A little review and impressions of Pocket CHIP
Hello everyone, I want to share with you a review of the interesting device Pocket CHIP This is a "9 dollar computer" + qwerty keyboard and screen (The pre-order kit cost $ 49 now $ 69).
A review of the Chip itself can be found here . Having played with him since 2 weeks, I stayed in a very strange feeling: if it is short, the device is still raw and sometimes requires digging into the documentation and the forum, but by itself it is a very interesting portable linux computer. If interested, please under the cat.
Briefly about TTX: 1Ghz ARMv7 processor, 512 megabytes of memory, integrated video core mali 400, WiFi, Bt.
')
But what surprised me the most was the size, in the photographs from the authors, it felt ... a little smaller. As you can see in the photo compared to a 5 inch smartphone, the Chip is quite a weighty device resembling a thick Blackberry.
On the reverse side is the mount for the single-board device and in general the device does not abound with connectors.
In addition to what we have in Chip, we have a small area for prototyping and a GPIO line.
Under the plastic case, which is easily removed, we have a lot of space, for example, you can install the speaker or replace the battery with a larger one.
Thus, we can easily increase the functionality of the device with a soldering iron, glue gun and some kind of mother.
The keyboard is original, on the one hand it is better than the touchscreen, on the other hand, it seems to be a good idea to print normal keys on a 3D printer that are easier to find tactilely (plus, there are already models, take and type).
Since we started talking about the screen, then as mentioned above, there is a screen with a touchscreen, but there are several “BUT”:
- Low screen resolution of 480 by 272 pixels
- Poor viewing angles
- Resistive touch (needs to be calibrated)
On the other hand, in the current state, a small resolution is not so bad, although the video core does exist, but it does not work, therefore less pixels have more fps.
Also under the keyboard are 2 holes, allowing easy movement to put the chip in a vertical position.
In general, we have a good iron, but it can be better, on the other hand, the device cost $ 49 on pre-order.
Inside we have linux 4.3 (at the time of writing) with Debian and its graphical shell.
So, I will immediately say that there are 2 important hotkeys, ctrl + tab toggle the active window, ctrl + q to close it.
It is important, it is better to set the locale right away and not to worry in the future.
True, it has several unpleasant drawbacks, namely, changing applications on the desktop is not so easy, changing the velpaper, etc. It is treated very simply, there is already a community fork called the Marshmallow edition, we set it up by downloading and running the script, details are here .
From the fact that we are met by the Terminal - the usual linux terminal, I would advise replacing it with urxvt.
Pico-8 - pseudo reto console, more here .
SUNVOX is a synthesizer, but I don’t understand anything in music, but it looks solid.
Get-help - device documentation
Write is the simplest text editor.
And viewing files:
It all started with the fact that I put Doom, because how can you live without a thought?
We put a prboom and a wad (because we are good and respect the copyright). On the whole, it is going well, but management forces us to recall the tractor driver’s regime in the Duma. In the installation of any difficulties, just do:
But I wanted to go through a few GBA games more, so we take RetroArch (assembled for this processor with SDL1.2 works very well.
The device showed itself interesting from an unexpected side, namely, as a platform for playing Bagels, a screen of sufficient size, plus a qwerty keyboard, make it possible to play this kind of game well.
You can read more here .
I really liked Cataclysm-DDA 0.C.
In general, I really liked the device, the community is still not very big, but I think the matter is more that the device has just started to be distributed normally. For fans of Linux, digging into pieces of iron and just geeks is a good toy, but I think the next revision will be more interesting. As an emulator for retro games, he, in my opinion, is still inferior to the same PSP (better than PSP-Go is unlikely to appear in this regard), let's see what can be squeezed out of this piece of hardware. Although if you are friends with a soldering iron and a 3D printer, it may be more interesting to buy Pi Zero and make the case yourself.
A review of the Chip itself can be found here . Having played with him since 2 weeks, I stayed in a very strange feeling: if it is short, the device is still raw and sometimes requires digging into the documentation and the forum, but by itself it is a very interesting portable linux computer. If interested, please under the cat.
Iron
Briefly about TTX: 1Ghz ARMv7 processor, 512 megabytes of memory, integrated video core mali 400, WiFi, Bt.
')
But what surprised me the most was the size, in the photographs from the authors, it felt ... a little smaller. As you can see in the photo compared to a 5 inch smartphone, the Chip is quite a weighty device resembling a thick Blackberry.
On the reverse side is the mount for the single-board device and in general the device does not abound with connectors.
In addition to what we have in Chip, we have a small area for prototyping and a GPIO line.
Under the plastic case, which is easily removed, we have a lot of space, for example, you can install the speaker or replace the battery with a larger one.
Thus, we can easily increase the functionality of the device with a soldering iron, glue gun and some kind of mother.
The keyboard is original, on the one hand it is better than the touchscreen, on the other hand, it seems to be a good idea to print normal keys on a 3D printer that are easier to find tactilely (plus, there are already models, take and type).
Since we started talking about the screen, then as mentioned above, there is a screen with a touchscreen, but there are several “BUT”:
- Low screen resolution of 480 by 272 pixels
- Poor viewing angles
- Resistive touch (needs to be calibrated)
On the other hand, in the current state, a small resolution is not so bad, although the video core does exist, but it does not work, therefore less pixels have more fps.
Also under the keyboard are 2 holes, allowing easy movement to put the chip in a vertical position.
In general, we have a good iron, but it can be better, on the other hand, the device cost $ 49 on pre-order.
Soft
Inside we have linux 4.3 (at the time of writing) with Debian and its graphical shell.
So, I will immediately say that there are 2 important hotkeys, ctrl + tab toggle the active window, ctrl + q to close it.
It is important, it is better to set the locale right away and not to worry in the future.
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install locales && sudo dpkg-reconfigure locales && sudo locale-gen True, it has several unpleasant drawbacks, namely, changing applications on the desktop is not so easy, changing the velpaper, etc. It is treated very simply, there is already a community fork called the Marshmallow edition, we set it up by downloading and running the script, details are here .
From the fact that we are met by the Terminal - the usual linux terminal, I would advise replacing it with urxvt.
Pico-8 - pseudo reto console, more here .
SUNVOX is a synthesizer, but I don’t understand anything in music, but it looks solid.
Get-help - device documentation
Write is the simplest text editor.
And viewing files:
Games and emulators
It all started with the fact that I put Doom, because how can you live without a thought?
We put a prboom and a wad (because we are good and respect the copyright). On the whole, it is going well, but management forces us to recall the tractor driver’s regime in the Duma. In the installation of any difficulties, just do:
sudo apt install prboom doom-wad-shareware But I wanted to go through a few GBA games more, so we take RetroArch (assembled for this processor with SDL1.2 works very well.
wget http://tinyurl.com/jv5dyzk -O RetroArch-PCHIP.tar.gz #Unzip: tar -xzvf RetroArch-PCHIP.tar.gz #Go to RetroArch folder: cd RetroArch ./install.sh # ./install.sh sdl2) Launching RetroArch: ./retroarch.sh The device showed itself interesting from an unexpected side, namely, as a platform for playing Bagels, a screen of sufficient size, plus a qwerty keyboard, make it possible to play this kind of game well.
You can read more here .
I really liked Cataclysm-DDA 0.C.
And in the end?
In general, I really liked the device, the community is still not very big, but I think the matter is more that the device has just started to be distributed normally. For fans of Linux, digging into pieces of iron and just geeks is a good toy, but I think the next revision will be more interesting. As an emulator for retro games, he, in my opinion, is still inferior to the same PSP (better than PSP-Go is unlikely to appear in this regard), let's see what can be squeezed out of this piece of hardware. Although if you are friends with a soldering iron and a 3D printer, it may be more interesting to buy Pi Zero and make the case yourself.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/372793/
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