
Tiny quad-core system-on-module for makers and hardware startups - willey
https://neutis.io/
======
fernly
My flabber is gasted at people complaining about paying a meaty $49 for a
quad-core, 64bit, cpu with 8gb of local storage. Twenty years ago I was
writing docs for the SGI Challenge[1] with its four MIPS R4000s in a tidy
cabinet the size of a two-drawer file (disk drives mounted externally)
weighing about 250lbs.

This thing far exceeds the capacity of that machine, costs several orders of
magnitude less, and FITS IN A FUCKING MATCHBOOK. Jeez. Get some perspective.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SGI_Challenge](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SGI_Challenge)

~~~
tty7
so? $49 is way too expensive for this. i can get a x86 from ebay way more
cheaper than this.

who would even bother, the rpi zero is $5.

~~~
squarefoot
The RPi Zero at $5 is a (hardly verifiable) reality only for a few lucky
purchasers, especially writers in some blogs/magazines, but an urban legend
for everyone else. 10 people every now and then telling the world they got it
at $5 mean nothing when there are thousands who can't get it without price
inflating bundles. We already know why it is produced in so scarce quantities,
so I won't comment further. Besides that, the RPi Zero has also way inferior
capabilities compared to this one..

Regarding the Emlid board, yes, it's way overpriced, but it doesn't seem a
product aimed at makers -though it also tries to sell itself as such-. Once
you add the board to make it useable the price will grow a lot. To me it has
its uses as an industrial module manufacturers can stick into their products.
I personally would rather get a NanoPi NEO2 plus its dock at a total cost of
$28, or 10 more for 1GB RAM, and the OrangePI also has some boards with
similar characteristics, but that's a personal choice: Nano/OrangePI boards
are wonderful boards for makers and experimenters but if you're building
something critical then you should look elsewhere. If the Emlid board
satisfies safety requirements then its price is totally justified (and selling
it as a makers board could do bad PR), otherwise they should make a breadboard
friendly version at a lower price.

~~~
imtringued
THe RPi Zero is misleading. It has less performance than this.

The direct competitor is the RPi3 and costs $35 which is $15 less and it
doesnt require a breakout board to access it's IO. The eMMC is the only
interesting aspect about this board.

SD card manufacturers can get away with using the shittiest flash and
controllers they can find because SD cards can be replaced. eMMC is not user
serviceable and therefore actually needs to be... you know... reliable.

This board is clearly not for hobbyists. It's intended for hardware startups
that will design their own custom breakout boards.

------
andmarios
Very sad to see so many negative comments. It seems a good product. As the
owner of an emlid navio2 rasp pi hut I have to say that I am impressed with
their work. Top hardware quality and great documentation. In the first hour of
use, I used their C libraries and Python examples to manage to access some of
the module's sensors via go. I hadn't even ever do C bindings with go before
that.

This board seems to target people who want to create products with it. I
wouldn't place a rasp pi in an end product and certainly wouldn't come near an
orange pi even for a prototype.

------
Hasz
No idea why anyone would want to use this.

There's dozens of SBCs with 2x better specs than a Pi, but the Pi is arguably
the most dominant board out there. For makers (for anyone really),
documentation is king. Working code, lots of examples, and good forums make
the SBC, not the hardware.

As for the other group, "hardware startups": Why on earth would you lock
yourself into another startup for the brains of your new project? It makes no
sense. Remember what happened to Intel's SBC? If a company that big can't
provide decent EOL support, what do you think will happen if Neutis folds?
Pick a ARM something core with a certified BT/WiFi module, and choose from
several manufacturers with real EOL schedules and a history of following them

Don't get me wrong, the 10 year guarantee is nice, but I don't think anyone
can afford to believe it.

~~~
nrp
It's a niche, but I can see real value in this for small runs (<10,000 units)
of space-constrained designs. Using a SoM is a huge time-saver for
development, but most available are either expensive and have painful and
partially closed BSPs (most SoMs on the market) or are bulky and weaker
(Raspberry Pi Compute Module, C.H.I.P. Pro).

In the event Neutis is at risk of folding or you want to go to larger scale
production, you can put the time and effort into dropping the Allwinner SoC
and SoM peripherals straight onto your design.

I have a couple of projects in mind that could use this, where I was otherwise
considering the C.H.I.P. Pro or going through the effort of integrating a SoC.

~~~
qume
My thoughts exactly. I think many of the posts here are from people who are
not designing for manufacture and are just looking at the specs like it's a
small standalone computer like the rpi.

It looks pretty good to me. Havent had to use those high density connectors
before but assume its straight forward enough.

------
madez
It claims to run on mainline Linux but mainline Linux does not yet support
CPUFreq, hardware crypto, HDMI, nor the GPU for the Allwinner H5.

[http://linux-sunxi.org/Linux_mainlining_effort](http://linux-
sunxi.org/Linux_mainlining_effort)

~~~
beagle3
It says "based on mainline linux", not "running on mainline linux". They
probably have non-upstreamed patches.

~~~
wryun
But by that definition, what linux isn't 'based on mainline linux'? Unless
they're offering some guarantee that they'll keep their patches up-to-date...

~~~
beagle3
There some boards out there still running on 2.6.x series, and many running
3.0 - those would not qualify as “mainline linux״ at this time.

Some boards can boot a kernel.org kernel without patches; those run “mainline
Linux”, not something “based” on it.

~~~
madez
Do you know of any board that can run mainline Linux with support for all
components?

~~~
subway
The closest you're likely gonna get is an i.MX6 based board.

------
rubatuga
I could see this costing $30, but $49 is quite a stretch. What are your main
advantages over Orange Pi Zero [1] which costs $8.49? I can only see the DDR3
rated to -25 and the secure enclave.

1\.
[http://www.orangepi.org/orangepizero/](http://www.orangepi.org/orangepizero/)

~~~
SlowBro
The Orange and Nano Pis are not FCC-certified, so they're not likely to be
integrated into any product sold in the United States, at least legally-
speaking, assuming the manufacturer doesn't want to be fined. Orange pretends
to be certified[1] (the PDF is named FCCCERTIFICATION), but it's mere
verification (now called Supplier's Declaration of Conformity, or SDoC), and
SDoC is not the same as certification[2].

If a manufacturer were to use the on-board wireless they could be heavily
fined. Certification for these boards would cost around $15k, significantly
increasing the price of an integrated product.

At least FriendlyElec doesn't pretend to have gotten their boards certified.

[1]
[http://www.orangepi.org/download/FCCCERTIFICATION.pdf](http://www.orangepi.org/download/FCCCERTIFICATION.pdf)

[2] [https://www.fcc.gov/general/equipment-authorization-
procedur...](https://www.fcc.gov/general/equipment-authorization-procedures)

~~~
tmuir
I can't speak to pretending or not, but at the bottom of this
NanoPi/FriendlyElec page, there are very similar looking pdfs for fcc, rohs,
and ce.

[http://www.friendlyarm.com/index.php?route=product/product&p...](http://www.friendlyarm.com/index.php?route=product/product&product_id=132)

~~~
SlowBro
Thank you. I couldn't find that with a Google site search[1]. But yes, that's
not full certification.

[1]
[https://www.google.com/search?q=fcc+site%3Afriendlyarm.com&r...](https://www.google.com/search?q=fcc+site%3Afriendlyarm.com&rlz=1C1GGRV_enUS764US764&oq=fcc+site%3Afriendlyarm.com&aqs=chrome..69i57j69i64.5832j0j4&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8)

~~~
tmuir
I've always wondered where the line is on a product's FCC certification.
Obviously US retailers such as Adafruit and Sparkfun have sold fully assembled
unlicensed radio equipment for over a decade. What subtle changes could these
companies make with their products that would suddenly gain the interest of
the FCC?

~~~
SlowBro
Do you have an example? SparkFun even has a blog entry about certification
that's a useful read, although not entirely accurate.
[https://www.sparkfun.com/tutorials/398](https://www.sparkfun.com/tutorials/398)

~~~
tmuir
thanks, thats an interesting link.

~~~
SlowBro
That said, a manufacturer could still use an Orange or Nano Pi to integrate.
Simply disable the onboard Wi-Fi and include a certified USB Wi-Fi adapter.

------
JoeAltmaier
A new product like this seems to come out every month! Lots of fun for
embedded folks. This is a higher-end one, and the power-per-price keeps going
down. You can get small dual-thread processors for a few bucks (only 1Mb RAM
etc) on up to things like this for $49. Seems like the ecosystem is filling
out nicely.

------
normaldotcom
Some background--emlid, the company that is producing this module, relied on
Intel Edison modules for the compute power behind their RTK GPS products. The
Edison modules were recently EOL'ed.

I would guess that this module is primarily being developed as a replacement
for the Edison emlid's RTK products, and they are pitching it as a separate
product as well to recoup some of the development costs.

------
keenerd
Eh, I'll stick with the PocketBeagle board. It is half the price, very easy to
source, doesn't require any special connectors and has those extremely useful
PRUs.

Slightly larger, slower and no wireless connectivity but that is a worthwhile
tradeoff.

~~~
bradstewart
Are you actually using the PRUs? They sound fantastic on paper, but I can't
shake the feeling they'd be extremely difficult to actually use.

~~~
mkj
In my experience the PRU code is fairly straightforward and fun to write, but
wrangling Linux drivers/remoteproc/TI SDKs/devicetree etc is a bit of a
hassle.

[https://github.com/mkj/pru-
mic/blob/master/pru/asmpr0.asm](https://github.com/mkj/pru-
mic/blob/master/pru/asmpr0.asm) is the guts of some code to read from MEMS
microphones, for example.

------
jimmies
I'd imagine it'd be competing directly with the likes of Raspberry Pi 3
Compute Modules. And the RPi3 CMs don't seem to be as popular as the RPi 0 so
far. And that's given the RPi was super popular, and was known for their
amazing community and commitment to connection standard, support and
production.

This is even more hardcore than the RPi 3 CMs, and more expensive. Seems like
you have a brave team to tackle on this pie.

~~~
ivereninov
True! I think that the reason why we do not perceive CM3 as popular is that it
is not something that you can use right away. Unlike Pi Zero it requires a
custom carrier board, which narrows customers to those who are trying to build
a product with it. They normally do not share much online :)

Neutis has advantages over CM3, it is much smaller, comes with Wi-Fi and BT
and the connectors take much less space on the PCB!

~~~
SlowBro
Furthermore, the Pi Zero is single core and very hard to source in bulk for
product integration.

------
drazvan
What secure element chipset are you using? This could be very interesting for
a project I am working on. Does it run JavaCard / GlobalPlatform and are the
access keys available?

~~~
ChoGGi
Not sure why he didn't reply to your question as well, but it's a
[https://www.microchip.com/wwwproducts/en/ATECC508A](https://www.microchip.com/wwwproducts/en/ATECC508A)

------
osivertsson
I think this looks good! I also think the price is reasonable, and the linked
page also mentions volume discounts.

Extended temp range, long-term supply, CE & FCC certification, BSP with OTA
upgrade support, manufacturing tool, and best of all: "we rely on Neutis
ourselves in our line of Reach M+ and Reach RS+ RTK GNSS receivers".

What WiFi+BT chip is used?

Webpage mentions Debian briefly. How good is that support today?

~~~
ivereninov
Thanks! Wireless module is AP6212A, which is based on BCM43430. It has very
mature software support.

I will ask team about Debian tomorrow, can you get in touch with us directly
so that we can keep this conversation going? You can find the contact email on
Neutis website.

~~~
berbec
Crazy question, does monitor mode work on the wifi? That chipset reminds me of
my HTC Wildfire S - aka Mr Robot Phone [1]

1: [https://bcmon.blogspot.com/?m=1](https://bcmon.blogspot.com/?m=1)

------
petrolejboj
I am new to hardware things and just wanted to check. Is Neutis N5 suitable
for making something like PocketCHIP but in more compact form (smaller
device)? If so I would definitely prefer 49$ over 5$ rpi0, just because of
better performance and much smaller form factor.

------
emh68
I like how they threw “makers” (or “pro makers”, whatever that means, on the
actual page) into the title. Uhhh... Yeah I’m going to spend $50 and then
probably at least another $50-$100 for the breakout board, which I’ll need as
a (pro|) maker because they use high-density FMC connectors on the actual
module itself... At this price point and level of integration difficulty why
not just use a (much more standard and better-documented) Pi Compute Module?

------
eberkund
$49 seems very expensive for something like this. There are similar packages
available in the $5-30. What makes this special?

~~~
ivereninov
It is all about the details. Industrial DDR3 with -25C temperature is quite
expensive, but it is a requirement for any company building a product that
could be used outdoors. Quad-core GHz A53 in such tiny footprint, but really
with everything needed onboard. Very motherboard and embedding friendly and
with proper software support.

I think I will give some backstory which might be relevant. This product was
born out of a need to migrate from Intel Edison in our high precision GPS
equipment. We looked long and hard for Edison alternatives but there were
none. They were either too big, or too expensive or did not have enough
computing power. So we decided to build our own.

Disclosure: I am co-founder of Emlid, the company behind Neutis. Happy to
answer any questions.

~~~
tcd
"Neutis runs modern Linux kernel based on the mainline version. Unlike other
modules that are stuck with old legacy kernels without updates, Neutis will
get security fixes and new features on time."

You must clarify that. You are on a technical forum and that simply is not
acceptable. "Mainline" is 4.16-rc2, there is only one mainline, so you are
saying it's shipping with an rc quality kernel that is still in active
development?

Or do you mean it comes with an LTS? "Yocto and Debian". Debian does not use
mainline kernel, in fact, no linux distro does, ever. What version of debian?

~~~
ivereninov
Currently our main focus is on Yocto, since this is what most people would use
in production. Right now BSP runs on 4.15 and the processor is well supported
in mainline. Since our own product is based on Neutis we put a lot of effort
in testing of stability of the system and peripherals.

There is so much work done by the great linux-sunxi community, you can see the
mainlining progress for H5 processor here: [http://linux-
sunxi.org/Linux_mainlining_effort](http://linux-
sunxi.org/Linux_mainlining_effort)

Sorry, it is the middle of the night here and I am not ready to confirm on the
exact Debian version, but I believe that it has not been decided yet. You can
contact us directly and we will get back to you with more info on this.

------
godelmachine
Would you kindly shed more light on what kind of Crypto chip are you using?
What are its capabilities?

~~~
ivereninov
Sure! It is ATECC508A from Microchip and it does a whole lot of things. Please
check out the chip description from Microchip for full list of capabilities.

~~~
gdamjan1
That's good enough for U2F (the same chip is used in u2fzero). But not good
enough for RSA.

I wonder if it can be made to work for attestation like TPM

------
megy
I just want a cheap one that has bluetooth LE so it can be controlled from a
phone app. Does such a thing exist?

~~~
tmuir
Any linux board that has a USB A port, runs the bluez stack and node js, can
do this with a $5 bluetooth dongle.

There's a really nice set of node.js libraries, noble and bleno, which allow
you to communicate in both directions. Noble allows your linux box to be a
central device, and bleno allows your linux box to be a peripheral.

~~~
voltagex_
Except when you find you bought a fake CSR Bluetooth dongle that doesn't
actually support BTLE.

------
quadrature
what would the current draw on this be for average use ?. Would it be suitable
for a handheld mobile device ?

~~~
ivereninov
Sure, we use it in a battery powered device ourselves. Consumption really
depends on how you use it, but roughly it will be around 1W for average use.
You can limit frequency if you need to.

~~~
ksrm
For mobile devices the standby current is very important. Is any kind of sleep
mode implemented? The low cost SoCs always seem to omit this.

------
cryptonector
With a secure element this has a huge potential, though obviously it depends
on the details.

------
oneplane
Unless it gets the ecosystem the Pi and the Beagle have, this gets old rather
quickly.

~~~
thom_nic
I think "ecosystem" doesn't actually matter much (if "ecosystem" means maker/
tinkerer mindshare) for commercial applications. All you need is (1) kernel
support for the chip including drivers e.g. for video/ peripherals, and (2)
good userland support for aarch64. You can debootstrap a Debian rootfs that
will work on any aarch64 chip. As mentioned elsewhere, it sounds like the H5
chip has good kernel support which covers (1.) Actually there's a (3), which
is bootloader support. I don't know if the H3 typically uses u-boot or some
other bootloader.

What differs is what each chip actually supports. E.g the Pi/BCM2835 doesn't
have onboard ethernet MAC/Phy. Neither Pi nor H3 have onboard CAN but maybe
neither of those things matter. Point is these days most of the details of the
chip are abstracted away; if you have good kernel support there's not a lot to
worry about.

~~~
imtringued
There is no real demand for alternatives to the RPi.

People who buy RPis don't care about specs and price. They usually buy only
one for $35 and use it to get linux experience or they already have a specific
usecase in mind like retropi, pihole, etc.

I once wanted to work on the mali open source driver but now I'm thinking:
What's the point? Nobody (including me) gives a shit about it anyway. Just
spend $15 more on that RPi 3.

~~~
thom_nic
> There is no real demand for alternatives to the RPi.

Only if you quality that with "among consumers." There is tons of demand for
ARM-based modules that are designed to be embedded in a commercial product.
Comparing this product to any SBC such as RPi3 or Orange Pi completely misses
the point. Just look at the headers on pretty much every SBC. If you see 0.1"
pitch headers, it's meant for hobbyists, not commercial application.

As mentioned elsewhere, you can compare this to CM3, but there are tons of
other players in this space (and there have been for longer than the CM has
been around.) To name a few: Anything from Variscite, Myir, Toradex: note many
of these cost well north of $50 because they're meant for commercial/
industrial. Samsung Artik 053, Chip Pro, Olimex SOMs and SOPINE are some newer
players that have been pushing the price down a bit in this space. So this
product is price competitive, esp since there aren't many aarch64 modules out
there.

Specifically: if you were designing a product that needs Ethernet (esp GbE)
you almost certainly would not choose the RPi CM because it's not on the BCM
chip. i.MX and AM335x support 10/100 MAC/Phy, H5 supports GbE. If you were
doing an automotive product, RPi and H5 do not have CAN, so you might choose
an AM335x SOM. There is definitely a real demand for alternatives to the RPi
in the space that this product is targeting.

------
lolikoisuru
Does this require any of the binary blobs that are in the mainline Linux
kernel?

~~~
pritambaral
> the binary blobs that are in the mainline Linux kernel?

There are binary blobs in mainline?! Or do you mean the linux-firmware
project?

------
aetherspawn
This looks like a lot of fun.

Would have been perfect for an automotive project years ago.

------
rootw0rm
incredibly boring piece of kit. years behind...no thx.

