Going to be a busy month for me with lots of new systems coming in.  Latest is this beast from Odroid
https://secure.reichelt.nl/odroid-n2-6x-...stct=pos_0

Happy to see that Reichelt in Germany has stocks and getting them from Korea is a bit hit and miss... 

It should be here in a few days, so I'll try to do a review at the weekend along with a couple of other new arrivals I'm expecting.

It seems the spam bots are not content with just posting on the forums they also have been sending a lot of messages to the mail box and clogged it up quite badly. Resulting in mail not getting to me.

I've cleaned it up now, and will check it a little more often to prevent it getting totally filled. But if you mail me and get a bounce or no reply, contact me on this email as well

brianbeuken5  which is at good old gmail and thats a dot com....

So there's a new version of Raspbian, which the Raspberry 4 needs to operate, but those of you who still have older Pi's will probably want to try it out, so here's the basics 

I set up Buster on a Pi 3B+
It's initial set up is a bit more fussy than previous versions but its all fine aside from insisting I must speak Dutch if I set my locale to Amsterdam...I wish it would understand that being in 1 part of the world does not mean you speak that language.. Fortunately there is an English only tick box.

It does seem a tiny bit clunky in use on the 3B+ maybe it expects a bit more power to run, but thats not the Raspberry way, so will see how it gets on after its finished updating and installing.

And that took a while but, yes it seems a bit smoother now.

SSH and VNC are disabled by default so you need to enable them if you are using headless systems or coding on a PC

STB and GLM need to be installed 1st and bullet physics

But...thats it... all libs are in the same places, and it builds and runs demo's fine. It still needs the _static libs of Stretch but no problems at all getting things up and running.

Interesting to note checking the libs folder there is currently no GLES3.0 folder... that maybe due to installing itself on a 3B+ I'll see if it installs the libs on a 4 when my monitor cables come.

So..all good..at least for my level of usage (ie not so much on the Pi itself). If there are issues I'm sure users will find them. But on a 3B+ at least Buster seems to work just fine.

Wasn't expecting it, but am very happy to see it.
I've got one on order so have no idea yet on what changes if any are needed to the builds... I'll provide any updates as soon as I can.

https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/raspber...GSTODvyYnI

Its not even Pi day...but look..the Pi 4 is out, and what a beast it is.


https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/raspber...PaZCxXpa10


Im overjoyed about this, and also slightly amazed.. 2-3times the power and OpenGLES3.0 (maybe 3.1 or 3.2?) They have it listed as 3.0 and 3.x so curious to know which it is.

Also 1-4GB of LDDR4 memory, thats very refresshing, much more speed and more speace. The Raspberry now really has a place as a desktop system.

Can't say I'm overkeen on the dual screens, not sure why a Pi needs it, and the need therefore for mini adaptors but hey ho.. if people want it they get it,

I'm curious about the USB3.0, will the again share a bus? And a full Gigabit ethernet.. 

It really is a perfectly awesome little machine, and still at a base $35 for the 1GB, though I've gone for a 4GB model.

Well I guess its time look at adding those GLES3.0 chapters.

I rather like the Vim2 I have, though it does not have full drivers for it GPU, its one of the few Octacore systems that I find can comfortably handle some serious processing. I don't really like the case its in or the lack of heatsink though that does cause a few issues when seriously strained.

Khadas seem to market these mainly as Android/TV boxes and they do rather well, but a new one is on the horizon that will have some interest for us as game devs and possible AI dev.

https://www.khadas.com/vim?utm_campaign=d0e49486-86fa-419f-b885-a80af7b4aa43&utm_source=so

The Vim3 is using a new CPU to the market though, the hexa core A311D, which probably means it'll be 6months of more before we see any real good OS's, I suspect Armbian are on the job already. But once it beds in it should be quite a nice machine. It has a lot of very nice features that are more common on maker boards than Android/TV boxes so perhaps Kahdas are expanding their target market which is good for coders.
On paper this is a mega fast Arm 4x2.2GHz and 2x1.8Ghz, and should be able to blast out a lot of processing, the fact it also has a PWM fan header means you can put some seriously good cooling onto it to keep that performance at its limits.

It has a next Gen Mali G52 MP4 GPU, which isn't really going to trouble the Jetson or Rockchip systems, but it will outperform almost all the other systems, if/when it has hardware exposed. Amlogic havn't been to easy to get drivers for in the past except for Odroid. All the extras it has could make it very competative with the Rockchip machines.

Priced at $99 it falls under my $100 limit, so its going to join me at some point. There is a slighlty contrived launch discount being offered that can knock it down to $69. If you manage to share their promo material around, sadly I failed to even get a copy link on facebook...(not not just cos I'm stupid,I followed the instructions and the options expected didn't appear).

I'm hoping I can get hold of a sample board and put it through its paces, if not I'll leave it a few months till the OS is in place and try to pick one up.

I hope it does well.

In an effort to make sure that whatever SBC you own the code can be made to work with it, I've been collecting a lot of SBC's over the last couple of years..

I might need help? Serious, professional help.


But the good side to this,  I've tested my projects on almost all these systems, and got them working in some fashion, if you can't get your SBC to work, let me know and I'll try it out, if I don't have your SBC, I'll certainly try to get it.

This is an issue I had with Ubuntu 18.04 running on an Nvidia Nano but I have noted a couple of other Ubuntu systems would fail to run demos so this may be the cause for them too.

Basically if you can't get an X11 window to open from your VisualStudio deployed app, you have to make sure that you are indeed using the correct log in name for your SSH connection and the Target. This is very unlikely to be different.

The issue however seems to relate to autologin on Ubuntu if you are signing in manually, even as your expected user name, you can transfer build and run, but your builds will fail whenever they try to get an X11 display to set up graphics.

I figured it had to be something to do with access rights somewhere, so I went to the settings and checked the Securty and Privacy->Password settings. I didn't see anything odd there, but while I was in I switched to autologin to on.

Guess what.. that solves it.. My projects now happily build and run and can be executed from my VisualGDB debug command.

To double check I set autologin back to off and sure enough my VisualGDB failed again
So the secret is... ensure you have automatic login, with your matching ssh username

Bizzare issue...Dunno why this is happening, but very happy I resolved it.

An odd thing to be sure, and with shipping and customs outside my $100 budget (total cost was around $160), but its related to a project I am working on for my university and I need to see if I can configure this to be a viable dev or target learning system for areas when computers are not so easy to find never mind learn to code on.
1st impressions are...well surprising, its slow of course and I'm not sure what OS they shipped with it, but it does work...apart from Firefox telling me that Google is an unsafe site and wont' got to it.. lol it may be right

Im doing a full update of its current OS now and will see if I can install some dev packages on it. Of course no visual studio, but I want to see which of the Linux IDE's can be made to work if that is possible it might be a viable option to use as a dev system targetting another machine or itself.

I'll also attempt to use it as a target, though previous Pine A64 attempts havn't gone well the software has had time to mature and does have a strong following. The Rock64 from  them isn't half bad but this is based on the older and more troublesome A64 

Build quality is surprisingly good, I had expected from reviews to find it really bad. The small keyboard isn't the greatest thing but nor is it the worst. If it can be married up to a decent OS it might actually be a cool little system.
The current default KDE based ubuntu (I think), installs GLmark2-es2 fine and recognises the mali 400mp2 but it isn't showing any sign of acceleration and the score is naturally very low at 27 on screen but a surprising..188 offscreen..hmmm.. I'll have to see if I can find an A64 OS that has drivers.

I will report back when I manage to get things up and running

Recently I went to a local Game Developer Meetup that I have been signed up to but not attended yet and it was a bit interesting. The main draw was that there was a person from the local EA Mobile group who spoke about sound in games. After the event, I mingled with some folks and when they asked me what I was working on, I mentioned being interested in developing with OpenGL-ES.  This caused some eye brow raising and a question: "So, you're bypassing Unity?"  It seemed a bit foreign to these folks that anyone would use anything other than a tool such as Unity to do any sort of development.

I do find this interesting though since there were folks calling themselves Game Coders but did not actually code; they just used what Unity gave them.

Is this common?