I would be suspicious of this. It's not just one alarm bell ringing.
- The website. Jesus. With all the templates and content management you can pluck out of thin air, the result is very shoddy. Apparently that isn't a warning sign enough for some people.
- No corporate history. The company has another site but their blog there is empty. No news. Dodgy RSS listings. The whole thing is even shoddier than the product site.
- The payment is through Paypal. Address was visible yesterday (now encrypted) as mr.hipboy@gmail.com. lolwut? What a handle. Very professional. Real name appears to be Luffy Wang of Hesseney Road, Hubei 150, HK. (hipboi@qq.com) This guy really likes hips.
- The product is $49. Less than the price (delivered) of two Raspis with a SATA controller and port. This was what made my eyes light up. The phrase "too good to be true" exists for a reason.
- And while I'm talking about specs, why do the pictures and words disagree so much? How many card readers are there? Are they SD or MMC?
- Oh and it's available almost without delay. Despite that there are no reviews, no tester units in the wild. No videos of on working. Not even the hint of a fart from a prototype.
+ There is a GitHub page: https://github.com/cubie-tech This is probably a detail I wouldn't have bothered with if I were running this scam.
Yesterday my acquaintances on G+ and I decided that this is most likely a scam. I really hope it's not and I'll be the first in line for the second batch, but please be careful.
What's interesting is how lagged the development world is from the consumer electronics world. If you want an Allwinner A10, or a Marvell Kirkwood/ ARMADA 300 piece of kit, and you want it at the best possible price, possibly before dev kits show up, you need to scope out consumer electronics, not dev boards. The Mele was a product, this lack's the consumer experience of a product, is just a platform, and it, like many dev kits, show lag v.s. what the consumer boys are up to.
This is simply a small board exposing a very cheap ARM A8 SoC that does everything (just add ram+flash): hold on to your fucking pants and get used to the future. Course, may not materialize. My OpenPandora hasn't. ;)
I have two Open Pandoras that say you Just Need To Wait A Little More (tm). ;)
And yeah, seems like every few years we get more and more college grads who seem to be surprised that there is, in fact, a lot of very cheap hardware out there to be had. I've been running and using micro-scale Linux hardware like these new-gen things for decades. Gumstix, BananaBoard, et al.
Okay, the <$50 pricing is pretty nice, but not entirely unexpected given the trend over the last 10 years of having these things get cookie-cut around. The whole point of ARM in the first place was to get to this position ..
Wow. As someone who is actually active in the A10 community, I know Tom and this is not a scam. Some people focus more on developing cool shit than on their website.
Well if people want to sell their cool shit, they probably aught to spend 20 minutes making sure all the media around their product doesn't look like a giant con.
Seriously other than the handle hipboi/hipboy in an email address that was removed from the site yesterday, there's nothing definitively linking Cubietech/Cubieboard to Tom Cubie.
And I can't see anything about the Cubieboard on Tom Cubie's Facebook or G+. That also strikes me a little odd.
Mostly because he hasn't actually announced it yet. The website is still in process and cnx-soft found it recently. Thus all the hubbub.
He has shared the info with people who are friends on G+. But ripping in to someone for their choice of nickname? Seriously? I've seen many worse nicknames by people in this so called startup community that seems to be more and more filled with cynicism and negativity.
Apparently if you don't use a Mac/rails/js it isn't worth looking in to.
I didn't take it as a joke based on his phrasing of all the other criticisms of the site. Perhaps I over reacted, but immediately jumping on it being a scam because the site isn't pretty enough (and isn't ready to actually take orders) seems rather odd to me. Perhaps because I work with ARM devices all day I'm just used to sites that look like that and it doesn't scream scam to me.
If you're right, you did everyone a favor by pointing it out. But if you're wrong, no amount of arguing about the quality of this guy's website is going to make you look less dumb. The way you wrote that comment, you've gone "all in" on the prediction that this is a scam.† I think that was imprudent, but either way: let's let it play out instead of wasting time backpedaling.
† Message board nerd pro-tip: avoid the word "lolwut" if you want to maintain the pretense of evenhandedness.
Who's backpeddling? I'm certainly not. This isn't just about this website — it's about any website that is (or will be) asking you to hand over money or details. My analysis will stand, regardless of the actual situation here.
Gather round children! This is what a two-minute scam website looks like. No effort, discrepancies everywhere (specs), technical inconsistencies (domain whois). But look somebody in a forum said it's a real person, it must be real! No.
If you charge into a site like this and trust it, you're an idiot. Your idiocy is not dependent on this one being a scam. Put the card back in your wallet and wait until the product actually exists.
And the lolwut was in keeping with the style of the handle and the website. I thought that was rather obvious and certainly wouldn't have thought it needed a sidebar conversation... But here we are.
Umm... the site isn't taking orders, which you would know if you'd bothered to make even the most cursory investigation before putting finger to keyboard. So if it is a scam, it's one with no way of making money at present, which would seem a very strange form of fraud.
And yet he's selling it. So he obviously does care somewhat - otherwise it would be just a video of it working and maybe some assembly instructions. (Something my grandfather did with the Williamson Amplifier: He published how to create it in Wireless World rather than patenting it and making tons of money from it.)
The point is: he built a business, whatever his intentions before he started, his intentions are now in selling.
Erm. That doesn't work the same for a web app as it does for a product site. If you start off with absolutely zero trust and have a shitty first launch, your next few ones will notice a difference.
I don't know anything about these guys, but I don't think it's too good to be true.
Ever since the Raspberry pi shipped, credit-card sized computers have been coming out the woodwork. As expected, now there are projects on vWorker (ex RentACoder) asking for engineers to design such computers with state of the art specs with a maximum bid of $499. I can't make this shit up! $499! At least toss us a bone and add a zero so we don't laugh quite so hard!
Anyway, aside from that rant, this is a Great Thing. I predict an array of products that are now possible due to a flood of dirt cheap, physically small computers that can run Linux. One off industrial controllers that would have taken a week of development time can now be pushed out in a day, etc.
Having lived in the SBC and industrial space my entire career I'd probably take issue with that statement if I could be bothered to.
I'll amend it to "cheap credit-card sized computers" if it makes you feel better.
Gumstix have been around for what, about 10 years IIRC? They are more expensive than what I'm talking about. The point I'm making is that CPU boards on the level to run flavors of Linux easily are approaching "jellybean" component status and that will enable applications that simply weren't feasible before.
Ever since the Raspberry pi shipped, credit-card sized computers have been coming out the woodwork. As expected, now there are projects on vWorker (ex RentACoder) asking for engineers to design such computers with state of the art specs with a maximum bid of $499. I can't make this shit up! $499! At least toss us a bone and add a zero so we don't laugh quite so hard!
[citation needed]
I'm thinking it would cost at least $150-$200 to prototype, per PCB revision. If it was design only, I wouldn't trust a random freelance designer to get it working first go.
I remember one weird case where bunch of EEG units acted weird, well noisy. The highly experienced MSEE couldn't explain it, because it wasn't the high sensitivity input amp or anything on the board. I eventually figured out it was the off-board battery, and it turned out to be the impedance would climb causing a noisy EEG, as the battery was wearing out in fairly short time from abuse (excess low discharge in SLAs will damage them). Perhaps a few extra capacitors might have help.
It would be the same for these A10/A13 clones, weird glitches can crop up, and even with an experienced engineer, the design could require a PCB revision and a new prototype.
You need a citation that idiots are asking engineers to design complex CPU boards for $499? Just head over to vWorker and search.
In case it's not clear, the $499 is the price they are offering to pay an engineer to do the design, not the price they want the end product to sell for. Hence the reason they are off by close to two orders of magnitude.
I was curious for details, as I didn't think anybody would be that dumb and still be serious. I did search for requests for a board design related to Android or Cortex class CPUs on the site, or similar freelance sites (or eLance or Freelancer.com)
I think on vWorker and some of the others, people just post projects with what they can afford -- a few hundred $$$ -- and see what sticks. There's always someone who will take them up on it, even if only to disappear forever when they realize how difficult it is.
I have received at least one personal invite to design just such a board in the last week (max bid $499), but I already deleted it.
Raspberry Pi is just the new, "hipster", eval board.
There have been cheap, affordable, fun eval boards like the Rpi out there for years. Gumstix, Beagle, and so on. Prices are coming down, sure, but don't kid yourself that the RaspberryPi is something new and ground-breaking: its just a surface feature of a rather larger industry.
You do realize basically all these rules applied to the ras. pi when it was first announced too? Considering that was over a year ago, and comparable parts have been regularly available from China (e.g. Allwinner A10) for many months, it's quite hard to find any surprise in this project at all.
They look like a hardware company, not a web design company. Why do you care about their-not-the-latest-hip-web-theme website? I rather they save the web design money to deliver a lower priced product. Every company starts with no corporate history. You are welcomed to buy from Intel if so choose. Hardware price drops all the times. The price point is not too far off.
HN has been big on launch early and get feedback. How shallow it is to have negative feedback based on look. Let's wait and see how the product turns out, rather than commenting on their web design.
You obviously have absolutely no idea what a true startup is. Do you understand the concept of most viable product? How long did you spend collecting all this information? Are you a disgruntled competitor with a bit of jealousy perhaps?
The guy is working on physical hardware. Do you know how difficult that is? To ship a device like this? A lot of the issues you mentioned are the last of his worries.
I'm a bit suspicious, too. Googling the name of the board turns up maybe 10 results all in the same domain. Immediately following are things not related to the Cubieboard. I'm probably gonna sit this one out for now.
EDIT: Using some different terms brings up a ton of articles about the board from popular sources, yet they're all new within the past few days. I dunno, it might actually be real, but it me a bit uncomfortable, but that may just be me.
This is typical of the technology-journalist-circle-jerk you see when a new product is announced but nobody has hands on yet. No news older than a few days old. Same photos over and over again.
I can't believe the level of raspberry pi astroturfing present here. This board is so much more powerful that it can run full Ubuntu fast and the same chip is actually used to build very competent android tablets. I read things like "mindshare" "community" "The site is wrong" "the GPU is better in the raspberry" (Ha! sure, games will run better i suppose) , well the site looks perfectly OK for me. I gonna burn points for this, but the u$s 50 Raspberry pi is overpriced since you can get a u$s 67 complete android tablet (http://goo.gl/Misru)
The RPi already has add-on boards and a relatively large community compared to new competitors coming to the scene. In a way, it's like comparing the msp430 to the arduino. The msp430 is arguably better than most of the AVR chips, but they just don't have the hobby mindshare of the arduino community.
A key advantage would be if you could actually buy it. Raspberry Pi is still "due to extreme demand the estimated delivery time is uncertain and may exceed 12 weeks."
Gumstix are more expensive but easily available in any quantity, so that's what I'm designing with now.
It can run a variety of linux variants. But all ARM processors that I am aware of can, even going back to the chip in the old Acorn Archimedes from the late '80s. Also, I have personally never heard of a chip that is able to run android but not able to run linux and I am not entirely sure how you would even go about making one.
Sorry, I'm looking for confirmation that they've booted a mainline kernel on it. Bonus points if the graphics chip is supported (I was confused, I thought it was on-die but it's not)
Either you are confused about the definition of astroturfing, or you are confused about the nature of the raspberry-pi foundation.
We don’t claim to have all the answers. We don’t think that the Raspberry Pi is a fix to all of the world’s computing issues; we do believe that we can be a catalyst. We want to see cheap, accessible, programmable computers everywhere; we actively encourage other companies to clone what we’re doing. We want to break the paradigm where without spending hundreds of pounds on a PC, families can’t use the internet. We want owning a truly personal computer to be normal for children.
I'm not agains the Raspberry pi foundation. I'm against the stupid old SoC they used and the low amount of memory. If they want to build a personal computer then add more memory, Raspberry PI now is an expensive microcontroller.
The amateur quality of the website (esp. the prose) worries me. Do we have any further information on the owner? Or, the location of the company?
I could quite easily imagine cubiebox being no more than an amateur scammer's effort to cash in on the uptick in interest in ARM boxes.
In particular, the grammar on the parent Company's website (http://cubietech.com/) is horrific. Plus, it has a newsfeed populating from god knows where: "Missing NY teen found safe
Marriage doesn't make people happier, it just stabilizes the happiness they already have. The research shows that the married people surveyed weren't any happier than..."
90% of the 2nd/3rd tier arm market is like that, they certainly have their problems but they're almost all legitimate companies that deliver a product.
Agreed. I've worked with some of them (with the mini2440), and a lot of their websites are just ugly, and out of date. They are mostly used as a place to post their phone numbers, and not as a business front. Keep that in mind.
Also all of the generic comments on the buy page(http://cubieboard.org/buy/). Most of which are asking "Please keep me updated when its available for shipping." and getting the response "ok, we will inform you when ready to ship." Seems likely the Q and A were posted by the same person to give the illusion of popularity.
Nasty gotcha: It's using the Allwinner A10 SoC, which is primarily aimed at running Android tablets. The documentation for the chipset is extremely limited, so trying to use it for applications outside the norm may be quite difficult.
Actually the Allwinner A10 is pretty well documented by the vendor and by the community, has a bunch of standard linux distributions running already. Much better than most ARM SoCs in the cheap Android tablet market.
AFAIK the one exception is the video decoding hardware, where the Linux libraries are apparently sub-par.
There's so much great, cheap hardware based on the Allwinner A10 out there right now!
I just ordered a Mk802 II for $65. It has a 1GHz Cortex-A8 single core processor, Mali 400 graphics, 1GB of RAM, 4GB of storage, a microSDHC card slot, 802.11b/g/n WiFi, 1 full-sized USB port (usable for power), 2 micro USB ports, and a full-sized HDMI connector so you cna just plug it in to your TV.
It ships with Android 4.0 on the internal storage (with access to the Google Play Store) or you can run the linx dustro of your choise from a microsd card.
I have one, too. Yesterday I tried Ubuntu with LXDE, it's a little bit slower then expected and video decoding is not fast enough. I guess I'll use android and maybe try CM10. I use a powered USB hub to plug external drives (the power may not be enough for some USB drives)
Make sure you are using hardware decoding which is more than fast enough. I doubt these systems have enough cpu capacity to decode HD streams w/o assistance.
Speaking as the instructor for a class that is using raspberry pis: at this point the most important thing about the raspberry pi is the community and mindshare. It's going to be hard for a new board, however awesome, to replicate this.
Ditto. The community, 40,000+ posts, the idea, the talks that's what matters sometimes. There might be 10x more powerful devices in a year or less for the same price, yet they have to gain the same momentum as Pi. And nothing stops the Pi folks from concentrating on these. My understanding is that they (Pi) are not doing it for the money, they simply want kids to learn programming as many of us did back in our Apple ][ prompt, or BBC Micro, ZX Spectrum, etc.
I thank you, in the same way I thank Ubuntu for existing:
Someone needs to draw away the popular attention from those with the will to get stuff done.
If I can re-furl my barbs & continue, if the Cubieboard were taking orders right now it would be a shit show of people coming in from Engadget and HN and all over buying these things up then being extremely aggravated they A) don't just work B) require some fairly serious willingness to chase out the good information on uboot, the sunxi platform, & to get your OS installed: there's not much in the way of authoritative, well compiled references for doing so.
I was pretty shocked seeing this board on Engadget today. There've been a steady stream of similar-ish boards, such as the $60 Hackberry, also A10 based, which too is still in "prerelease" form.
It looks like the GPU on the RasPi is still more powerful, so the cheaper board might still be better for things like a media center application. I'm very curious though about what appears to be a SATA port on the Cubieboard.
Also, the RasPi has a huge initial advantage in that it was in the space first. They have a leg-up in publicity, marketing, and simply an initial user-base. If the Cubieboard benchmarks don't absolutely trounce the Raspberry Pi for almost every type of computation, I don't see the Cubieboard overtaking the Pi anytime soon.
> It looks like the GPU on the RasPi is still more powerful, so the cheaper board might still be better for things like a media center application.
Has either of them actually good (foss) drivers? At least Mali400 has "limadriver" project going on, quick googling didn't find anything for raspi.
Overall I'd love that Allwinner A10 got more attention, it seems fairly popular chip in cheapo chinese tablets. Getting GNU/Linux instead of Android for those would be neat.
I have to ask, what is the preoccupation with FOSS GPU drivers? Not just with boards like this, but even standard desktop hardware. Does anyone seriously think a firm like NVidia is going to illicitly slip spyware or something into their binaries?
I can compare fglrx (used it for 2 years) and radeon (used for 2 months). And besides worse performance in 3D and smaller power consumption, fglrx is much worse and causes some problems with my laptop.
Not to mention that when I used fglrx I was afraid to upgrade the kernel because it forces me to recompile fglrx module (with all the strange DKMS thingy which is very strange to me - I just want to "make install")
Open drivers are good for debugging and avoiding crashes, and for flexibility, re: Linux kernel versions and API changes over the lifetime of the device.
Actually you are right. The problem (from user point of view) is not licensing. The real issue is the drivers being out of tree, making them much more fragile. I'd like to be able to update kernel and/or xorg without having to worry if binary blobs explode on my face.
In this space, I wouldn't be too worried about publicity/marketing just yet. Also, if the cubbie has less demand/quicker manufacture lead time, it will sell VERY well. Especially because of the huge backorder on the pi. At that price point, if I can order and get the cubbie now, or get a pi in 6 months, I'd get both. Also, in the hacker/hobbiest world, having one (or more) of each isn't infeasible.
cnx say it is expected to be open hardware.[1] if true this would make it a pretty big deal. sata also.
also this is no 'scam' project..
>the cubieboard (intended as BeagleBone competitor) and that aliexpress shop are both from Tom Cubie (aka hipboi). Also the author of the initial u-boot/mmc for sunxi and the software engineer at Allwinner Tech who GPLed the code released by QWare.[1]
assuming this is accurate, this puts him in a pretty good position to support it.
Fwiw, I have Linux running on my a10 tablet and it runs pretty well.. obviously a light weight desktop.. ff runs well on most sites, although there is slow down on complex sites eg. engadget
there is some linux support for the gpu, but not the video acceleration (hopefully, 'yet').
Are any of these ARM solutions open source for the full stack?
Arduino is nice because I can use it to prototype something, and then if I want to mass produce it I can take the open schematics, rip out what I don't need and produce custom boards. Is that possible with any of these ARM solutions?
They've got one version running an admittedly slow i.MX processor, and another coming down the pike running an Allwinner chip. As a bonus, though, it's all reasonably easy-to-assemble TQFP chips.
Fair point. You can find BGA memories with ball spacing just slightly north of impossible, though. As far as I'm aware, that isn't possible with most (any?) A10/A13 chips.
There are no ARM with complete open source because they all have the GPU integrated. The Mali is probably the closest to open due to the LIMA project with the Freedreno project backing Qualcomm's Adreno (and maybe work with the Freescale mx5x) getting access to the sources isn't particularly hard (but does require an NDA) but you still won't get the most important part, which is the source to the shader compiler library in there
I'm really keen to try out the Carambola, a $22-EUR device with built-in wifi. It's really barebones in terms of peripherals, but that's perfect for many internet-of-things apps.
Chromium maybe. I'm not sure there are any Chromebooks based on ARM yet although there seems to be a profile for building tegra2 devices. I know the Trimslice is supposed to be able to run it but I haven't actually seen a software release of Google Chrome for it. Hexxeh does seem to be working on it for the Pi but I haven't used the Pi so I can't say (I personally need a little more power than armv6 has)
More than likely 2A is just to have some headroom for everything. They likely allocate an amp for the two USB. I can't seem to get access to the site now but I imagine there are a couple 5v and 3.3v pins in the GPIO header that are allocated a few tens of milliamps.
That said, you're right that the board itself shouldn't pull anywhere near 2A.
This looks really cool. Will have to get one to talk to my r-pi as I think it is a bit lonely.
I love the fact that more people are building these kind of devices at this price point. I have been looking at pc104 boards for years but they were always far too expensive for anything with some decent kick.
Give it a few more iterations and a few more people trying to build similar devices and then there is a proper marketplace for essentially a new consumer device class, in much the same way as the OLPC project was the catalyst for the emergence of dirt cheap netbooks. There will be tonnes of people working on this after witnessing the demand for the r-pis.
And anyone who thinks that the r-pi lot will do anything other than welcome things like this is off their head. They are a non-profit with the stated aim of getting as many of these kind of small cheap devices out there as possible.
Remember, you don't compete against an organisation like that in the normal sense of the word, as if you put them out of business by doing it bigger and better and cheaper, then all you have done is helped them to achieve their objective without them having to do as much work.
Personally I suspect that it is exactly the kind of development the r-pi lot were hoping for.
I wish manufacturerers would make thse boards with VGA output. There's no sense in buying a 35 of 50 dollar computer if you need a $150 monitor to use it.
- The website. Jesus. With all the templates and content management you can pluck out of thin air, the result is very shoddy. Apparently that isn't a warning sign enough for some people.
- No corporate history. The company has another site but their blog there is empty. No news. Dodgy RSS listings. The whole thing is even shoddier than the product site.
- The payment is through Paypal. Address was visible yesterday (now encrypted) as mr.hipboy@gmail.com. lolwut? What a handle. Very professional. Real name appears to be Luffy Wang of Hesseney Road, Hubei 150, HK. (hipboi@qq.com) This guy really likes hips.
- The product is $49. Less than the price (delivered) of two Raspis with a SATA controller and port. This was what made my eyes light up. The phrase "too good to be true" exists for a reason.
- And while I'm talking about specs, why do the pictures and words disagree so much? How many card readers are there? Are they SD or MMC?
- Oh and it's available almost without delay. Despite that there are no reviews, no tester units in the wild. No videos of on working. Not even the hint of a fart from a prototype.
+ There is a GitHub page: https://github.com/cubie-tech This is probably a detail I wouldn't have bothered with if I were running this scam.
Yesterday my acquaintances on G+ and I decided that this is most likely a scam. I really hope it's not and I'll be the first in line for the second batch, but please be careful.