I have one from the original crowdsourcing campaign, with an audio dock. Interference makes the sound quality is so bad it's unusable for any practical purposes. Support was useless.
Vocore2, a ridiculously small Linux PC
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Re: Vocore2, a ridiculously small Linux PC
#22This project looks awesome. I can imagine it being used instead of the ESP8266 in many of my IoT projects. That would be a huge time saver. It will start to become competitive once it is actually cheaper than Raspberry Pi Zero. Especially as the Vocore2 is MIPS-based.
My main issue with using a full-blown linux device for IoT is that it's a full blown linux device. Not only is it harder to get up and running IMHO (vs just flashing your code to esp8266), you need to maintain a full OS which is a hassle security wise in the longer term. I get that there are some advantages, but overall I think IoT is better off as simple as possible. Also, it's not possible to take the RPi zero seri…
Any OSes you would recommend?
Re: Vocore2, a ridiculously small Linux PC
#23I have one from the original crowdsourcing campaign, with an audio dock. Interference makes the sound quality is so bad it's unusable for any practical purposes. Support was useless. http://forum.vocore.io/viewtopic.php?f=16&t=3500&p=5185
It sound like you havent grounded it, speakers are complicated but crackling can usually be fixed by connecting it to an earthing wire
Re: Vocore2, a ridiculously small Linux PC
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
Click though to product page, full specs are listed: http://vocore.io/v2.html “Around 40” GPIO pins
that's a weirdly non-specific number...
That's because a lot of pins are configurable (there is a muxer on them), so you could have a maximum of 40 GPIOs but if you want say, an SPI port, then you get less GPIOs.
Re: Vocore2, a ridiculously small Linux PC
#25Website says: "It will help you to make [...] the tiniest router in the world."
Got one of these and I'm pretty sure they're quite smaller: http://amzn.asia/d/idyKhjN
Makes me wonder if I could turn those Japanese routers into computers (they're dirt cheap at £8.50)...
Re: Vocore2, a ridiculously small Linux PC
#26Smallest linux computer I've seen was Transcend SD card (the wifi one). There are more manufacturers and I think Electric imp uses the same chipset.
I looked at what you meant, and first found this article
https://hackaday.com/2016/06/30/transcend-wifi-sd-card-is-a-...
which links this article:
https://jamesone111.wordpress.com/2014/03/19/exploring-the-t...
So this is a Linux server in the size of an SD-Card that has 16 GB of storage. And Wifi. And lets clients connect to download whatever's on them.
I was thinking, wow, this must be some pro photography thing costing like $399 or something.
The cost (given in the second article) is £25 (which is $32.19 today.)
That is pretty cheap for a tiny Linux server of this size. With WIFI.
And it made the rounds 5 years ago: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Transcend%20Wifi-SD%20card&sor...
What is the world coming to.
By the way here is the one where HN discussed it the most:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7647434
And note the comment that Transcend released the firmware (though that link is offline today.)
However I guess there really just aren't all that many use cases for this kind of a server. Or maybe it has been superseded? One page[1] lists it as weighing just 2 grams, compared with the weight of 2.5 grams for a U.S. penny. That's gotta have some sort of applications. Why isn't this more popular at $30, or what are people using instead? Is it like, impossible to get any ports out of it, even a single serial debugging port via soldering, so you can't connect it to anything else?
It just seems so hackable!
[1] https://www.extremedeals.com.ph/products/transcend-16gb-wifi...
Re: Vocore2, a ridiculously small Linux PC
#27Website says: "It will help you to make [...] the tiniest router in the world." Got one of these and I'm pretty sure they're quite smaller: http://amzn.asia/d/idyKhjN Makes me wonder if I could turn those Japanese routers into computers (they're dirt cheap at £8.50)...
Yours are thinner, not smaller overall I think. The Vocore is basically the size of an ethernet port, judging by screenshots.
Still, in the end, you're correct that it's not real news that the size of a full Linux-capable computer is now entirely dictated by the type of physical interfaces you need. There is nothing you can do with a Vocore that you couldn't already do with other similarly-sized boards.
Re: Vocore2, a ridiculously small Linux PC
#28The problem with Linux in these applications is that it's not a realtime OS.
Nothing prevents you from using U-Boot to boot FreeRTOS.
Re: Vocore2, a ridiculously small Linux PC
#29> 128MB, DDR2, 166MHz This is small supercomputer! My first distribution (Slackware 2.0) was running on a P75 MHZ with 8 MB.
Do you know the fischertechnik toy line? It's a little bit like Lego technic (fischertechnik fans will hate me for this comment because fischertechnik appeared in 1964, while the first Lego technic was introduced only in 1977). They have a programmable controller for their robotics models: 600MHz ARM CPU and 256MB DDR3 RAM. We are talking about a toy line here :)
No, thanks for the heads up.
Yep pretty crazy nowadays, although if I would be playing with electronics, I guess I would just use the ESP32 instead.
Re: Vocore2, a ridiculously small Linux PC
#30Smallest linux computer I've seen was Transcend SD card (the wifi one). There are more manufacturers and I think Electric imp uses the same chipset.
I looked at what you meant, and first found this article https://hackaday.com/2016/06/30/transcend-wifi-sd-card-is-a-... which links this article: https://jamesone111.wordpress.com/2014/03/19/exploring-the-t... So this is a Linux server in the size of an SD-Card that has 16 GB of storage. And Wifi. And lets clients connect to download whatever's on them. I was thinking, wow, this must be some pro photography thing co…
My experience is that SD-cards don't last very long when used as the `/` directory.