
Vocore2, a ridiculously small Linux PC - HappyAlbatross
http://vocore.io/
======
dagenix
Oh dear - no HTTPS on that page. But, it does host a store section that lets
you add stuff to your cart and then click a checkout button. That button takes
you to PayPal (unless an attacker re-directed you elsewhere). Its not clear to
me that there would be any real way to verify that what you are paying for the
stuff from that website - it seems relatively straightforward for an attacker
to modify the PayPal link to send you to pay for stuff on their store.

Basically, this seems like a pretty irresponsible way to run a web store.

~~~
slenk
I e-mailed the support email about it. I got a response back - I think I
convinced them to do it: "Thank you. You are correct, I will go to godaddy and
get one :) it is fashion. Regards Chin"

Or he is telling me to get lost.

~~~
geezerjay
It seems a full day has passed since you've posted the message. I've just
checked the store and it's still served through a plain old unsecure HTTP
connection.

It seems you were told to get lost.

------
Yeri
This is something similar that's about to get released and way faster:
[https://neutis.io/](https://neutis.io/)

~~~
windlep
The Neutis is $49, the VoCore2 is $18. They seem to have different power
consumption as well. While it might be similar in size, the cost difference is
substantial. The best choice as usual depends on the project.

------
k_
I was interested when the campaing came up and ordered a VoCore2 + Ultimate
Dock (42$) back in november 2016. Never received it (must have been lost
somewhere).. so I lost all interest in it.

Looked promising, though.

------
stereo
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.

[http://forum.vocore.io/viewtopic.php?f=16&t=3500&p=5185](http://forum.vocore.io/viewtopic.php?f=16&t=3500&p=5185)

~~~
squarefoot
HappyAlbatross is right: you definitely have a grounding problem, either due
to missing proper ground or having a ground loop somewhere. Also if you're
using a switching power supply and/or a class D amplifier (that is, a
switching amplifier [1]), they can be real nightmares if not properly
filtered, and cheaper ones almost never are. Grounding and ground loops,
filtering and decoupling are complex issues which would need entire articles,
but there's a lot of stuff on the net to get you started. Long story short:
don't throw away your board, the problem could disappear just by changing a
power supply or rewiring ground connections.

[1] They use the same identical principle behind switching power supplies but
applied to driving speakers: performance is fantastic compared to current
draw, but they tend to produce lots of harmonics and RF noise just like
switching power supplies.

~~~
derefr
Would you be able to test to see if your problem is power-filtering related by
powering the board from a battery rather than from the wall?

------
etaioinshrdlu
Related: The Octavo systems system-on-package:
[https://octavosystems.com/](https://octavosystems.com/)

It's a TI AMxx series linux computer in a package on package module like a
raspberry PI is.

It comes in two variants, a regular pitch BGA and an ultra wide BGA so that it
is actually possible to hand solder it! (or with hot air or a toaster.)

It is what is used on the Pocket Beagle.

It saves you the need to to most high speed signals and really the hard parts
of building a higher-performance board.

~~~
metafex
The thing just is that TI didn't exactly retain the people that know the
internals of the OMAP series. If you hit any bugs you're on your own
unfortunately. (Your milage with the existing documentation may vary also).

~~~
joezydeco
OMAP's been dead a long time. Sitara is OMAP with the media blocks stripped
out, and it sure looks like it's on their roadmap for a while to come.

[https://training.ti.com/sites/default/files/docs/TI%20Missio...](https://training.ti.com/sites/default/files/docs/TI%20Mission%20Critical%20Catalog%20Processor%20Overview%20April2017%20non-
NDA_0.pdf)

~~~
metafex
Of course it will be produced for as long as customers want it. But the
roadmap makes it also crystal clear where they are going: More DSP cores. We
likely won't see anything newer than the Cortex-A15. TI builds what enough
customers want, and if you're not locked in enough to their DSPs or general
ecosystem, you'll move away. That in return means there won't be anything new.
No single customer is big enough to warrant bigger cores alone.

A nice quote I remember "I'd rather buy TI stocks than their products".

------
lsllc
Similar to the Omega2+:
[https://docs.onion.io/omega2-docs/omega2p.html](https://docs.onion.io/omega2-docs/omega2p.html)
... except Vocore2 is slightly smaller and the Omega2 is ~30% cheaper and has
an SD card slot.

Vocore2: MT7628AN 580 MHz MIPS with 128MB DDR2 and 16MB NOR: $18

Omega2+: MT7688 580 MHz MIPS with 128MB DDR2 and 32MB flash: $13

Both have b/g/n Wifi and are 10/100 ethernet ready. Omega2 software is based
on LEDE.

Note that there is a SMT version SoM of the Omega2+, the Omega2S+ which is
around $10 per unit when buying trays of 50.

------
janci
Smallest 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.

~~~
logicallee
I looked at what you meant, and first found this article

[https://hackaday.com/2016/06/30/transcend-wifi-sd-card-
is-a-...](https://hackaday.com/2016/06/30/transcend-wifi-sd-card-is-a-tiny-
linux-server/)

which links this article:

[https://jamesone111.wordpress.com/2014/03/19/exploring-
the-t...](https://jamesone111.wordpress.com/2014/03/19/exploring-the-
transcend-wifi-sd-card/)

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...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Transcend%20Wifi-
SD%20card&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story)

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](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...](https://www.extremedeals.com.ph/products/transcend-16gb-wifi-sd-card)

~~~
squarefoot
My use case would be to turn a 7 years old camera (which is still better than
most phone cameras) into a WiFi networked camera so that when I shoot photos
of items I'm selling on Ebay it directly uploads them to my home server
(NFS/SMB). For that use it wouldn't even need the flash storage: just buffer
in RAM until the image is uploaded.

~~~
cptskippy
Sounds like the Toshiba FlashAir or Transcend WiFi SD cards might suit your
needs.

------
voltagex_
I'm pretty sure I gave away my original Vocore - the pins were simply too
small for me to solder.

The Vocore2 looks like a considerable step up, but without mainline Linux
support it's of limited utility.

~~~
cordite
Ditto on the pin size. I wasn’t able to find utility out of it

~~~
squarefoot
You may find interesting the NanoPI Duo:
[https://www.friendlyarm.com/index.php?route=product/product&...](https://www.friendlyarm.com/index.php?route=product/product&path=69&product_id=197)

Not in the same league (faster + more RAM but bigger + more power hungry), but
the breadboard friendly form factor makes it very close to be the ideal
minimal Linux module.

~~~
cordite
This thing is dense!

------
dang
From 2016:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11397638](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11397638)

------
__mp
I take a major issue in their usage of OpenWRT. It seems to me that every
hardware I touch with OpenWRT included is out of date - or "well aged". As
soon as you try to modify something in the OpenWrt interface and/or update the
system, half of the features do not work anymore - luckily the reset button
usually works. At least the OpenWRT variant they are choosing looks recent.
Good luck!

I'm at the point where I only get Raspberry PI-based hardware. This way I know
that I'm able to update/or reinstall in a year or two.

------
tomas789
This 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.

~~~
askvictor
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 seriously until they start
shipping in any serious quantity - I don't like the play they've made by
keeping it scarce.

~~~
cptskippy
> Also, it's not possible to take the RPi zero seriously until they start
> shipping in any serious quantity - I don't like the play they've made by
> keeping it scarce.

What do you consider to be serious quantity? You can order 250+ of them off
Digikey right now or go into any Microcenter and buy them.

------
caccialdo
Website 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](http://amzn.asia/d/idyKhjN)

Makes me wonder if I could turn those Japanese routers into computers (they're
dirt cheap at £8.50)...

~~~
toyg
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.

------
snvzz
For those wondering what SoC it is, as it's unfortunately buried 2 links deep,
here's the page with the information.

[http://vocore.io/v2.html](http://vocore.io/v2.html)

------
pjmlp
> 128MB, DDR2, 166MHz

This is small supercomputer!

My first distribution (Slackware 2.0) was running on a P75 MHZ with 8 MB.

~~~
tralarpa
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 :)

~~~
pjmlp
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.

------
amelius
The problem with Linux in these applications is that it's not a realtime OS.

~~~
rcxdude
You can get pretty fantastic latencies on stock linux with some tuning, with
the kind of processors embedded linux runs on you only really gain some
microseconds by going to realtime variants. The main reason to prefer a true
RTOS is because it will generally be simpler, and thus a bit more predictable
and reliable in its behaviour, which is important for high-reliability
systems.

~~~
monocasa
> The main reason to prefer a true RTOS is because it will generally be
> simpler, and thus a bit more predictable and reliable in its behaviour

I mean... you just defined real time there.

------
baybal2
>MT7628AN

Be prepared for a surprise when you try making wifi work on that thing

------
franciscop
If it had USB-C I'd have insta-bought at least 2. Why are we in Q3 2018 still
releasing new products with micro usb? Otherwise looks very cool though.

~~~
lixtra
Because USB-C is still a mess.[1]

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17285411](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17285411)

------
2sk21
I could not make out from the documentation - are there are GPIO pins as on
the Raspberry Pi?

~~~
ricardobeat
Click though to product page, full specs are listed:
[http://vocore.io/v2.html](http://vocore.io/v2.html)

“Around 40” GPIO pins

~~~
anentropic
that's a weirdly non-specific number...

~~~
navaati
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.

------
pankajdoharey
Can a USB 4G Module be connected to this ?

~~~
nwmcsween
Might as well get a cheap Chinese android phone as the USB 4G is going to cost
more than the device.

------
payne92
TL;DR: this is based on the Ralink processors that are widely used in consumer
routers, wifi light switches, etc.

RT5350, 360 MHz, MIPS 24K, with 32MB of RAM.

CPU datasheet:
[https://www.mouser.com/ds/2/813/RT5350-1022839.pdf](https://www.mouser.com/ds/2/813/RT5350-1022839.pdf)

