Interview with the Creators of CHIP, a $9 Single-Board Computer

Single-board computing is hot on the DIY scene right now and riding that knife edge is C.H.I.P., a project currently in crowd-funding which prices the base unit at just $9. I was happy to run into the crew from Next/Thing Company who developed C.H.I.P. They were happy because, well, the project’s reception has been like a supernova. Right now they’re at about $1.5M of their original $50k goal. We spoke about running Linux on the board, what connectors and pinout headers are available, as well as the various peripheral hardware they have ready for the board.

$9 But…

Last week I published a post discussing the possibility of Linux evolving into mainstream because of engineers growing up with boards like C.H.I.P, Raspberry Pi, BeagleBone Black, etc. At that point I was thinking that most of these boards would be used as a desktop computer. My thinking has changed a bit (which I’ll get to in a moment) but I think it’s important to note that most people will not use the $9 base model for this purpose. It only comes with composite video. So the “but” about the price is you need to spend an additional $10-15 for VGA or HDMI adapters. As I said before, that’s not a deal-breaker.

Having now seen it in person, I’m beginning to wonder if this won’t be used for a lot of headless projects?

…yeah, maybe just $9

There are a ton of reasons this should make it into projects that don’t have any need at all for a display — giving you the savings of not taking up board space or BOM cost for unused ports.

It has power-management (X-Powers AXP209 PMIC chip) designed into it, allowing for easy operation and charging of batteries. There is WiFi and Bluetooth, camera support, 8 GPIO, and your standard UART/SPI/I2C. Think of all the relatively heavy-lifting embedded projects that are begging for this horsepower and pricepoint: rovers, drones, and visualisation displays (think huge LED matrices or giant flip-dot displays)  to name just a few. I’ll be interested to explore the latency of the GPIO when I can get my hands on one of these; an issue we’ve heard about with Raspberry Pi powered devices.

You Can Take it With You

I’m not quite sure what to think about the Pocket C.H.I.P.

It’s a portable-form-factor which has a huge screen and a full keyboard. The base unit plugs into the back, inside of a case with an interesting geometric shape (anything is better than rectangular, right?). Of course it all runs from battery.

I don’t see myself using something like this but I’m obviously not the target demographic. In the age of smartphones it’s hard to envision something that’s not dirt-cheap taking hold. On the other hand, just having the reference design as an example of what you can build up around the base unit is a great marketing move on their part. “Hey, look at this ARM chip on a PCB” — meh. “Hey, watch this ARM-board power a portable touch-screen computer with clicky keyboard” — Awesome!

Filed under: computer hacks, cons, Featured