C.H.I.P.................................
Les Pounder loves Pi, and loves hacking something to life using the single board computer but could he be adding C.H.I.P.s to his plate?
Sold as the first $9 computer can the C.H.I.P. push the Raspberry Pi Zero off our IoT top spot? It’s a 1GHz device with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth built in, storage and more.
Crowdfunding has brought many single board computers to life and the latest of these is C.H.I.P., a $9 computer from Next Thing Co. Measuring 6.1cm by 4cm by 1cm tall, C.H.I.P. is slightly larger than a Raspberry Pi Zero, a device that shares the same 512MB of RAM and a 1GHz CPU speed, but in the case of CHIP it’s provided by an All winner R8 ARM Cortex A8 CPU.
But what C.H.I.P. provides is extra integrated Wi-Fi (B/G/N), Bluetooth 4.0 and 4GB of flash storage for the OS. The board also comes with one USB 2.0 port, a micro USB for power and a combined audio/video composite jack. But lacks digital video output.
There’s an 80-pin GPIO, with some pins that can be user-controlled and others that are bespoke connections, such as connections for Pocket C.H.I.P.’s LCD screen. Also present on the board is a JST connector that’s commonly used with Lithium Polymer batteries. It gives an instant portable long-term power supply for embedded projects thanks to an onboard AXP209 power management chip.
Installing the operating system is handled via a Chrome browser plugin and requires an extra configuration step for Linux users. Once the plugin is ready, installation is simple and takes around 10 minutes. When ready, you need to attach your peripherals and power up to the desktop. C.H.I.P. doesn’t come with any HDMI or VGA interfaces and requires the user to purchase an add-on board, known as ‘dips. We used the HDMI dip to connect our C.H.I.P. to a screen.
Booting into the OS takes 1m 12s and once fully loaded we see an interface similar to Mate’s desktop. Applications are in a menu to the top left and configuration and notification icons are in the top-right. The interface has a noticeable lag but is still usable. We installed the htop dashboard and saw that around 70% of the RAM was being used and the CPU was maxed out. This generated a lot of heat, which was enough to make the CPU a little uncomfortable to touch.
Deep fried chips
Installing software is possible using the Debian APT packaging tool and the package manager GUI. On first boot, we updated the software to ensure we were up to date which updated our kernel to 4.4.11 released on May 28 2016. We installed the Arduino IDE and flashed the blink sketch, the Hello World of hardware, to an Arduino Uno. Compilation was noticeably slower than our Core i5 laptop, but that’s to be expected given the C.H.I.P.s hardware. To test the GPIO, we installed the Python library, which is very similar to that used on the Pi. Within a few minutes we had the obligatory flashing LED test completed. As part of our test we installed OpenArena, in order to test the prowess of the Mali 400 GPU. Sadly, this test was short-lived as loading the game menu took a long time and choosing menu options meant a delay of around 1-2 seconds, so it was clear the game would be unplayable. Looking on the official forums it appears as though there’s no driver for the GPU but hopefully this will be remedied. But is C.H.I.P. a games machine? Not really.
Its closest competition is the Raspberry Pi Zero and for just $4 extra it offers Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and 4GB of storage. This means that C.H.I.P. can be used for embedded Internet of Things applications and for these applications it excels. C.H.I.P., then is a serious piece of kit for embedded projects and provides everything you need to get going.