[HH] BLU Meeting - Linux on Small Hardware

[Kurt Keville]

The board Brian mentioned was the Gertboard... not a lot of info on 
that yet, I think. The products we didn't physically have to show & 
tell were the Cotton Candy and the Trimslice... although I think we 
may collectively have them by the time the next meeting rolls around.

At 03:16 PM 6/21/2012, Tom Metro wrote:
> > 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>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
>
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