is supposed to be on disk. But for the database to function and do its thing, it needs space in RAM. Like page swap and cache.
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