06-20-2018, 08:57 PM
Oh bugger, it seems NTC who made the little $9 C.H.I.P. have gone bust and there's no apparent sign of a relaunch.
Shame, their little board was actually quite nice to use, and cute to show to people, and I recently did an update on it and noticed it was downloading Mali GPU drivers, which I assumed were related to the Allwinner binary blob release.
Though only a single core CPU and not very fast at that, it would have got a bit of a boost with its Mali 400 working. Mind you not that much of a boost it was only an M1, but any graphic acceleration is to be applauded.
It was really pretty much the worst SBC on the market, but it had a nice clean OS and was simple to get started, though such a low power system was never going to be any good at the wide range of tasks they wanted it to do, there was even a "games console" kit version...hmmm
I really was hoping they'd get another board to market with the same nice approach to the OS and community but with a better more powerful SBC.
I actually rather liked it when I tried it out, and I might get it up and running again soon to see if the updates do indeed provide an improvement. But its dead Jim, so perhaps I'll just try it out, take note of the set up (should be standard debian) and then move on, even the NTC board isn't showing a lot of discussion in its demise so it wasn't that well supported (oh thats probably why they went bust)
Shame, their little board was actually quite nice to use, and cute to show to people, and I recently did an update on it and noticed it was downloading Mali GPU drivers, which I assumed were related to the Allwinner binary blob release.
Though only a single core CPU and not very fast at that, it would have got a bit of a boost with its Mali 400 working. Mind you not that much of a boost it was only an M1, but any graphic acceleration is to be applauded.
It was really pretty much the worst SBC on the market, but it had a nice clean OS and was simple to get started, though such a low power system was never going to be any good at the wide range of tasks they wanted it to do, there was even a "games console" kit version...hmmm
I really was hoping they'd get another board to market with the same nice approach to the OS and community but with a better more powerful SBC.
I actually rather liked it when I tried it out, and I might get it up and running again soon to see if the updates do indeed provide an improvement. But its dead Jim, so perhaps I'll just try it out, take note of the set up (should be standard debian) and then move on, even the NTC board isn't showing a lot of discussion in its demise so it wasn't that well supported (oh thats probably why they went bust)
Brian Beuken
Lecturer in Game Programming at Breda University of Applied Sciences.
Author of The Fundamentals of C/C++ Game Programming: Using Target-based Development on SBC's
Lecturer in Game Programming at Breda University of Applied Sciences.
Author of The Fundamentals of C/C++ Game Programming: Using Target-based Development on SBC's