> Topic: Linux on small hardware > Moderators: > Kurt Keville, Systems Administrator, MIT Clinical Research Center > Tom Sohmers > Federico Lucifredi > Brian DeLacey > Michael Larabel, Founder, Phoronix Media
I "live blogged" this on the BLU IRC channel, as I usually do for BLU meetings I attend. (Not a whole lot of info. Just key phrases and product names I peck out on my cell phone keyboard.) Here's a summary of the meeting: There were technical difficulties getting Federico's computer attached to the projector, so he headed off to the Apple store to get an adapter. I'm not sure what the original agenda was supposed to be, but they shuffled things around and had Michael Larabel, Founder, Phoronix Media, talk for a bit about ARM devices and a tablet made for developers to show off the NVIDA Tegra. His site (http://www.phoronix.com/), which covers Linux hardware, both desktop and ARM devices. Others mentioned you could get consumer tablets (like the ASUS) running the NVIDA Tegra for half the price, and were easily unlocked so you could run other OSs (Ubuntu). Then Brian DeLacey took the floor and gave an intro for a couple of videos featuring Kurt Keville demonstrating a 48-node supercomputer cluster running on solar power, built in a repurposed high-tech trash can. This was built using $180 (each) Pandaboards, which use a top-of-the-line Cortex ARM CPU, and was benchmarked at something close to 48 double-precision gigaflops...a few GFLOPs behind the entry point for the top 500 supercomputers 6 months ago. (The machines on the list keep getting faster, so they are further away from the bottom of the current list.) All that consuming around 200 watts. Brian mentioned picking up a Coby Android tablet for $120, which he thought performed pretty well, and thought the $150 ~ $180 Pandaboards were comparatively overpriced. (There are other Android tablets in the same price range with even faster CPUs.) Next up was Federico. He started with a demo of "little bits," which are modular circuit blocks that you can assemble sort of like LEGOs. (http://littlebits.cc/, $29 for a starter kit or $89 for a kit like Federico showed.) There's a Ted talk by the inventor. (http://www.ted.com/talks/ayah_bdeir_building_blocks_that_blink_beep_and_teach.html) Federico snapped together a few modules and showed how squeezing a pressure sensor caused an LED bargraph to vary. He next showed off a Raspberry Pi (http://www.raspberrypi.org/), showed a close up board view using a USB microscope, and then demoed booting it to Debian and started up X with the xfce desktop. Someone at the talk mentioned that one of the RPi developers has created an accessory board that facilitates adding peripherals, like Arduino shields (though it didn't sound like it was compatible with Arduino shields). Lastly he demonstrated a CuBox computer (http://www.solid-run.com/), which is impressively packaged as a 2" cube. He showed photos of the interior, showing how they packed everything in using two stacked PCBs. It uses a Marvel Armada 510 CPU, which is also an ARM derivative. The device, like the RPi, also seems aimed at media playback. It has a bit higher-end hardware than the RPi and is expected to sell for $150 ~ $200, but isn't available yet. He attempted a boot demo, but only managed to get a flash of a penguin on the screen before the projector reported no signal. -Tom _______________________________________________ Hardwarehacking mailing list Hardwarehacking@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/hardwarehacking