Why I stopped hacking the Amazon Dash button and learned to solder

Re:Why I stopped hacking the Amazon Dash button and learned ... by joezydeco on Sunday July 31, 2016 @10:02PM (#12199848)

Yeah, I believe we're at some kind of inflection point here.

I'm old-school embedded. So yeah, get off my lawn you kids that need an RPi, 700Mhz of clock, and a multitasking O/S to read a GPIO pin and send 10 bytes to a server.

But man, you can pretty much run Linux on a single chip now[1], so why mess with anything else? You can tangle with some other the other embedded O/Ses out there for months, or spin up something in Linux in an afternoon.

[1] almost. I've run Linux from an RZ/A1 but with a little bit of external QSPI NOR. I'm guessing the next generation of A9/A15 SoCs will stack more DRAM and NAND flash on top to make this a no-brainer.

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Re:Why I stopped hacking the Amazon Dash button and learned ... by skaevola on Sunday July 31, 2016 @11:39PM (#12200066)

It's so amazing how electronics have progressed. a startup called Octavio Systemsn is now selling a single package that can run a Linux system. I wouldn't count it as running Linux on a single chip, (power system, microprocessor, RAM) because I believe there are multiple dies within the package, but still, super impressive.

Here's a link: http://octavosystems.com/2016/05/09/osd3358-new-era-integrat...

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Re:Why I stopped hacking the Amazon Dash button and learned ... by joezydeco on Monday August 01, 2016 @12:35AM (#12200218)

Any time I see someone messing with a Raspberry Pi I try to steer them towards the TI Sitara/AM335x line.

The schematics for all of their reference boards (aka Beaglebone Black/Green) are freely available, the chip has solid documentation, TI has a good Github+Linux repository, and you can make a really nice system out of it.

The Octavio part is nice, I'm also really interested in what NXP (cough cough Freescale) is doing with turning the iMX into a module. These are both pretty rare birds though. When I can get trays from DigiKey, we'll be cooking.

http://www.cnx-software.com/2015/06/24/freescale-introduces-...

http://cache.nxp.com/files/32bit/doc/support_info/SINGLE-CHI...

Dual-A9 is overkill for making an IoT device node, but hey if you're going to run Azure/Python/Node.js to send your 10-byte report, what the hell.

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Re:Why I stopped hacking the Amazon Dash button and learned ... by sangnoir on Monday August 01, 2016 @07:15AM (#12201515)

> Any time I see someone messing with a Raspberry Pi I try to steer them towards the TI Sitara/AM335x line.

I don't think I will ever forgive TI for abandoning the Galaxy Nexus when they decided to abruptly exit the Android business. Since they chose not to update the drivers, Google couldn't update the GNex later Android versions despite being a Nexus phone. Google Glass had a TI chipset and Google managed to deploy a new Android version to it (I guess via some driver-compat work-around) but I hear the setup wasn't stable. I now avoid TI wherever possible.

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Re:Why I stopped hacking the Amazon Dash button and learned ... by joezydeco on Monday August 01, 2016 @10:40AM (#12202699)

I was sad to see OMAP go as well. I had been working with it since OMAP1 and it did have some nice features. Sitara is pretty much an OMAP without the video DSP so I'm guessing TI just couldn't find a road into the handset market since Apple and Samsung were locking it all up.

I've since switched to the NXP/Freescale iMX family and it's pretty similar in a lot of ways.

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Re:Why I stopped hacking the Amazon Dash button and learned ... by monorailz on Monday August 01, 2016 @04:26AM (#12200895)

You have a typo (well two, really), their name is Octavo Systems.

I hadn't heard of them before, I just noticed the link you posted said octavosystems.com in the url, not octavio.

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