Cubie Board

[dipchip]

Hi all,

  If your into the Raspberry PI type of boards, your gonna love this!

http://cubieboard.org/

I plan on purchasing one of these... when they become available again.
Seems they can't keep any in stock.  The price is ... well, cheap! 
Definitely a lot of bang for the buck.

--Chip

[Iliganon]

Hallo!!!

I just recently got my Cubieboard 2.0 (A20 AllWinner Soc + 1GB RAM) from the Post office! Bought mine from IO Technologies. Though it took 1 month to arrive I'm still very excited!!!

It's good to know that someone else is playing with single board computers here. I'm more inclined towards using it like the usual arduino and stuff. I'm planning a simple DCS/PLC system using this powerful board. Would also like to make something in the likes of Emerson's DeltaV Automation System.

We should make a section here in Sonsivri for those who like Single Board Computers especially the ARM ones, RasPi, MarsBoard by Element14, MarsBoard by AllWinner, ODroid, CubieBoard, and others.

As a Bonus, I have attached an image of my SSH comms with Cubieboard2 Compiling NodeJS while running htop on top. My Cubieboard is installed with Lubuntu. Finally, any hints on how to build my own choosing of Linux Distros using Arm Tools would be greatly appreciated! Thanks!

[solutions]

Don't know much about it, but do you guys have a schematic, and firmware for these, if any?

[zac]

Don't know much about it, but do you guys have a schematic, and firmware for these, if any?

http://cubieboard.org/download/#Hardware%20Documents

[Iliganon]

Don't know much about it, but do you guys have a schematic, and firmware for these, if any?

Most of the Parts, development and design for this one is done in China. There are other single board pc's that are more well-documented like RapsberryPi and BeagleBone Black. Even the processor for this one is ARM based but Chinese designed. However, this adds to the cheapness of this device. The schematics can be found on the official site albeit even until now I'm still confused at what really constitutes official for this device because most of the sites you can see are English translations of Chinese data.

I finally also just made the GPIO work just now and completed the Blinking LED exercise. Perhaps the standard Hello World for embedded computing. Lol. But I'm amazed as to the potential of this one because I compile using gcc and multithreading. I also just recently finished compiling NodeJS which will soon be handy later for networking tasks.

I will be working on some short articles on this one in the near future so that new players will have some guide. As for me, it's been translating Chinese articles and it has been quite difficult to some degree. I invite in everyone to try this out, it's really fun. Also, you can ping me if you need any help. Would be glad to help out others and learn from everyone.

[dezso]

That's look greate.
I'm interested to talk about more, have Mini210v2, Mini6410, Mini2410.
My primary OS windows CE, open to Linux but not expert.
One thing cut my attention is the SATA port on this board you got, have you tried to connect sata drive to it, have a project in minde to format HD and SSD on the fileld with a push of a button. What is the boot time of Linux?
If you have a minute would you be aable to check if you can format SATA drive with eXFAT?!

Thanks

[Iliganon]

I have not yet tested the SATA component. I do have HDD's on standby but are currently being used for other purposes. I will in a while try it out. But it seems not all compatible Linux systems support the SATA as it has to be supported in the Driver level.

I should tell you that it's unfortunate that the Linaro Lubuntu installation that I currently have takes time to boot due to a bug. The bug only activates when the Cubieboard is booted while the Ethernet is unplugged. It seems it has problems acquiring DHCP IP address and it halts the entire system in about a minute. Without the bug, it boots at about 10 to 15 seconds.

By default though, when mine arrived it has an Android OS which boots quite perfectly well (6sec) with or without Ethernet connectivity to any DHCP server. But I think Android is not very practical in many applications except maybe for multimedia purposes. With that said, I will note your suggestion and try my best to test the SATA with the variety of compatible Linux Releases.

I can't say much with Windows support because Microsoft has poor to no support on ARM especially the less popular (such as this one) processors. This is an AllWinner A20 chip with a dual core ARM7, a Chinese brand and not very popular. I do hope if anyone gets ahead of me to share information regarding setup and deployment of SATA or even with a possible compatibility with Microsoft's OS's.

I would also like to make an update that I have successfully compiled OpenCV, NodeJS and successfully controlled the low level GPIO pins of this devices. This device with its very low price point and a wide array of General Purpose Input/Output pins is very nice for sophisticated embedded projects. I have tested successfully OpenCV's Face Detection example, and NodeJS server capability in realtime web. This makes the device very powerful as it can do very high level and complex algorithms such as Facedetection but still be able to control the GPIO for other peripheral devices such as LCDs, DAC/ADCs, and Relay Switching. In other words it can do both High level Complex tasks and Low level GPIO tasks which makes it very agile and compact platform compared to modern day Arduinos. I'm really starting to have so much fun with this board!!! Hahahah! 

[dezso]

Thank for looking in to that.
Probably will order v2 next week, currently on mini210 Debian I'm able to create exfat but unable to mount it, fuse not installing properly. Also exfat created on mini works fine with Mac and HDCamera but windows 8 cannot access fs. Are you a Linux guru, any suggestion on fuse ? Missing /dev/fuse modprobe spouse to creat it but isn't.

Ty

[happylex]

I use it with VGA and it is very easy to set the display output and resolution in the FEX file. Also TV out is simple to do. Sound quality is fine, I mostly use it as a MP3 player with library to manage the albums. I plan to build it into an amplifier with the PT2313 and a sure-electronics power amplifier. I would like to keep the AVR away and use the I2C of the cubieboard:

I designed a little audio board, with a PT2313 and ATMEGA644 (I have 10 of those here). It is made to exactly fit the maximal 10cm x 5cm ...

Did anybody use the SATA with Cubieboard 2? I am not always happy with the transfer speed of the SD (15 MB/s). Booting up to ready to play music and control the I2C, buttons etc. takes 42 seconds. Would be nice to take away a dozen of seconds.

And how about YouTube in Linux? It seems that the browsers don't work well with the accelerator. I can play videos if I activate HTML5, but it takes all my processing power to just play a movie in the small browser screen. Other video players work perfectly.

[Iliganon]

I use it with VGA and it is very easy to set the display output and resolution in the FEX file. Also TV out is simple to do. Sound quality is fine, I mostly use it as a MP3 player with library to manage the albums. I plan to build it into an amplifier with the PT2313 and a sure-electronics power amplifier. I would like to keep the AVR away and use the I2C of the cubieboard:

Did anybody use the SATA with Cubieboard 2? I am not always happy with the transfer speed of the SD (15 MB/s). Booting up to ready to play music and control the I2C, buttons etc. takes 42 seconds. Would be nice to take away a dozen of seconds.

And how about YouTube in Linux? It seems that the browsers don't work well with the accelerator. I can play videos if I activate HTML5, but it takes all my processing power to just play a movie in the small browser screen. Other video players work perfectly.

As of now the guys at EFF are still working on a fix for the CedarX platform for Linux. As always there are high level agreements between IC Manufacturers, ARM and Google to protect Android bins. They always make it hard to make things work just as easily for Linux. I have made some tests though on their current progress. I can now play 720p and 1080p videos of different formats using the Cubieboard (Linux) through mplayer, but at the moment only in full screen. This is the link of my video.

As for the SATA thing, too bad i still don't have the budget to pursue testing. lol, it seems i'm on a tight budget now. I apologize though for the low video quality. Hahahah!