

NanoPi – Micro ARM WiFi Board - zdw
http://nanopi.org

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steckerbrett
64MB is pretty restricting for most things people would want to run on a
Raspberry Pi, the text says you can run Debian on it but that feels like it
would be pretty tight. That said, the thing is stupidly cheap for driving
small displays (huh, it's analogue RGB though) with as a complete system, and
the amount of GPIO available is quite incredible. I'll be excited to buy one
to play with if the shipping doesn't double the cost.

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kristoffer
Of course you can run Debian with 64 MB RAM. I ran Linux on a 200 MHz Pentium
with 32 MB for years as my only computer. It was perfectly fine.

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_delirium
You probably didn't run a current Debian, though; things have grown a bit. The
current official "recommended minimum" memory is 128MB, though they mention
it's possible to get away with less:
[https://www.debian.org/releases/stable/i386/ch03s04.html.en](https://www.debian.org/releases/stable/i386/ch03s04.html.en)

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buserror
I agree, debian hasn't ran in 64MB for a very long time now. Just try
launching 'aptitude' and /that/ will just explode in your face.

You can always swap on the SD card.?. >:->

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lucb1e
I see a buy button that goes to Features#order, but nowhere do I see where I
can actually order it. Is it available yet?

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rasz_pl
dont bother, this is an ancient 7 year old soc

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joezydeco
Once you're off my lawn I'll teach you all about the 8051, HCS09, and Z80,
sonny boy.

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buserror
Actually, I agree with the previous post; and I'm the former maintainer of the
mini2440 architecture (which used the SoC that board inherits from).

arm9 are a bit lame, and /ancient/ \-- you can at least get a cortex a8 or so.
A 400mhz arm9 is also dog slow.

Also, on every single previous friendlyarm board, they tried to push their
proprietary crap bootloader, until I ported u-boot in 2008 or so, but every
single board afterward, they tried to push their binaries... .. down to
shipping kernel sources with '.fo' files for drivers (!!!) -- as object files!

For a bit of history on this, do read my old blog:
[http://bliterness.blogspot.co.uk/2012/09/mini210s-and-
open-s...](http://bliterness.blogspot.co.uk/2012/09/mini210s-and-open-source-
issues.html)

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acangiano
I think that this is awesome. I see this as a very affordable board in between
Arduino and RaspberryPi. Also, competition is always good.

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misnome
Competition is good, but does it need to have the same name?

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olympus
With the popularity of the RasPi, everyone is using the name. This product has
specifically called out a pin-compatible header with the RasPi, so I think
putting Pi in the name is okay. They are drawing attention to the fact that it
can use many of the same accessories, not necessarily just riding the
coattails of a recognizable name.

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ImJasonH
It's a tiny thing but I wish the small USB connector was on the other end so
it could be connected to power at the end, instead of at a 90deg angle to the
board.

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math0ne
This looks awesome, obviously couldn't run xbmc or emulators like the normal
pi but with integrated wireless and a low price this seems like it will be
much better than the normal pi for integrated projects.

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steckerbrett
Could probably emulate lots of things, it's a hell of a lot faster than a
Commodore 64.

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rocky1138
Yeah, emulation probably ends just after SNES with this thing, but it would be
cool to see how far someone could push it :)

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anonbanker
zsnes (before the C rewrite) ran FFVI at full speed on a pentium 166 with 32MB
RAM.

UltraHLE ran Mario64 full-speed on a celeron 300Mhz with 64MB RAM.

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sigjuice
Is all the source available or are blobs required to build images?

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joezydeco
Did you dig into their website? They have a github repo:

[https://github.com/friendlyarm](https://github.com/friendlyarm)

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sigjuice
I looked through the repo, but it is not easy to tell if and what blobs are
needed by the system. I was hoping someone more familiar with the SoC would
know.

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akhilcacharya
I was actually looking at OpenWRT devices at this price point for a possible
project, but this looks a lot better for the price.

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kogepathic
The Nexx 3020H is a great OpenWRT device.

* 400MHz RAMIPS CPU

* 64MB RAM

* 8 MB SPI flash

* USB A port

* dual 100Mbit ethernet

* 2.4GHz 802.11n 2T2R (300Mbit claimed)

There's even a Chinese build of u-boot that has a web interface for directly
flashing the mtd partition that OpenWRT is on, so it essentially becomes
unbrickable from bad OpenWRT builds.

You can buy them from AliExpress for around $14.50 USD in single quantity with
free shipping. They don't have any GPIO to speak of (except internal UART
pads) but for that price, just buy a cheap Arduino/STM/PIC board and hook it
up through USB to the 3020H for all the I/O you need.

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buserror
8MB flash is pretty good too, that was the limiting factor on the 703n's

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andyidsinga
DVP Camera Interface is cool

