SBC, Single Board Computers

If You Don't Like It, Then Why Do You Type Like That Too?

Got an Olimex Micro A20 in the mail. It's huge, but has well over 150 pins. Now I just have to find a use for it. I've thought of hooking it up to a game controller and trying to make some kind of simple AI, but I have no idea how to read from the screen.

Dedicated porn machine

Going for an ODROID-XU4 when I am able to spend some money. Unless a better version comes out by then. (e.g. XU5)

Thinking of perhaps developing a small 3D MMORPG that can be played on SBCs. I'm sure to be mocked when I say that I plan on using Python for it.

Got one of Saanlima's Project Oberon 2013 workstations sitting on my desk, just need to connect it up. Quite open, all the Verilog is published.

hackaday.com/2016/05/10/new-part-day-a-beaglebone-on-a-chip

Meh, I already have a Commodore 64 for this kind of shit, ny SBC can at least run modern OS' m80

witch one doesn't have binary blobs

Beaglebone Black should be able to run without any proprietary blobs. Never tried it myself though

They are significantly worse

Because Some People Understand Sarcasm And You're Not One Of Them.

Are you building the kernel and OS from scratch or did you miss the entire point of that execise?

thanks user
I've looked on the olimex board most of them seem clean except the ones who integrates NAND storages it seems that it requires
found this
olimex.com/forum/index.php?topic=3310.msg13914#msg13914

and this old article from the fsf that should need some update
fsf.org/resources/hw/single-board-computers

it seems that the FreedomBox project says that the board does not requires blobs to work
wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox/Hardware/A20-OLinuXino-MICRO

They can make decent Pentium 4 PC replacements actually, ignore he has short term memory loss and forgets how awful P4s were without dedicated GPUs

I've got an Olimex Micro A20. Great board but it takes 12 volts instead of 5. If you order one get the charger with it, because you won't be able to power it properly with a MiniUSB adapter. If you can find anything about the Lime2-A20 being free get that instead, because it runs off MiniUSB just fine.

Can it run crysis?

...

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Here's the closest direct comparison I could find
htpcguides.com/raspberry-pi-2-vs-banana-pi-vs-x86-vs-x64-unrar-par2-benchmarks/

The Dell XPS is running a Pentium M 700 @ 1.86 GHz equivalent to a Pentium 4 @ 3.33GHz

Those are both mobile processors though.

Just for the sake of the thread here's a SBC comparison I found whille I was looking
wiki.glidernet.org/cpu-boards

It probably depends what you're planning on doing with it. BBB for example is pretty bad at floating point operations. According to a comment on a Hackaday benchmark post:

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An ARM SoC will beat a P4 in power usage and video decoding, and will probably be fine for most tasks, but an ARM CPU is significantly less performant than a P4.

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Are we ever going to see an sbc running on a more powerful but slightly dated SoC so it'll be cheap and powerful?
Thinking something like mtk6752 or snapdragon800, 2GB ram, etc for around 50 or 60 usd?

Preferably mediatek since they're the king of multithreading, but the snapdragon has a stronger gpu so it'll be good too.

...

I want to get a SBC to use for torrenting and streaming so SATA and Gigabit ethernet is a must.
What is the best option out there? I've been looking at the Cubieboard 2 and the LIME2, but I'm curious if there are more options available.

Orange pi plus 2 is under 50 usd iirc.

The specs look great, but I cannot find any images for the Allwinner H3 (Debian, Arch).

orangepi.org/orangepibbsen/forum.php?mod=viewthread&tid=342

Arch, debian, Fedora, Ubuntu, opensuse, and a bunch more.

Cool, I was only looking at the Debian and Arch sites. Thanks user.

Have fun with shitty firmware

theregister.co.uk/2016/05/09/allwinners_allloser_custom_kernel_has_a_nasty_root_backdoor/

Will that make a difference if I'm not planning on going online with it?

Not really, but if you haven't already bought the board try a board with an Allwinner A20 instead. The H3 requires Allwinner's backdoored kernel but the community has their own A20 kernel which is clean. I'd recommend the Cubieboard 2 or Olimex Lime2 A20.
For distros try out Armbian. It's Debian or Ubuntu with lots of board-specific tweaks. It's also backdoor-free for A20 boards.

Go home RPi Shill.

Nobody wants your shitty hipster meme.

Did You Learn English By Reading The Titles Of Clickbait Articles?

nobody(you)

in olimex board don't take the one with nands to boot from nand you have to include blobs

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Raspi is propietary shit and also
I could use some open SBC but I'm don't need one right now. Usually they are only good for some specific small projects.

All sbc are propietary.
RPI is not shit, it's the best SBC out there.

Also you're a faggot.

The Blackborne says hi.
Who is your supplier?
It takes one to know one does it not?

The what?

I meant a Beaglebone Black. Spelling serious messed up there.

Yea I assumed so. but BBB uses the ARM architecture, which is propietary.

True, however it is the most currently freedom respecting SBC until RSC-IV SBC's become viable.

I agree with this, with a side note that RPI never aimed or stated to be fully open source.
And yes I'm keeping my eye on lowrisc.org.
That would be the shiiiizzzz.

i386/amd64 are proprietary too.

aiju.de/electronics/aijuboard/

the only re-writeable binary blob is a small optional power management feature. I've read the script used by Parabola to deblob the BBB kernel patches.

Meanwhile it is literally impossible to boot the RPi without a proprietary bootloader

literally Chinese botnet

this. It's possible to use Olimex boards in freedom, but only when booting from SD

nobody(null)

pine64 is cheaper

full gigabit that does not run over usb

hive-project.de/

I'd fuck around with one of these

...

>Open Source debug code is enabled by mistake
Never change Freetards

Im sick of linux/unix tbh - want some retro Amiga'ish feels

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Quark

>>590211
Just hacked some delicious 32kB NVRAM onto the board -- this needed sum Extra Wizard because the onboard video generation is shared with the CPU (and the CPU's automatic DRAM refresh). I used a 74LS157 multiplexer to hide the extra address bus lines while the video part of the timing cycle was active.

...without the 74LS157, and the RAM expansion wired up like is usually done, the active extra address lines would be whatever the DRAM refresh access counter was at, and the video generator would see RRxxx instead of 00xxx -- resulting in hash everywhere.

. the one guy on tech that does anything remotely interesting

Keep posting m8, do you have an end goal or is it just fuck about and see what happens?

I agree, but this shit is over my head. I'm just an enthusiastic amateur. My day job has very little to do with Holla Forums stuff. I hope this guy keeps posting.

He's not getting ignored, he's just not getting replies. Imageboards don't have upvotes and don't value low-content replies that only say something is nice.

Don't let a lack of replies discourage you. This is interesting.

I'll wait until there's a product available to order, and the reviews seem good.

Why do people do this shit?

I'm not ignoring him. I just have nothing to say about it.

Nice hacking in progress, brother.
Where can I learn about this subject?

that is fantastic. have you been documenting the process on a blog somewhere?

...

I'm using a pi to learn stuff about linux. Had to start somewhere I guess. Want to get something less cucked and childlike but it works for me for now.

I din realize, the website lets you order them and says will be delivered next month, i just fingered it was a normal lead time but now I know your right and they have not shipped. I'll wait too. But I still plan on getting one.

idk its lame mby you should kidnap and torture them to find out

For a design (and UI) nothing like UNIX, I'm having fun with this right now: saanlima.com/pepino/index.php?title=Pepino_Oberon

It saves my sanity after a day trying to maintain a big-ball-of-mud system to read and hack on some elegant code.

I'll check it out, thanks

>oberonstation.x10.mx/

416 kB Empty Page GET

So out of two companies offering three hardware platforms and an open-source emulator, one of the companies doesn't know much about Web design. Not sure why this is relevant to good hardware/compiler/OS design, which is the subject of the book.

Just really to do this-- getting a board I bought for a dollar to be a 'real computer'. This one actually doesn't have any hardware output ports so things like an IDE interface is out, but rather than do the more extensive hardware hacking, I'll just look out for another board to be that future project.

But now, I have a very nice raw Z80 system that I can code on from the comfyness of my workstation.

Eh... too much effort. (And mentioning online having an EPROM programmer attracts all the feebs who want to reprogram their car's ignition controller.) But I can chirp in when I find someone doing a similar project.

Oops, forgot this one.

Floating point maths, motherfuckers!

Which was a big deal. I think that it wasn't just that Microsoft produced a microcomputer BASIC that was so special, it was the decent FP that was in it (trig functions..) that gave it the edge in the market.

...

fwiw, this is the Z80 board's bootloader that I wrote.

Being a JAMMA Arcade test board, it has an input port for the joystick, coin sense, etc. Just 8 bits worth, so serial comms for sending code to the board was the only way (..when I also want a PS/2 keyboard hanging off it as well..) Software RS232esque serial is a pain to make reliable, however a clocked SPI-style interface, while using two wires, can run as fast as the receiving CPU can handle.

A Raspberry Pi (bought pre-SJW...) makes it easy to bit-bash from Unix. I write and assemble the code on my main machine, and a shell script ssh's a stream of decimal values to the program in the first listing. That program bit-bangs 16-bit values to the Z80. On the Z80 if c < 256, it pokes the lower byte into a pointer, if c==$0600 it jumps to (downloaded) code at $8600, anything else updates the pointer. Sending all word-length values makes things simpler and less likely for sync issues if there's 8-bit SPI transmissions as well. A near-identical bit of code handles the 9-bit transmissions from a PS/2 keyboard (on a different pair of wires).

After I tuned the timings on the RPI's side (no handshaking, and I found that 60 usec clocking was not too fast for the Z80), it does about 800 bytes/sec, and it's been quite reliable.

Raspberry pi is terrible. There are easily best options out there for roughly the same price or less.

You know about raspberry because all the media is talking about them. They even paid to have one mentioned at mr robot.

It's also probably related to sf media talking only about sf projects or hipster friendly stuff.

Z80/6502/6510 Undertale Backport when?
VVVVV was backported to the Commodore 64 and it plays really well on it
youtube.com/watch?v=DAw0mII__WI

There's the Odroid XU4, which has 4 1.4GHz cores, 4 2GHz cores, 2GB RAM and USB3. It uses a Samsung SoC.

please don't buy this garbage.

ODROID-XU4 must have the secure boot enabled boot loader. There are four components of boot loader:

bl1.bin.HardKernel
bl2.bin.HardKernel
tzsw.bin.HardKernel

Can you name a few better options for a lower price?

fuck up. which sbc costs less than the pi zero?

When people talk about the Raspberry Pi that's usually not the board they're talking about.

Actually it's the best out there.

on what basis?

That's a very strong statement. Depending on what you're looking for it might be the best, but there are
- More powerful boards (that are also more expensive)
- Boards that don't run the ethernet through USB and can get a decent network speed
- Boards with special features like SATA

Not true, the parallax propeller c3 is open

It's a bit too hardcore for scrubs that need a babbys first Linux distro prepackaged before they consider it though

The next stage of this Z80 hack: getting data out of the thing. Unfortunately, the board has the /IOREQ + /WR directly sent to the video generator (to cycle the screen colour), and it'll be too much bother hardware-hacking those signals out. Alternatively, I could make it generate barcodes on-screen, and have the RPi that's already controlling it to use a camera and with some opencv2 coding, decode what's on screen.

Alternative idea #2: just flash the screen with manchester-encoded data, and have the camera use quick-and-dirty means to extract bits from that. (This avoids having to get up to speed with OpenCV2...)

I pre-ordered the pine64 and it's complete shit, that is unless you ONLY want to use it for android.
They lied, they lied to all of us, they put all their effort into android and "RemixOs" (android), while they relied on the "community" (one or two dedicated community members that don't get paid) to come up with a working linux version. We will never have any video acceleration so anything GUI or desktop related is un-useable. Also what kind of shit gets by like this: You could type something (forgot exactly) like "rootthisdevice" to get root access to the board. Someone forgot to remove it during development.
Just get a Raspberry Pi, same specs and wifi/bt included. I wish I did.

Ouch. I was thinking about getting a Pine64, but Linux support seemed a little thin on it.

Yea not only you but there are a lot of posts on the forms of people regretting getting it for the Linux support, and others wanting to return (not possible).
But the one thing I forgot to mention was it would make a good home server, due to it having a real Gigabit Ethernet port (not Ethernet to usb like on the raspberry pi). But you still are limited to usb2.0 hdd's, but that's fine for a 30$ soc.
I myself would still go towards RPi, it's so well supported. (Personal gripe about how pine64 will be stuck on kernel 3.1 forever)

Would you still recommend the Pine64 for a diy Android tablet?

Yea it woks great for android, and only uses 2.5 watts. You should get the wifi addon board that goes with it. Who knows what usb wifi adapter would work.
The whole project is towards android with people that have no experience. The 64+ version has a touch screen, battery, camera port, and more. So you can buy their addons to work with it, when they release them. I don't think they have all the addons out yet.
They don't even have all the orders out yet, three thousand orders to still ship out of 32000.

Thanks for the info.

Yeah, if I get one, I'm going to get the wifi/Bt module.

Last time I checked, the touchscreen still wasn't out. I think the estimate on that was late May or June.

Hiho young humans.

I mentioned before that this Z80 board doesn't have output ports-- what there is of /IOREQ & /W is all sent to the colour output selector. Colour is done by using a D-flipflop/latch, whose output bits control which of the R/G/B/Sync composite video signals get out, controlled by saved copies of processor bus signals D0-D3.

D4 and D5 do...something that I haven't understood yet, but they run off into the video generation, and are being used somehow.

But bits in D6 and D7 are unused! I copied the circuit used for latching bits D0-D3, tapping the reset and clocking pins from the 74LS174 chip to a second 74LS174 with the D6 and D7. Its output goes to optocouplers to give me *two* electrically isolated output bits-- this now can mean SPI (probably), or a bit-banged serial port. I can now get data out of the Z80 board! :-D

The new circuit is the darker veroboard. I had to do a bit of leg extension hacking to get the second daughterboard to fit on. The two 6-pin DIPs starting from the left are the optocouplers, the middle chip is the second 74LS174, and the rightmost chip is actually the D0-D3 D-flipflop mainboard circuit transferred to the veroboard, where I could make a tidier job of tapping the control signals needed for the middle chip.

Nice. So what do you plan on using the board for at this point?

The next thing to do is to get it into a case, and then get some kind of storage happening-- that'll probably entail SPI'ing to the RPi, but it would be nice to make the Z80 independent from it.

I just bought a Pi2 because i'm cuck. What would have been the right choice?

See, now that looks suspiciously like two caps user. So yea, probably no.

They're all shit, they all require binary bobs in some form. I want to get a propeller c3 because it's open source hardware and an interesting architecture, but it's not in the same league as an octacore ARM with 3GB RAM, Wi-Fi, GPU and a hardware video decoder.

Hmm... and now that the board has 32kB of RAM, a CHIP-8 interpreter is doable (those need 4kB..the original board was only 2)

Have they made a fully floss one yet?

Just so you know Jamma board hacking user, I've been watching with bated (lol) breath what you post. It's badass, and an inspiration

So what's everybody's opinion of the Pine64?

IDK only one guy here has one. He says linux support on it is weak. IDK why that would be. Its a rather common chip and shit and all the schematics and shit are open sourced. The gpu is common as fuck too. Still thinking bout getting one because actual gigabit and cheaper. Make a web host that just hosts shit from ram at gigabit for $20 would be prrdy kool. I think there shipping costs are kinda Jewish though. Mby ill just get pi 3's instead but I'm really pissed about everything running through a single usb host... that bottleneck is tighter than the girls on hebe and it really fucks with alot of my use cases.

My wet dream is a new (cheap) board to have sata and gigabit. Would bust a nut if it had SODIMM ram (ddr4 hnnnngggg) and pcie (like those kike galileo boards (those fucking jews at intell hate ram, giving it only 256 megs of ram, got I want to kill them and the piece of shit is $80+shipping))

You are all colossal faggots.

Allowing yourselves to be cucked to the weakest, most inferior hardware possible while (((they))) have the strongest possible and control your every thought and action.

SBCs are for cuckolded niggers, simple as.

Whya are you bringing your favorite porn category into the discussion?

Using a Pi 3 as an XBMC/Kodi box for my TV. Works brilliantly for that.

Why arent you doing embedded development in javascript , Holla Forums?

opensource.com/life/16/5/espruino
Espruino.com

Tell me more about this c3. I'm looking into buying a SBC and don't want anything that isn't totally FLOSS. What makes it so difficult and non-beginner friendly compared to any other SBC?

I'd probably initially be using it as a cheap media center / diy "smart" TV. Basically something to replace my laptop that just always sits next to the TV for movies and stuff from an HDMI.

I imagine once I got comfortable with it I'd like to do some retro gaming though.

It is not going to do anything like video decoding, it has eight 32-bit non interruptable cores, with fuck all memory and no operating system to speak of. People have written retro games for it, but if you want to stick Linux + Kodi+mame on a sdcard and have it Steve jobs, look elsewhere

What about a beaglebone?

Beaglebone needs a blob for GPU/VPU, but

It's among the best you're going to get, a board where everything is open source except for a blob gpu driver is the high water mark as far as I've seen.

I use a ubietruck as a home server. It works well enough for everything, and has a power supply thing for 3.5 inch hard drives. It has VGA as well, which is pretty neat. It's a shame they went full retard with the 4 and 5, picking Allwinner chips that don't have as much support as the A20.
I bought an Olimex Micro A20 and it's fucking huge. 180 or so pins split into 4 GPIO sockets and 2 of their own UEXT sockets. I have no idea what I'm going to do with it yet.

*Cubietruck

The BB's PRU would be a really nice resource--- basically they're 200MHz ARM cores dedicated to bit-banging (and bit-reading..) offloaded from the main CPU (thinking of the Amiga's Copper). I've seen one project where the BB did very high-quality NTSC->HDMI conversion with it: lukazi.blogspot.com.au/2015/08/a2-serial-video-to-hdmi-converter.html

...unfortunately it needs a proprietary TI compiler, and is ITAR-controlled.

Bought an arduino microcontroller the other day. Going to program it to do cool shit
Technically not an SBC

lowrisc should be out within a year

Is there an agreed definition of what a SBC is and is not?

A computer has to have a processor, memory and some form of IO to count as a computer. An Arduino has all 3 so it's technically a single board computer. It runs off an 8 bit Atmel chip though, so don't expect to run Linux off it.

I think at a minimum, it has to be a "general purpose computer" capable of running a general purpose operating system.

If you can wire up a serial console and run something akin to a BASIC interpreter (ala c64) I'd count anything from there up.

Von Neumann and Harvard CPU architectures.

dmitry.gr/index.php?r=05.Projects&proj=07. Linux on 8bit

C'mon guys, get hyped about this. It's a totally open hardware, free software supporting single board computer. It uses the same chip as the Novena, the imx6.
imx6rex.com/2016/05/initial-openrex-pricelist-pre-order-now/

Expensive as fuck

I want to believe...

Freedom ain't free.

I wanted to make this 1970s-era Z80 CPU feel at home, so the last part of the project was to install Dottori into a case with wood panels and, of course, that Data 70 typeface that was all the rage back in a time when The Six Million Dollar Man was on TV.

Just as a test I tried the laser-toner-transferred-using-solvent idea, and just putting the prototype panel in made it just look right, and now I think I'll leave it like this.

Bought a BBB, didn't understand ESD at the time. Completely fucked it up before I had a chance to do anything with it other than the bonescript tutorial with the lights.

just

ESD?

electrostatic discharge

I cant remember if it was the orange pi but some sbc line out there had a really shitty sata over usb implantation and was trying to pass it off as real sata. It was quite a bit worse than just about any usb sata adapter.

My Raspberry Pi B just broke, and I'm looking for a new board, preferably with some kind of wifi builtin, to not to have too much heat generated at the USB ports (I use it as wireless hotspot).
I stumbled upon the Orange Pi, and this "Lite" model looks really nice for just $12.00. Have any anons bought it? How is it, and how well is it supported? I loved how I could get pretty much any distro to run on my RPi as everybody had one, and there was a ton of documentation and such. I'm most interested in alpine linux, though (as it's what I used to have a pretty much static hotspot). It says it's compatible with RPi2, but just how, is the CPU just the same or is all the hardware compatible? I might want to do some OS development on it, as I like ARM asm, but don't want to have to be reversing hardware/software to document it.
If not this model, does anybody have any other reccomendations?
I'm pretty much looking for this:
- Cheap (Max €20,-)
- Can run at least alpine or gentoo
- Preferably open hardware (though that's hard with the requirement above)
- Wifi antenna, otherwise at least 2 USB ports, that hopefully don't generate as much heat as the RPi did.
- Preferably well documented or big enough community
- If possible, any exciting (even if otherwise useless) peripherals like an IR receiver or something.

Sorry, I'm real bad at asking short questions. I tried to shorten it, but this is as short as it gets.

For the Orange, i'd wait a little bit, since the support isn't totally mainlined (linux-sunxi.org/Linux_mainlining_effort#Planned_for_4.7)?
There's the pine, banana pi, odroid c1 and some other stuff. The pine seems really interesting, since it has an AARCH64 CPU.

so how'd you break it? I just got mine yesterday and now I'm worried I fucked it up

The pine definitely looks interesting, but it's yet another shitty kickstarter and their website doesn't explain shit besides looking real fancy. Is it really as open as it claims to be? Where is actual documentation? The banana pi would be an instant get, if I actually could get pricing info on the official site, but other sites say it's $57, so that's a big nope. The odroid c1 is discontinued, sold out, and $35 (which roughly translates to €33,- + shipping).

The thing is that the Orange isn't supported anywhere. You'll have to wait 4.7 or 4.8 for ArchARM (for example) to support it.

Watch out around the Orange Pi series. They use Allwinner H3 chips, and a backdoor was found in the kernel. The Allwinner A10 and A20 aren't affected because they have custom kernels, but you can't do that with the H3 just yet. The Orange Pi One is good if you want something like an Arduino but better, just don't use it for security based stuff.
Orange Pis are "compatible" with the RasPi in the way that their pinouts are the same. The software can be different, and I don't know if anyone has ported the Pi's GPIO thing to other SBCs. You could still do it manually.

Best match I can think for your requirements would be something by Olimex. They're OSHW, cheap and well documented, and they have a special peripheral port to make adding extra things easier. No idea about installing Gentoo though. Good news is that they're Europe based, so shipping shouldn't be much of an issue. Look up the Lime A10, Lime A20 or Micro A20.
Micro A20 costs 55 euros, but it's fucking huge despite the name and has 180 or so full size pins. It takes 12 volts, so make sure to get the charger for it. I have one and it's been worth the money, but I got mine from a third party for cheap.
Lime A20 is much cheaper, and about the size of a RasPi. It's got a fuckton of pins, but they use tiny ones which are hard to use. If you want to hook stuff up get the A20 UEXT adapter, and a tiny ribbon cable.
Lime A10 is the same as above but doesn't have gigabit ethernet, needs a slightly different UEXT adapter and is rated to industrial temperatures. It's also cheaper, but still 30 euros.

I have an Orange Pi One. I like it. Things to keep in mind:

don't handle any kind of naked electronics without an antistatic wrist strap or something similar:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antistatic_device#Antistatic_wrist_strap

there's no writing in the wall that you will fry your board as soon as you touch it, but it's a matter of time before it happens. Also try to put the board inside a case like you would do with a desktop computer or a smartphone.

TBQH fam I like this. Makes cheap set top boxes and hdmi dongles more interesting.

NOTE WEARING THE BRACELET

PAJEET, MY SON

The lime A10 looks interesting. Thanks for the recommendation, user.

Finally got the SDCC C Compiler happening-- and even better-- working code from it.

The Mandelbrot took 88.5 minutes to calculate...

Kill me.

Cute microprocessors doing cute things.

A 80C31 running some TINYBASIC code to twiggle a stepper motor.

Now with more Laser burning small holes in my wall.

Are there any SBC with 4gb of RAM or cortex a53 processors? or are we still stuck with 32 bit?

pine64 but the linux support for it is not mature apparently.

Hey user

How do you get started with this sort of thing? I have a few old microprocessors with the programming board things at home, an old guy I work with gave them to me.
The only problem is that I don't know what to start with, there's so many possibilities.

Are there any 32 bit ones with CPUs that are 2.0ghz or more? Cause the most powerful ones I've seen are only as strong as a current entry-level smartphone

You are my favorite poster on Holla Forums

You could try some simple assembler programming, either for x86 (simple stuff /is/ actually doable...), or for some emulated MCU (certainly they're out there for Z80, 6502, and 8052). Many of the emulators make okay debuggers as well-- for this Z80 system, I used z80mon from wwwhomes.uni-bielefeld.de/achim/z80-asm.html

When you've got the basics down for writing source, assembling, linking, running, etc., search around for other people's code for things like (ROM) Monitor programs, and get those working. Lots of other peoples code...

By then, you can start thinking about learning coding for the processor in the old guy's programming boards, transferring your code into EPROM/Flash/whatever.

With this board there was hardware hacking involved. I guess my success with that just came from having read lots of stuff in early 1980s computer magazines (BYTE, Electronics Today International, etc.) which had the idea of double-decking daughterboards on IC sockets. Certainly clickbait-a-day electronic sites are plagiarizing those tricks on a regular basis.

You could still be well served reading the byte magazine archives archive.org/details/byte-magazine

If nothing else, to have a laugh at the claims made and how much things cost back then.

Thanks based microcontroller-user, you are truly my greatest ally

I did some asm at university and greatly enjoyed it, I guess it's a fairly large step from that to killer robots though. One day you will hear of my exploits.

Nice stuff user, I recently got into 6502 and I really enjoy it. Do you have a blog/wiki/braindump where you document your stuff?

Need a linux SBC that has AC wifi but actually has the linux drivers to use it

Is that fucking truth because my Pentium 4 630 is 3GHz and can software decode [email protected]/* */ in real time

Now I'm trying to do the computer-on-a-breadboard thing.

Natural Computer Law says the first attempt to wire a breadboard-computer is not allowed to work.

It's a 80C31, with NVRAM instead of external ROM-- which hopefully will get the Harvard architecture CPU to 'run code from RAM' with near zero-effort. If I can get this to work, I'll make a permanent PCB for it using wire-wrapping.

The 2nd photo shows the CPU bus lines /are/ toggling away madly, so it's probably a RAM Output-Enable issue, or the code in the NVRAM is bogus.

Going by CPU Mark anyway

cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel Pentium M 1.86GHz&id=1162

cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Mobile Intel Pentium 4 3.33GHz&id=1378

*Single thread rating may be higher than the overall rating, thread performance is just one component of the CPU Mark.

Don't get me wrong, shit was interesting as fuck, but I guess I don't have patience for getting that lowlevel...

Still really cool 👍

So I'm planning on turning my BBB into a FOSS tablet to use as both an ereader and mutlimeida center. I've seen a few very detailed guides for doing it to a Raspberry Pi, and fewer for doing this to a BBB.

Any tips? I've never done anything like this before.

Also, what's the advantage of an Arduino?

Blasphemy. By the way, color E-ink is coming.businesswire.com/news/home/20160524006209/en/Ink-Announces-Advanced-Color-ePaper-Breakthrough-Technology

a bbb or an rpi run a whole OS while the arduino, the digispark and other microcontollers just run one program constantly

the microcontroller in an arduino is cheaper and can operate in real time (but you're paying out the ass for the arduino name so get a cheap chinese clone that uses the same parts)

i know user, i'm just being an impatient shithead

I can get an e-ink screen, just don't know how compatible it'd be with my other uses for the device.

thanks

So anyway, I have a noobie question. If I'm going to make my bbb into a tablet/e-reader, can I still use it as a server for a VPN or something? Hopefully this question makes sense. I basically don't know if a server has to be dedicated and have no other functions, or if I can also use it for multimedia and stuff.

And I wanted to ask, is a BSD OS better for a server? I'm looking for a logical excuse to put FreeBSD on my bbb

Yes, it can run a general purpose multitasking, so you can run multiple services on them, just keep an eye on the load, but display + VPN shouldn't be too taxing.

So, a VPN routes all your traffic through an encrypted tunnel to the server (and then onwards to the rest of the Internet). This is only useful if it's far away. Running it on your home machine doesn't add any security. I just mention that because an e-reader needs to be with you to be useful. I guess you could leave it plugged in at home and tunnel into it from school to get past web filtering or to connect to your home LAN.

What about display + file server?

Thanks for the explanation, that makes sense. I had just read that was a potential use for them. Weird that someone said that though in hindsight

It makes perfect sense because you might not trust free WiFi networks and want to tunnel to home. Not to mention being able to access all computers/printers/whatever at home, securely.

Got the breadboard computer working this weekend-- the problem turned out to be the USB serial interface and one of my terminal programs not liking each other-- but the board design itself was okay.

With all those flywires, it maxes out at 3.68MHz, but that was somewhat expected. (The 80C31 part here can go up to 12MHz.)

But the Breadboard Computer was not impressed that I made a breadboard computer, the ungrateful shit. (Those are normal Tiny BASIC prompts.)

Are there any 4GB RAM SBC's available yet?

Wanting to replace my desktop with one of these when we go off-the-grid in a few weeks.

Nice wires faggot.

A Fabulous Computer needs Fabulous wires, pleb.

There are a few, but they're expensive. I think the Radxa Rock 2 has it as an option.
If you just want a small computer you could make something with an ITX motherboard. The Fractal Design Node 202 is the size of a game console. If you're set on a SBC the Cubietruck has 2GB RAM, VGA and SATA, so it should make a decent computer. I use one as a server.

I got a free Pi 3 from IBM (they had a recent giveaway with their IoT shit and gave a few thousand Pi 3's away for free)

currently using it on my mums tv running OSMC, sickrage, headphones and transmission-daemon so tv, movies, etc all automatically downloaded, sorted and plays on the big tv. Works with hdmi CEC out of the box and uses $5 power per year.

This week's hack was to make a wire-wrap version of the breadboard 8031. I did DIY wire-wrap IC sockets (see the /diy/ board), but as the first WW project I've done, I rather liked the technique-- very hands-on, and I didn't have a hot soldering-iron turned on for hours.

We get it, you Wrap.

...

sheeeeeeeeeeeeit

golibgen.io/search.php?search_type=magic&search_text=don lancaster&submit=Dig for

I've been doing some clock speed tests of the 80C31 WW board. An advantage of wire-wrapping over stripboard and breadboards is you get better high-frequency performance-- only about half as good as a well-designed printed circuit board, but better than the more ad-hoc methods. Anyway...

Max speed: 4.9152 Mhz (eh, was hoping for better...)
Minimum speed (while still getting usable baud rates): 2.00 Mhz

The 80C31BH datasheets states the minimum was 3.5Mhz, so there was a little bit of a surprise there...

Forgot to mention: the clock circuit is a crystal on a 74hc04 circuit like you'll find anywhere, and the output of that is sent to a 74hc161 "Divide by N" binary counter, so I could throw any crystals I had in there and get anything I wanted, rather than buying individual crystals of specific frequencies.

FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU

I just noticed that I had 220pF ceramic capacitors in the on-board clock circuit-- those should be 22pF.

With the right caps in, it now does 11.052 MHz .. \o/

...and now confirmed for 20MHz (..on a 12MHz part!)

YEAYUH

Is the ram on a pine a64+ upgradeable?

This indie pixelshit fad needs to die.

You could buy a real non-meme computer for that.

Terrible speed. Non-"smart" phones are stronger than that.

Something interesting I figured out: at 20 MHz, the 80C31 would be fetching from the memory bus at 6.66MHz, otherwise known as 150ns-- the speed limit of the EPROM. Ah, so that's why.

Let's see you make a computer from 1970s-era scrap that's 4 times faster than the first IBM PC.

thoughts on this sexy beast?

I'm a retard but I think this thing is a bute. What projects would this board excel in?

is the pi 0 outdated? looking into one for strictly educational purposes.

Android vs Raspbian for a tablet OS? Would probably use to watch movies, shows and maybe read a bit on.

Thinking about snagging a pi 2, but may also go the android rou with something like an Orange Pi or Pine64

Why does it seem like the only way to use an ARM CPU is to get a SBC? Why can't there be a mini-ITX or even an ATX motherboard for ARM processors? I want to be able to swap out CPU, RAM, SATA connections, graphics, etc. ARM should be great for home server/HTPC use, but the boards it comes on don't have enough SATA ports, have shitty slow graphics, and don't have cases. Instead the best bet is to use an AMD APU or something along those lines.

Elaborate

I have this exact problem

What I did to "improve" on this issue is use my BBB as a controller and gateway for the real machine, it can be turned on all day, if I need it I connect to my BBB and wake it up, it starts and now I have my connection rerouted to the main machine (a normal quadcore 2,3Ghz x64 16GBRAM micro-atx) I leave all the small things (ssh/ssl/static website/torrent seed) to the little board and only wake the beast when needed (VM/Gaming/Java work), it is working fine so far...

pi zero is very cheap and very low power. there are faster machines out there but they're also much more expensive

Why can't I find a used ODROID XU4?

I'm going all out on this new meme, fellow anons. Currently all I own is a BBB, but I'm going to pick up an RPi 2.

Would I be using each to their fullest potential by utilizing the BBB as a VPN since it's the most open sourced, therefore most secure for private stuff, and using the RPi as a Raspbian Tablet / media box?

Any votes for BBB tablet?

I have a Raspberry pi, and I'm doing nothing with it because I'm a stupid desktop scrub.

that's not how it works

In the sense that there's not going to be any back doors in a fully open system it's true, isn't it?

But I do get that it wasn't an accurate claim

but how could you have the BBB and your main machine connect to the same HDD?

...

Please, if you recall update us. I want a small NAS and this would be helpful.

my main hdd's only have the OS and games, all the other things are in my NAS

I think you will have problems with power consumption and getting the right capes and shields, RPi has a lot of better alternatives for equipment

He didnt do this shit. Or he's an old guy that did this a long time ago. These images are from a very old blog of a bygone era, but they were indeed done and can still be done.

reverse image search didnt bring up anything so I guess its technically deepweb.

If you want to actually get into this shit, the uC community is alive and healthy, and cheap to get into. What he's doing is a bit lower level than this, but is also a living community and there are even guides online. Also cheap to get into

Or wait a sec, was that on this board just a (long) while ago? Would also explain why tineye found jack.

If so my apologies.

You are such a big faggot can you pls tell me why I'm wrong so I can learn?

lrn me oh wise one.

Thanks. I think I'll keep the BBB as a VPN & file server then.

What did I do wrong?

First, you bought an SBC that runs so damn hot that it needs a fan just so it won't fry itself. Then, you used it without a fan, causing it to fry itself.

can someone tell me what this guy means?

That it's the same as the RPI: you need blobs to init memory and all the stuff.
fsf.org/resources/hw/single-board-computers

It does run hot, but I put a heatsink on it and set it to powersave. It currently operates at around 63C.

I'm just wondering what exactly killed the psu. Seems to me like the fan messed it up somehow, and now I'm afraid to try again.

I know it's not FSF, but does anything in it's price range top it as a desktop computer? The more free, the better of course. I'm looking into buying an XU4 to cut my desktop some slack.

If you don't care about freedom, why not something like asrock.com/mb/AMD/QC5000-ITXPh/

sure there'll be no obvious backdoors but there could still be bugdoors (intentionally placed security vulns that are hard to find unless you know they're there)

that's just a meme. you can write secure code and not release it or you can make a buggy piece of shit and post it up on github. being open doesn't magically make things secure. that's all i was saying

in terms of threat model, if your info is stored on the pi and you're doing all your browsing on the pi, the security of the bbb doesn't really factor into it. a browser exploit or whatever is still going to pop your pi. the vpn protects you from people on the same network (your isp or school or people in a coffee shop) but just moves the problem further away (so now your vpn provider sees your traffic instead of your isp or your isp sees it instead of your school)

Thanks for the explanation.

And to be clear, I wasn't actually planning on using the VPN for the Pi Tablet, I was just gonna do purely normie shit on it because I know it is easily exploitable. I am however planning on comfortably using a librebooted memepad and routing my network traffic through my BBB when I'm away from home, and I think this is an area where the BBB totally dominates any RPi.

because it's more expensive and doesn't look as cool. Plus I've never heard of this, so I imagine the community isn't very strong.

It's an amd64 "normal" CPU, m8... a lot more powerful but still fanless, 4 SATAs and no need for support/community.

...

&agreed.

Looks cool :)

So what's the scoop on ARM architecture vs x86 / 64?

Any SBCs that can run sc2?

Any SBCs that I can slap a fan on, like on the ODROID-XU4? I'm looking to replace my desktop and wanna hear some options. XU4 is sexy with those blue lights and beefy fan.

ARM isn't incredible, but RISC as a whole is cool for small cores not needing SIMD everywhere. Look for SH4, RISC-V and MIPS. SH4 especially, since the patents will expire soon.

Getting my dick hard.
Think I could make a handheld console with this?

generally slower than x64, choice architecture for high-level application and embedded programming

Faster than ARM generally, choice architecture for engineers

ARM for the longest time had application processors that consumed less power and produced less heat than x64 but with the latest Intel Atoms that is no longer the case. Overall x64 is the superior architecture in many ways, CISC always leaves more potential than RISC

In what circumstance should an SBC be dedicated as opposed to multi functioning?

I have one as a VPN that I'd like to also use a seedbox, and maybe a media and file server. What would the potential drawbacks to this be?

Doing too much work with too little. If the hardware isn't strong enough to reliably handle all of that stuff at once, then you're going to get shit performance. What you need to consider is what is the peak resource usage each of those separate things will be likely to reach, and whether or not your board can handle all of them peaking at once.
Many SBCs, mostly those on the lower end, need all the processing power they can spare to be reliable as media servers, especially for HD video. Depending on what sort of media you plan on serving, and what particular board you have, doing anything else with it while using it as a media server may not be a good idea.

The latest 'SBC' hackings: while it's nowhere as powerful or capable as the Spartan FPGA, I recently ordered this Lattice iCE40 HX8K board ...because it now has a reverse-engineered Open Source development suite! The IceStorm software even builds on _non_ Linux systems, which is a huge bonus.
And so for the past few days I've been cramming on Verilog... I got this serial UART design that I created from scratch working at 406800 Baud this evening... I want to attempt video generation next.

(I also ordered a few new AT89C52 CPUs-- the current-day version of the 80C31/80C52 IC I've used above, but with a 60MHz clockspeed ..but it might be a while before I get around to playing with them.)

Does that mean it can theoretically reprogram itself

So I have been think in buying a cheap SBC to have in my living room as a media center/emulation machine and maybe use it as a torrent box and surf the internet once in a while, Should I get raspberry Pi 3 or is there a better/cheaper option for me?

I use an rpi2 for libretro (lakka.tv)

Did you even read the thread?

Sort of, I mean, I'm well aware that they are a bunch of SJW, but I usually don't let those kind of things get on mind when buying these kind of things, specially when I'm broke.

Who the fuck cares? What can you actually accomplish with this shit?

Applefags and M68Kfags BTFO

here

The more I read around the more I think you guys are right and Raspberry might not be the best option hardware wise. But what about software wise? What are the chances that if I buy something like banana or orange pi I might miss out on cool stuff?

You can get a job that pays better than $2/hour for starters.

Today's frustration was spending too much time getting avrdude + buspirate + an AT89LP51 working together. The AT89LP51 is 34 years younger than the CPU in ... and it's got this newflanged 'Flash' ROM business inside it, doing away with the EPROM. I also picked up another AT89C52 chip that can clock up to 60MHz-- I'll wire that up to a 128kB SRAM chip, and it should do emulation of other 8-bit CPUs and Video -- I've seen guys make Apple][ and IBM PC emulators with them.

Hi Holla Forums.
I want to learn this sorcery too.
What are some online resources that would teach me programming these mini computers?

What do you think about the C.H.I.P.? It hasn't been released yet and the authors seem to be disgusting memesters, but it is cheap and powerful and they don't seem to be SJW.

Also, the PocketC.H.I.P. seems nice

pardon my ignorants but what is the uC community?

I suggest you wait for AArch64 to become the new standard.

...

Fun project mayne. Keep us updated please.

Also fuck me I should actually start using my bus pirate. Only used it twice as a glorified SPI flash read/writer.

Please don't hurt me Gentooman, I don't know how to program a mp or mc and I am willing to learn.

How is pine 64 currently? Have they made any progress in the linux department or at least added video acceleration?

Lima is dead. As surprising as it is, PowerVR might become the first mainstream ARM GPU with a free driver. Vivante doesn't count.

So I'm planning on buying a banana pi to make it an emulation machine using Lakka

Which version is better to emulate ps1/n64 seamlessly? Is there even one? The specs are cool but this compatibility list says a10 and a20 doesn't run n64 that well, that looks doubtful imo.

Probably o-droid xu4

what is the best board to make a little media client on my tv to watch shit from my home server?
REQUIREMENTS :
must be able to output through hdmi
must be able to output 1080P
must have wireless N
must be able to mount SAMBA shares (thats what my server is using, fuck mediatomb)

it would be cool if it were easy to setup some kind of remote control but this isnt 100% needed since i could just use a bluetooth wireless dongle keyboard or something.
I could also set up an Arduino to take in infrared signals from existing remote controls and have it send keystrokes into the computer over USB (and also use relays to power the SBC on and off )

That's probably right, but bpi is cheaper and more accessible in my country, guess I'll just have to deal with that.

So, I'm getting a rpi3 and installing to make an emulation machine.

I know odroid xu4 is better, but I can't afford it with my country taxes, is there any other better alternative? If not, I'm just settling with this.

Fix'd.

What country?
Probably not.

I was, then I got one of these for free and it's way more powerful and generally flexible

Hueland.

...

umm...

hate to rain on your parade

I want to buy the cheapest board that isn't a RPi, just because. Doesn't matter if it's a knockoff soldered by a chink kid in a kitchen. Any recomendations?

Look at the left sidebar here

aliexpress.com/store/product/NEW-orange-pi-plus-Allwinner-A31s-Dual-Core-1GB-RAM-Open-source-development-board/1553371_32248189300.html

...

Thanks user, peak resource usage is what I thought to (didn't have the proper terminology though).

Can a BBB handle being all of those things? (VPN and seedbox, file/media server too if possible)

I'm stuck between a BananaPi and an OrangePi.
Which one would you recommend?

All singleboard computers are shit seedboxes since they barely can upload 2MB without getting bottlenecked on the usb/memory/network bus

These images were from an older geocities page that housed a lot of other tech projects. Even so a homebrew z80 computer is nothing new.

there is A LOT of z80 code online, because arguably it is the easiest processor to program assembly for.

I'd go with BananaPi. Lemaker seems to keep up with updating different distros for both boards and a more solid company.

>>>/oven/

If you can't teach yourself then just fuggg off.

I've decided to start on the SBC with something they aren't intended for. I want to run an induction heater entirely 100% off a SBC.

As I understand, an induction heater is just control circuitry which is usually either a lot of analog shit or very simple PICs or maybe TIs. the bridge and the capacitor-inductor bank. Now I want to replace the control circuitry with these meme boards and make the thing remotely controllable via bluetooth and ethernet.

So it basically needs to do a few things.

It needs to see the power going through the capacitor bank and the voltage, this can be done using a transformer or maybe a hall-effect sensor.

It needs to sense temperature and control fans and also sense current at the mains input to stop the transistors from popping due to overheat/overcurrent.

It needs to constantly adjust the signal output to match the resonant frequency of the tank as shit is put in and taken out of it.

And finally, it needs to actually output the signal that gets fed into the gates of the main switches, probably amplified by a totem pole or something.

So, is it possible to take [insert SBC here] and turn it into a "dumb" microcontroller and just manually assign every core its specific duty?

For example, one takes the duty of calculating the new frequency that should come out of the pin, another core actually toggles the pin with the information it gets from core 1, core 3 feeds core 1 live information so it can calculate it and core 4 takes care of any manual changes made through the control panel which is operated via either a touch screen, bluetooth, or via a network?

The idea behind this is that I think the only reason "bigger" SBCs aren't used for this duty is because they can't produce a stable-enough signal that won't pop the transistors because the operating system is always getting in the way.

What do you think, anons? Am I retarded? Should I just use something that would be classified as a "microcontroller" and if I should, can you link me any boards that have sufficient capabilities? Bonus points if available on Farnell or RS Electronics.

Has anyone done something similar to this before?

wasn't for you, had just finished reading the thread and clicked on your digits to open the quick reply.

Is the Pocketchip usable with a regular window manager? And how flexible is the distro included, does it have most software available in the repos?

It seems like a kind of shitty but passable pocket PC but so much of the focus is on indie games that it's hard to find discussion of using it in other ways

micro controller

this is one place the broadcom chipset would be a good choice. just use an rpi, there's a shitload of community support and handholding guides. ignore the contrarian memelords

just start with an arduino clone or programming the gpio pins on an rpi and then move over to other hardware once you've got the basics

I'm that faggot.

I found two microcontroller boards that could be useful for my purposes, those being the C2000 LAUNCHXL-F28377S from Texas Instruments and the STM32F7 Nucleo boards (that cost only 20-something dollars for what is apparently the god of microcontrollers)

Anyone have any experiences with those or with high-performance mcus made by those companies in general?

Should I go with a microcontroller that has more than 1 core?

Would a microprocessor be better?

this is a bump disguised as a post

I suppose he went back in time to upload photos to Geocities with a Raspberry Pi 3 in it.

cool, my mom will be happy, I set her up a media server and she refuses to use it because she wants to watch movies on her TV
know any good linux based front ends for media viewing that isnt a whole OS and is retard proof

Fucking finally got something working!

SUBLEQ --- a one-instruction set computer. It's probably the closest thing to an original Turing-Complete machine design while still being able to do something with a finite amount of memory. The bit in the middle of the first image is the entire microcode sequence for the machine-- it only needs 8 control signals, when even an 8-bit CPU like the Z80 needs about 40.
It simple enough to actualy build a SUBLEQ CPU with TTL logic chips on a single board. Even better, there's a C-like compiler for it! mazonka.com/subleq/

The hack to make it a lot simpler than my original attempt was to go off-spec with RAM control signals-- just toggling a line is needed, instead of the usual positive-edge.

that is absolutely mad and awesome

fwiw, here's the original attempt in the Esolangs thread. It'll be easier to understand...

Here it is running compiled code... (Slowed down to 1/32768 normal speed because blinkenlights.)

If you want one of them new cheap H3 boards, then Oranges are probably the way to go. Xunlong has basically no official software support, but they seem to know what they are doing when it comes to hardware.

forum.armbian.com/index.php/topic/1351-h3-board-buyers-guide/

What do you guys think of the Jetson tk1. Currently im setting one up as an intercomstation with skype

Bumpth

Built something again. I got the idea from jeelabs.org/2016/07/mecrisp-on-other-platforms/

The MSP430 chips are quite nice, actually. They're a Von Neumann Processor (that is, ram and (rom) code are in the same address space-- like a real computer-- most MCUs don't let you run code from RAM without tricks). They're also 16 bit CPUs, a really simple machine code architecture, the 'Launchpad' evaluation boards are cheap, they're decently supported on Linux (including proper GDB-style debugging), and it only takes a 3v battery and one 10k-ohm resistor to run them standalone.

Love this sort of stuff!
I'm just a beginner but I bought a few solder kits to get started. will get to microcontrollers eventually..

Heard about the MSP chips a few times recently.

Mine arrived a couple of weeks ago.

They actually stamped this on it, I shit you not.

send it back

Would steam damage the components if you tried to get it off?

I adore the MSP430's but I hate hate hate HATE HATE 3.3v Vcc. Everything in the god damn world is 5v Vcc and here comes super special snowflake MSP430 forcing me to give it it's own special little power supply separate from all the OTHER fucking logic that uses 5v Vcc.

Seems legit

Fucking Signed.

It just occurred to me that TI now have over 10 different Launchpad eval boards out (including trying to flog a ARM Cortex-M0 as an 'MSP432') ...and most of them are shit, at least from my POV.

The good LPs--which work with mspdebug/gdb-msp430 without binary blobs, are the EXP430G2 (the original, and will program all the PDIP 430s), and the EXP430FR5739 (BGA packaging, but has 16kB of FRAM)

More FPGA work done in the iCE40-HX8K board.

This'll blow my anonymity, but my family heritage has a bit of a connection to the invention of television... So the obligatory use-an-FPGA-to-generate-video had to be done.

It was a fucking pain to get working. I wasted about 3 hours before realizing that in the Verilog world, "if (b1100 & b0100)" doesn't equal 'true', it equals b0100.

Great results at the end of it, though!

...and the last bug before it worked looked a little familiar

SO
FreAKING
COOL

why am I not doing anything half as cool as this?

Keep in mind I'm just a beginner at FPGA... The SUBLEQ machine and Video generation are simple things for it to do.

FPGA is definitely something to get into at the moment. The high-end Spartan chips are now capable of doing full-on system emulation of complicated machines like the Amiga (with all its co-processors!) ... youtube.com/watch?v=mPIfhLXsYkQ

I've been learning about the j1 CPU core

I've managed to find out how to increase the HX-8K's clock speed, and that allows faster pixel shift-outs, and higher horizontal resolution. I went for a 19MHz clock (up from 12MHz), which gives 640x192 at a 1:1 screen aspect. (All the early micros were weird in ways like that..)

640 is pretty-much at the limit of my Commodore 1084 monitor though. I'll need to get a good monochrome CRT monitor for any better-- or go to VGA...

Old people will remember a time when all the anime related downloads from a BBS (or newsgroups) were always in some weird-ass screen resolution like 320x192, 640x200, ...

YKK great taste

Poorfag here
Can confirm how bad P4s are(can't even play 720p videoos),atleast the Pis I have can do them.

How much did your setup cost? I know the chips themselves don't tend to be excessively expensive, but what about the programmer?

The HX8K eval board is this: au.mouser.com/Search/ProductDetail.aspx?R=ICE40HX8K-B-EVNvirtualkey55850000virtualkey842-ICE40HX8K-B-EVN .. AU$68-- pricey, but I just had to get one when someone demoed a 4-core J1a cpu on the thing.

..but with free tools becoming usable and gaining attention there's been a flood of much cheaper boards (olimex.com/Products/FPGA/iCE40/iCE40HX1K-EVB/open-source-hardware .. folknologylabs.wordpress.com/2016/07/21/a-perfect-storm/ .. icoboard.org/)

For software, it's the Icestorm suite clifford.at/icestorm/ TRIGGER WARNING: there's that "u must obey mentally ill trannies! Code of Conduct" in the repo :| Originally I used the yosys/arachne-pnr/icetools binary packages on a RPi, but I managed to build the source on my main BSD machine.

Why not just get the Odroid C2? I doubt you need a 8-core SBC for emulation.

You might've noticed in the first photo of that there's pixel intensity glitching along the left-hand screen border (and the right-hand pixel border is missing--although that's a different bug)

It's not a case of the pixel shift-register not being loaded with the pixels for the next line-- what's actually happening is the "inscreen" logic is being activated half a pixel too early. It took a while to realize a tidy and simple way of changing it at the right moment. It also removed several fudges I had to the combinatorial circuits-- win!

The Goddess of Cathode Ray Tubes would be pleased. I'm thinking this could be a apart of a future microcomputer project, so I've dropped the resolution back to 320x192 and redid the dotclock timings to make the aspect a bit less peculiar, so I can have a Pretty CRT display for it..

COLOUR! :D

...with inverse/reverse and flash attributes-- which allows the video generator to be on-par with classic micros like the Apple][. The screen pixel resolution was bumped up to 320x200 finally as well-- so it's got 40x25 text.

This text mode leaves enough on-FPGA static RAM that I could include the earlier bitmap mode, so I suppose the next trick will be always-overlayed text, colour, and graphics modes.

To make this all useful, I'll also need a way for CPUs to write to the video memory. Those could be a CPU included as another verilog module, or have something like an I2C serial bus for seperate computers to frob.

this was supposed to be the third image..

Hello Blog.

The FPGA eval board I've been playing with only has 128kbits==16kB of internal block ram. Kinda not much, especially if I want to do a softcpu. There's a few cheap iCE40 boards out there now (icoBoard, CAT-board, etc.) which include in the order of 32MB of DRAM, but: I'm cheap, and I wanted to build it myself.

The eval board's headers each give access to 27 IO pins, which is enough to address up to 256kB (8 data, 18 address, 1 R/W) on a standard JEDEC DIP SRAM IC. Then it was thinking up a tidy way to wire(..wrap) the board, and decided to use a 3-in-line header, one row of its pins replaced with right-angle pins to attach the PCB board.

Then the next challenge was learning how to get Icestorm/yosys to understand "inout" wire type as Verilog intended-- the software thinks only of wires being input and output... but it's achievable.

Tested it with LEDs, so I don't wreck my last expensive-ish 128kB SRAM...

close-up of the 'trick' to get the daughterboard happening without ribbon cables or the like.

...

Is there any SBC that can run 100% free software ?

yes, but you might have to give up a feature or two. like gpu, video decoding or wifi.

then you have these chinks with their sketchy kernel patches.

that sucks dick

what about the minnowboard? it's marketed as very freedom orientated

Depending on the use-case you may not need those specific features.

Not a big deal if it's headless. (However that does mean no emulation or media centers.)

Same as above, but I guess that would also mean no video conversion if you wanted to offload that from your desktop.

I thought libre USB adapters existed for wifi. Am I wrong on that?