What's the deal with the CHIP...

What's the deal with the CHIP? It at least seems to be non-jewed and useful enough be put to use for home surveillance and automation.

Other urls found in this thread:

youtube.com/watch?v=z7r8sKzt7HM
lotdg.blogspot.com
makezine.com/2015/05/07/next-thing-co-releases-worlds-first-9-computer/
channel99.info/
twitter.com/SFWRedditVideos

No link to tech specs.
Not googling.
Thread Ignored.

Is yet another SBC only this one was kickstarted.

I was going to post up a thread about their $9 microcomputer, im curious myself.

I own a PocketCHIP.

The bare CHIP is probably ok. It's cheap and comes with WiFi. It comes with 4 GB of memory, so you don't need to get a micro sd card to use it, but it doesn't have a micro sd slot at all so if 4 GB is not enough you need to use the USB port. Of course you can just use a hub if you want to connect multiple things. The only unique thing about it is the price as far as I know.

The PocketCHIP makes it more interesting. Portable reasonably-priced Linux computing. You get a real Debian system and a physical keyboard on a really small computer.

The screen resolution is low, but bearable with 5x7 as a urxvt font. By default it starts up into an annoyingly limited launcher, but you can just disable that and install another window manager and set it up how you want. I run dwm.

There are some rough edges. /usr/bin/acpi and xbacklight don't work, so you have to get a modified battery.sh shell script to get battery information and you have to write to /sys/class/backlight/backlight/brightness to change the screen brightness. To make all keys work properly you have to use xmodmap (with an included ~/.Xmodmap file), which also means that the keys won't work properly in the TTY. They maintain different kernels for the PocketCHIP and regular CHIP so you need to reflash if you want to switch between those uses.

It's very comfy for IRC and nethack on the go.

qutebrowser works well with it because it has keyboard control and small UI elements. The touch screen is not ideal when most of your software is designed for mice.


See picture.

How much does that game boy cost?

Are you going to upgrade to a Pyra when that comes out?

don't encourage the brat

$69

$69 now, $59 when I ordered it.


A Pyra would be great, but also ten times as expensive. I'm not getting one.

Seems like it would be the perfect tool for hacking the database without lugging around a laptop that would get seen by any security cam.

Holy fucking shit I got fucking Jewed when I bought my $200 OpenPandora. It doesn't even fit in most of my pants pockets without making a giant uncomfortable bulge, and all the downloadable software is kept in a big walled garden that's gonna die out as soon as Dragonbox is released.

How well does the CHIP support gaymen? Obviously I mean older games like the ones you'd run in DOSbox, ScummVM, or GemRB; I know it's not gonna run bloated current year games. Pandora handles PST in GemRB like a pro.

The PocketCHIP doesn't fit in your pocket all that well either and the screen resolution is much lower. I expect the OpenPandora can run all the same things the PocketCHIP can, as far as basic compatibility is concerned. I wouldn't recommend the PocketCHIP if you already have an OpenPandora.

Pocketchip is kinda shit, or at least how they sell it. Why the hell does it come with the very friendly sandbox if it's intended to be hacked about with it? Why not just drop us straight to a terminal?

Also, what's the point of the creativity and game software included on it when both are painful to use because of the extremely pressure and travel needed for each key press?

I'm thinking about making my own version of the pokechip for keks, maybe adding the ability to use it as a phone with a sim card, though I have some question
I'm thinking about those last two the most. I don't want to use cardboard, but what *would* be the best way to make your own (relatively) robust carboard case? I think I could into the metal working using the lost foam technique as far the case itself goes, but I don't want to use paint. And I have no idea how in fuck to make a plastics injection machine, but it could be cool.
Anything missing?
Video pretty related:
youtube.com/watch?v=z7r8sKzt7HM

This is the one of the dumber collections of words I have ever read. Before you try LARPing as a hacker, how about you learn to think first.

I wonder how usable would the pocketchip be with openbox and conkeror?

Can anybody with one try and see if recent version of conkeror is available in any repos?

Why not just pay a friend $20 for their old cellphone which is infinitely better? Is it not DedSec XD enough?

Because this doesn't have a botnet modem built in.

You can build a custom firmware and have it just as gimped as this 'chip'.

It runs Debian Stable with extra packages. Debian Stable has Conkeror 1.0~~pre-1+git141025-1+deb8u1, which I think translates to 2014/10/25 with patches. You could upgrade to Debian Unstable, which has Conkeror 1.0.3-1. You can also try compiling it yourself, which is probably not hard because you can install the dependencies with apt-get build-dep conkeror and the heavy parts like the rendering engine are taken from an installed Iceweasel or Firefox or Icecat anyway.

I'd recommend a tiling wm over a floating wm, so no Openbox, but perhaps it could work with some ricing. I don't know Openbox very well, but I know it's ricable. Tiling is nicer for this because you can use the keyboard for everything and the little space you have gets used efficiently.

nice design but the pocket chip needs a separate firmware than the regular chip or else it doesn't work (and vice versa) and the specs are also insanely shit

love the idea though

Chip and pocketchip are both actually REALLY nice hardware projects and the pocketchip UI is fuckin great for what it is.

Problem with chip is that they promise a LOT more kernel support than they can realistically ever provide. They'll never get a GPU driver of any sort working, ever.

Nice little wifi capable slightly-smarter-than-dumb terminal.

What does this mean? I don't understand what this means? TELL ME WHAT THIS MEANS!

It means their software team is...... not shit? Well meaning but ineffectual. What you get is a firmware image with a barely functional and mostly stock debian~ image with no drivers.

They made a lot of promises on what they would have including getting notable GPL violator allwinner to source their blobs.

How good is the battery life on this pocketchip thing, is it really 5 hours? The specs(1ghz, 512mb ram, 4gb storage, wifi, usb port) are decent enough for me.

As someone who would never carry a cellphone and finds tablets and ereaders disgusting due to the non-free nature this machine might be a decent compromise. And the price seems reasonable.

Their site and the style they're going with looks absolutely horrible though. Had I not seen a few posters mentioning it here I'd have discounted it as being some indie game thing.

the battery is actually pretty good, i doubt you'll see 5h with real use..... but there's not a lot of real use you can do with this. The size really is not awful and for what you can do with it and the pinouts, it's pretty slick. The keyboard is.... really awful but not quite as awful as a software keyboard. I think what hangs me up most on it is the staggered number keys.

If it had any GPU drivers and could play even the lowest-resolution videos it would be like my favorite shit.

Would it be happy watching some ancient, low quality shoutcast video streams?

I ... don't remember shoutcast ever having video. The like 16-32kbps realplayer tier might work? Maybe... greyscale it?

There's actually a couple of great shoutcast video streams still running - I'd love to use one of these to have video running on a portable CRT.

This guy usually runs some interesting stuff :
lotdg.blogspot.com

The strong and quite unique feature of Openbox is its pipe menus. If you're not taking advantage of them you're not getting everything you can out of it.

That doesn't look like it would work out all that well with no mouse and a 480×272 display.

They list artists before engineers.

This quote is from the article about the release of the first CHIP.

makezine.com/2015/05/07/next-thing-co-releases-worlds-first-9-computer/

That is how Next Thing Co. describe themselves. The description is no longer up on their kickstarter page but I remember seeing it after reading it either on the kickstarter page or their main site when I double checked after reading the article for the first time, to make sure it wasn't just the journalists wording.

Pic related it's them.


I'd rather give money to Microsoft or Apple any day before a bunch of faggot commie tech 'nerd' SJW's.

Wew lad. Poz me in my neg-hole and call me Shirley.

You watched too much movies about hackers.

Insufferable Mac-using hipsters, sure, but do you have a source for them being SJWs?

There's a difference between annoying and harmful.

The fact that they even mention the word artists when they are selling a fucking single board board computer is enough proof for me to assume they are commie leftist faggots.

cuck cuck cuck
cuck cuck DARKxX_xXSEPHIROTHxX_420xX_xXBLAZELORDxX
tranny cuck cuck

If they're commie leftist faggots that's too bad but not a reason for me to not use their stuff. People should be allowed to have retarded opinions.

If they use those retarded opinions to create insane codes of conduct or other things that genuinely affect the project there's a problem, but I'm not going to boycott people just because they have the wrong opinions.

Remember when Curtis Yarvin was invited to a tech conference and people wanted him banned from there because of his opinions? That's the kind of behavior you're promoting this way. Allow people to have opinions you disagree with. Boycott people for their actions, not for their opinions.

THANK YOU

And yet these 'commie tech 'nerd' SJW's' just achieved more han you ever will in your pathetic life

Really? Huh, coulda fooled me. Truly, since has progressed :^)

I have one as well

I installed SSH client and server on it and mainly it sits out of view hooked up to power and unpowered speakers and plays about an hour of music on "MOC" terminal player when I go to bed

The OS comes in 2 flavors that as far as I can tell cannot run together because the desktop OS does nto have drivers for the touch screen and the pocket OS cannot run as desktop because battery settings and other shit

this has put a damper on my plans to create a 9 dollar SNES machine as it makes switching require a flashing of the machine with the Desktop OS which renders the pocked a useless piece of plastic

my solution was to order a couple mroe chip computers and I plan to attempt the SNES play on that

look at this guy

look at this guy and laugh

Well that stream actually worked pretty well on the chip, but the battery life with software video rendering and heavy wifi use dropped it to probly

Normally I'd agree with you but these kind of people have a decent track record of making anyone who buys their product or support their project regret it afterwards. Stereotypes stick around for a reason, these people always put technology and software priorities second after whatever social movement is in at the moment.

At least there isn't any colored hair in that picture, most of them look normal enough. As in their parents wouldn't be ashamed of being seen with in public with them.

I'm probably going to get one of these for what it's worth but only because the form factor doesn't seem like the sort of tech product a Chinese firm would copy and sell for cheap. Other similar projects for small personal computers like the dragonbox pyra miss the mark completely or don't bother with FLOSS ethos.

Neat, that's probably enough for me and if necessary I could likely tap some power + regulate it from the CRT itself.

Cheers.

There's also a great weeb stream here if interested:

channel99.info/

Thank you for the reply. I'll probably end up getting one of these to fuck around with and try thing people haven't tried yet

The only linux handheld I've ever had (a long time ago) was the GP2X. It was actually alright at the time, and could play quake and whatnot which is all I cared about. I never fucked around with it too much but it did use linux