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Pi Zero or C.H.I.P?

Chuck(G)

Chuck(G)

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I've mentioned the 32-bit Maple Mini $4 (shipped) STM32 boards here (would have made various vintage add-on projects insanely cheap); now we've got both the $9 CHIP and the Raspberry Pi Zero coming online for sale. A brief description of both.

I think the advent of the ultra-cheap "hobbyist" boards are heralding a new advance in the hobby field. What do you think?
 
I backed the CHIP. I think the Pi Zero is a little *too* stripped down.

These are cheap enough to be easy ways to add microcontroller-based hardware to our classic machines, though. I'm looking at using one as a web proxy-type device.
 
Heck, people have already done floppy emulators with RPi. It does seem a little backward designing a peripheral using a GHz CPU to support a 4.77MHz 8088. Such is progress...

To bad that neither board has 5V tolerant I/O.
 
I think I would still lean toward the Raspberry Pi. Mainly, because the product family is approaching 7 million sold, they have a fairly large library of ported software (plus, with the latest Linux kernal, RPi is supported in the kernal, so software ports should be a little easier to do).

I don't know why people aren't talking about using a powered hub with the zero. Buy a powered hub, and power the pi from one of the ports. Did that with the first Pi models with no problems, so I didn't even have a dedicated 5v power adapter. I'd think that you could run it the same way. So what you'd need then is:
2x Mini USB to standard USB cables ($2 each)
1x powered USB hub (>$10)
1x mini HDMI to HDMI cable (>$5)
1x wifi dongle (about $5)
keyboard, mouse, monitor, Micro SD card.

I've been doing a bit of PiPlay emulation lately, so I'm curious to see how this model stacks up. Also, what is MPG playback like? I could envision setting a few of these up around the house as media players, NAS controllers, etc. since they don't seem to need monitors connected all the time to run.

And to answer your last question, yes... I think this is the most exciting thing to happen in years. Someone needs to tweak it to be a home computer. Also, at $5, it becomes a tinker's dream--burn it out? So what, it is $5! Oh, and it becomes pocket money for kids, not something you need to save months for. So yes, for many reasons, this is very exciting.
 
If I was in the market for one, I'd go with the Raspberry Pi. Today I was talking to one of our maintenance guys at work, and he has been seeing articles in industrial technology magazines where companies have been saving money by swapping out older programmable controllers with RPi's instead of sticking with high end controller and instrumentation vendors.
 
No, I was less interested in the full-blown Pi or Pi2 than in a cheap board that could be installed for various embedded applications. So the Pi is too expensive, but not the Pi Zero.
 
hmmm that CHIP is quite tempting
Has storage, battery, Wifi and the headers built in. I'd probably pay the extra.

I've wanted to monitor what my dog does during the day (cam with motion detect and stream to web), logging temperatures in my house and/or garage and c) maybe adding automated IR control for my HVAC if things get out of range - when you're talking that low in price, I might have to get a couple.

I think I've always been putoff using a Pi/CHIP for small projects because it feels wasteful - but when it's cheaper than any of the other options.... and uses very very little power (compared to a laptop/desktop)...

The low prices are certainly inspiring for little hobby projects.
 
Wasteful? I used to think that about commodity PCs. Then I remembered creeping featuritis and software bloat. Parkinson's law will save us from real progress. :)

Still, a controller with a half gig of DRAM and hectogigs of solid-state storage isn't too shabby. Used to be that the CPUs in Postscript laser printers dwarfed the power of the CPU inside the PC attached to them.
 
One of the problems with industrial PLCs is the mindset--and I can understand it. The product is high-value and quite probably, also involves a very high raw material cost, so the idea of utter reliability is part of the equation. As a more practical example, you could probably replace all of the process controllers in a nuclear power plant with RPis--but it isn't going to happen--there's too much at stake.

I'll occasionally modify floppy drives for use in older PLCs and $300 for such a drive is considered to be a fair price, even though the drive starts out as a cheap commodity unit. Floppy emulators for such equipment run about $1800, the last I checked--and weren't much different from the $20 Chinese units sold on eBay.
 
I'm surprised there isn't a hardened version of the RPi yet. That would further bridge the gap between hobbyist and fault-tolerant industrial controllers.
 
At this point you *might* be able to get a Pi Zero, but it does not look like the C.H.I.P is available for mainstream purchasing now.

All things considered though, I'd go with the Pi Zero for now, it has a very large community and much better support for it, and it does not need an HDMI addon in order to plug it into a computer monitor (fewer and fewer displays have composite these days). Full disclosure though, I own 3 Pi2 boards.

Chuck(G) said:
A brief description of both.
Click to expand...

What really annoys me about both of these is that the cost everyone is focusing on ($9 and $5) is very misleading. Once you buy the stuff you need to actually work with them, the both come in right around $25 (as per the article, C.H.I.P + USB cable + HDMI addon = $23, Pi Zero + USB cables, HDMI adapter/cable + storage = $25), which 3 to 5 times the quoted cost, not a lot of money but still not as cheap as they lead you to believe.

What I would have loved to see was them sacrifice a bit of space in order to put on a single regular USB port and regular HDMI port on the Pi Zero, even if this meant it was a bit bigger and even a buck or two more.

EDIT: C.H.I.P's website is here: http://getchip.com/pages/chip You can pre-order them, and they estimate it will ship in June of next year. Also, if you want to add the HDMI addon and an HDMI cable, that $9 computer will cost you $30 on their website, VGA would save you $5 off of that. I dunno, these to PC boards really feel like bad manipulative advertising to me. "Come get a computer for $9! O you want one, well in order to actually use it you'll need these accessories that cost nearly twice as much as the computer does." Just rubs me the wrong way I guess.
 
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Yesterday I received an email from Adafruit telling me that the Pi Zero was back in stock. It could not have been more than an hour before I navigated over the AF site--sold out already.

The C.H.I.P. is supposedly shipping, but the pre-order still seems to be the case at the maker site.
 
Chuck(G) said:
Yesterday I received an email from Adafruit telling me that the Pi Zero was back in stock. It could not have been more than an hour before I navigated over the AF site--sold out already.

The C.H.I.P. is supposedly shipping, but the pre-order still seems to be the case at the maker site.
Click to expand...

Wow, I did not even get an email, and I signed up for one as well. But yeah, that's why I put the *might* in there ;D C.H.I.P seems to be more of a *not yet* which I think is a bit worse than a *might*.
 
"Come get a computer for $9! O you want one, well in order to actually use it you'll need these accessories that cost nearly twice as much as the computer does."
Click to expand...

As you say, though, if you have a composite monitor or a composite-capable TV -- and most still are -- it really does work as is out of the box.

Disclaimer: I was an early backer of CHIP.

The C.H.I.P. is supposedly shipping, but the pre-order still seems to be the case at the maker site.
Click to expand...

Only to the beta group. GA is still for later in 2016. But the product, at least, does exist.
 
Raspberry Pi as a floppy emulator? Cool! I did a quick search...has it been done with anything other than Amiga?

The Pi Zero is only going to be useful for niche things...if you have to add a bunch of converters and a hub, you may as well get the $25 B+.

I once worked with a guy who did some work with Allen Bradley gear...his comment was that you could buy better, but you couldn't pay any more...

I've got 5 Pi's now...they are a lot of fun to work with. Here's what they are up to:

B: Hooked up to the TV, very rarely used for watching something on TV...also serves as a Samba file server and "a2server". Current uptime of 220 days.
B+: Sitting here for tinkering.
A+: Used in a digital camera project. Camera module, switches, buttons, and wireless adapter used to convert an Argus 75 TLR film camera to a digital camera. One of these days I will get around to creating a web page with all the details.
Another A+: In a case with camera module and a GPS board, along with a homemade shutdown button. Used to attach to the rear-view mirror on a trip to take a photo once per minute, along with logging GPS coordinates, and save to the SD card. Also set to upload reduced-size image and GPS coordinates to a web page for family and friends to follow along on a long car trip if so desired.
2 B: Just got it for Christmas, haven't had a chance to work with it yet, but looking forward to the faster speed for certain things.

I've found the Pi to be much easier to work with using a USB to serial adapter to connect to the console port...then I can use PuTTY to access it from my desktop, copy & paste things back and forth, etc.

I would have been more excited about the zero if they had put a camera module connector on it...though I also realize adding a few little things upsets the $5 price point very quickly. I also wonder a bit about the Micro USB connector and Mini HDMI connectors...that will make it more expensive due to required adapter cables for most everyone. I was excited when I found out about the Odroid W a while back...but then it turned out they couldn't continue to get chips to make them, so they are no more. Basically a Pi clone with some really cool features in a reduced footprint.

I'm starting to do a little tinkering with some cheap Arduino clones...though that is certainly a very different world than the Pi...

Wesley
 
I think the Pi Zero and CHIP is overkill for things such as floppy emulation. Consider the Gotek emulator--it uses a STM32F105 MCU that runs at 72MHz. Most of the components on the board are for interfacing to 5V signal levels--something you'll have to do anyway. A couple of years ago, I constructed a successful floppy emulator using an ATMEGA162 (8 Mhz) and some SRAM (SD card interface). It seems to be a shame to throw the power of a P0 or a CHIP at such a trivial task.
 
I'd really like to see a true tinkerer's el-cheapo pico-board thing. Seems like all of these are basically just ARM embedded boards running Linux, and half the time with undocumented semi-proprietary hardware to boot. I'd pay at least as much as I did for my Pi to have something based on a decent little 8/16-bit architecture with hardware you could understand with just a list of PEEKs and POKEs. Seems like the only things that approach that are a couple of Propeller projects and the FIGnition, which are maybe just a little too primitive...huh.
 
I suspect that a BASIC for a Maple Mini ($4 shipped), if you're willing to use serial I/O or USB probably exists somewhere. The nice thing about the Maple boards is that the I/O is 5V tolerant, by and large. Granted it's 32-bit, but who's counting?
 
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