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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

#211

Post by tonyarkles »

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.

They’re less popular in the hobby world, but the Freescale/NXP i.MX6 family has absolutely fabulous mainline Linux support. There’s still a Freescale tree, but for most functionality you don’t need it. A few years back a client of mine needed some other functionality that wasn’t available in the version that Freescale forked for their tree and they wanted me to come in and assess what it would take to backport the driver they needed or basically make our own fork that forward-ported whatever Freescale mojo was needed.

As it turned out, I spent a couple of hours messing around a bit with some device tree configuration to make it work with the peripherals on their custom carrier and a bit of `make menuconfig`… and it booted right up on Linus’ tree.

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

#212

Post by cosmojg »

snowAbstraction wrote: post #173
theamk wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Some boards have decent support. I've got an odroid C1 released in 2015 and I saw there is at least an Ubuntu 20 image for it!

Better yet, you can get the latest version of RetroArch up and running on an ODROID-C1 with Arch Linux Arm: https://archlinuxarm.org/platforms

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

#213

Post by numpad0 »

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...

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

#214

Post by wildzzz »

bombcar wrote: post #206
Rediscover wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If You have not tried what the other reply-post suggests (dumb brick), I have a 5V 4A dumb brick I can loan for a quick test. Seattle area. It has worked on quite a few boards here. Or purchase one from where-ever, they are really useful outside of SBCs (though they are usually 5.3V and 4.xA, so watch out with sensitive parts).

What is a dumb brick?

Sounds like a USB power supply that doesn't do any power negotiation and just gives as much current over 5V as it can handle. Those things typically top out at 2.4A so not really sure where you'd get one that could do much more.

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

#215

Post by anigbrowl »

anigbrowl wrote: post #139
HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sorry, that's @lovyan03 if you were looking to follow up.

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

#216

Post by isoprophlex »

wepple wrote: post #186
isoprophlex wrote: post #88

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"

Yeah, did you see the screenshot?

It didn't exactly spark joy, which these side project tinker tools should, in my opinion.

Lugubrious, heh.

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

#217

Post by hakfoo »

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 always wondered how we got there.

The original ARM chips, as in the Archimedes era, obviously ran in things that broadly resembled the other desktop computing platforms of the era.

They had to solve the same problems: deciding which device to boot from, how to initialize the attached grab-bag of peripherals. They also had a long series of models with varying capabilities and integration.

So they must have something comparable to a BIOS/EFI/Open Firmware-- a standardized hardware enumeration and bringup process.

Somehow that disappeared when ARM moved away from RISC OS "desktop computers" and went into the microcontroller world. Why?

I figured it probably either had to do with licensing, or an assumption that an embedded ARM core in some random device would only ever be used with a particular bag of peripherals, so there was no need to rely on conventions.

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

#218

Post by accrual »

nalzok wrote: post #199
cosmojg wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 d…

Wait, NUCs are that cheap? I would appreciate a link so that I can get my hands on one. I don't use eBay often and filtering feels terrible on their site.

It's not too bad. I usually filter by US only, used but not for parts, then it has pretty decent search syntax like "Intel NUC (i5,i7) -parts" and you can keep adding "-unwanted_terms" to get the query down to something more selective.

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

#219

Post by throwaway173738 »

rostakagmfun wrote: post #140
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…

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 ev…

I just get the kernel and grab the stock Debian userspace for the architecture. Vendors like to do horrible stuff to their sample distros.

I’ve also tried Yocto and Buildroot and frankly they’re not that great. Yocto’s build system is so complicated it could take months to fit all your custom layers together to get a working image. Every vendor of every layer has their own conventions and you have to manage patch sets on top of patch sets to get some things working. Buildroot works better but still has a rigid vision for what an embedded Linux system looks like and how it fits together.

The beauty of Linux is that once you get to libc the interface is identical no matter what board you’re using so there’s no reason to build everything from source. And if you want something like Yocto you’d be better off building rpm or deb packages from a basic layer and then using eg multistrap to build a root filesystem.

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

#220

Post by jcul »

joshmarinacci wrote: post #155
sosodev wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've had the same experience with non Raspberry Pi boards. They've become useless thanks to endlessly broken software and zero support. My rpi's have been useful for years and are still getting regular updates. I think I too was drawn in by the performance claims made by those other manufacturers. I realized though that raspberry pi are very powerful computers. We just take the scale of modern computing for granted a…

Yup. It's RPi or nothing. It's the software that makes these valuable, not hardware specs. If I wanted to sell an ARM board I'd make it as Pi compatible as possible.

It's been gathering dust for a while now, but I had great success with my odroid C2. At one point I was running a matrix server with various bridges.
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