cubietruck as onboard computer?

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GHA

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http://www.cubietruck.com/products/...x-a7-dual-core-2gb-ram-8gb-flash-with-wifi-bt

Anyone played with one?

Tempting, though a bit too much dosh to shell out if it's not up to it.
From Google power looks to be from 2w to 9w depending what's running, opencpn should be usable. But would it be fast enough to get weatherfaxes with something like fldigi? I haven't had any success on a raspberry pi with that.

Built in Bluetooth and WiFi is nice.

Any thoughts?
 
According to various posts on http://www.cruisersforum.com/ (search) it runs OpenCPN fine.

But what do you put it in? I have a miniITX in a standard enclosure on board, but could you put a cubietruck in such a box? It's for a boat and needs proper protection from the environment. And what about a 12volt vehicle power supply? No doubt it's fine for fiddling about at home but for on-board use you'll need a lot of DIY adaptation.
 
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Hoolie said:
But what do you put it in? I have a miniITX in a standard enclosure on board, but could you put a cubietruck in such a box? It's for a boat and needs proper protection from the environment. And what about a 12volt vehicle power supply? No doubt it's fine for fiddling about at home but for on-board use you'll need a lot of DIY adaptation.
Click to expand...
where to put it is easy :)
I already have a mini atx home built machine fitted under the chart table in a steel enclosure. it's a steel boat and in 7 or 8 years have never had a problem with computers or electronics on board (apart from those pesky itx 12v power suppliesd!) . so just bang it in there, gps & AIS feed are already routed.
it's the mini itx which is not behaving, on the 3rd car power supply now, the cubietruck is easy, 5v, simple from ebay, buck only, no noisy buck/boosts needed. And the miniitx board draws enough power to become significant running 24/7.

downside is not having windows for winlink software to get email with the ham radio, but there's a laptop which can cope with that. And shame not to have my favorite jvcomm for wfax, but hey ho, a few hundred milliamp would make that OK :)
 
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Well there goes the day,and probably half the night :)

Cubietruck aarrived this morning, slightly more than rasperberyy pie, there's a very rudimentary case from sheets of perspex and a few leads.
Booted straight into android, pulling between 400 & 600mA at 5v, so whats that, about 2 or 3 hundred milliamps at 12.5v. Cool!!!!!!

Navionics working within minutes, and the routes created in the tablet and a virtual machine running android in there. tiny delay in the screen redraw when dragging the chart around but not really much o a distraction.
for about 90 quid and very little power. From the battery meter it looks about 0.3A for the cubie and 0.7a for a samsung 19" monitor.

Happy Happy!
GPS and linux next........
 
I'll be following any updates with interest. Particularly interested to know if you have a bash at turning it into an access point with hostapd. A few minutes of googling shows the onboard broadcom device supports master mode but the only report I've seen of use as an access point suggests problems with encryption. Keep us posted.
 
laika said:
Keep us posted.
Click to expand...
Slow!
Couldn't get it to boot from Sd card so lubuntu now flashed onto the on board chip. Then struggled getting the wifi working so resurrected a r36 alfa router to plug into, OpenCpn dependencies seemed to download and install OK, OpenCpn source now downloading. Might need a pint while it compiles:)
And buy some more coffee.
But looking OK so far, fast and lean, sitting about 350mA as it downloads.
 
OpenCpn all up and running. :cool:
A little bit sluggish but definitely usable, plus there is optimization work going on with the code to speed things up so all good on that front. Pulling about 0.6A but 150mA of that is powering a 2 port serial /USB for AIS and gps. So that will change, there are pins for at least one hard wired com port at least.
Fldigi works for weatherfaxes and should be fine for rtty. Plus fast enough for psk31 on the ham side of things.
All in all a good day and a great little box slightly bigger than a pack of cards :)

cubietruck_03.jpg
 
Oops
Had the ammeter on the wrong side of the voltage converter,
More like 0.35A with usb/serial and OpenCpn running, downloading a weatherfax at the moment at 0.3A, batts at 12.6v.

Just gets better :)
 
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