C.H.I.P Hardware Design online

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Mzee
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Joined: 07/10/2013

The C.H.I.P hardware design is now available under a Creative Commons license: https://github.com/NextThingCo/CHIP-Hardware

As far as I understand it, this would be the first completely open hardware SoC once Linux kernel support is implemented. If this is correct, it's just awesome!

BugRep
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Joined: 04/05/2012

It won't be the first (eg. there is https://www.olimex.com/Products/OLinuXino/A10/A10-OLinuXino-LIME/).
But a more important point, it will probably not be freedom respecting hardware either. As far as I know there is no freedom respecting Realtek wifi that has 802.11n support.

Mzee
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Joined: 07/10/2013

That's for sure but Allwinner seems to have quite a bad reputation when it comes to actually releasing code.

lembas
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Joined: 05/13/2010

> a Creative Commons license
Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported

It's always best to be specific as the cc licenses are quite different. https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#which-cc

Mzee
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Joined: 07/10/2013

Sure, the exact license is shown here: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/us/

Michał Masłowski

I am a member!

I am a translator!

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Joined: 05/15/2010

It's not a SoC, just a board, like many other boards with some free
design files.

After reading
https://olimex.wordpress.com/2015/06/05/how-to-get-in-the-news-tell-people-that-you-will-make-and-sell-something-which-cost-you-20-for-9/,
I assume it won't be sufficiently available to be useful to recommend to
others.

Mzee
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Joined: 07/10/2013

Are you sure it's not a Soc? On http://nextthing.co/ they claim: " C.H.I.P. does computer things. Work in LibreOffice and save your documents to C.H.I.P.’s onboard storage. Surf the web and check your email over wifi. Play games with a bluetooth controller. With dozens of applications and tools preinstalled, C.H.I.P. is ready to do computer things the moment you power it on!"

Mzee
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Joined: 07/10/2013

Oh, I almost forgot to mention this blog post from Free Electrons: http://free-electrons.com/blog/free-electrons-chip-nextthing/

"Free Electrons is also very excited to be working with NextThing Co on this project! Thanks to this, over the next months, we will have a very substantial amount of time dedicated to this project, and we will regularly push code to support the missing hardware Allwinner SoC hardware blocks in the mainline Linux kernel and to support the C.H.I.P. board."

They also describe some more details about the board:
"
* Availability planned for 2016 for the general public. A selection of 1000 kernel hackers who backed on Kickstarter will have the platform earlier.
* Very small platform: 40mm x 60mm, making is even smaller than a Raspberry Pi or BeagleBone.
* Allwinner R8 processor, clocked at 1 Ghz, and offering OpenGL/OpenVG acceleration through an ARM Mali GPU
* 512 MB of RAM
* 4GB of on-board NAND flash storage
* WiFi and Bluetooth 4.0 to connect the system to the outside world
* One USB host port
* Powered through a micro USB connector which also supports USB OTG (either USB host or device).
* Jack connector for composite video out, headphones and microphone input.
* Many headers to connect external devices (SPI, I2C, UART + 8 GPIOs)
* Integrated circuit for charging a LiPo battery and being powered by it
* Additional HDMI or VGA add-on boards will be needed to connect to displays with the corresponding connectivity.
"