{"id":748,"date":"2014-11-30T09:50:34","date_gmt":"2014-11-30T09:50:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kernelcrash.com\/blog\/?p=748"},"modified":"2015-03-25T04:45:13","modified_gmt":"2015-03-25T04:45:13","slug":"pcduino3-nano","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kernelcrash.com\/blog\/pcduino3-nano\/2014\/11\/30\/","title":{"rendered":"pcduino3 nano"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>So I recently bought a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.linksprite.com\/?page_id=815\">pcduino3 nano<\/a> . I have completely avoided the Arduino and Raspberry Pi crazes. Especially for the Raspberry I never quite saw the point of a computer that used an SD card as a hard drive and had no sata connector. However I did like the idea of a very tiny quiet and low power computer that ran linux. So the pcduinos have been around for a while. Sure they have &#8216;duino&#8217; in the name and have some GPIO pins laid out a certain way, but they are basically tiny Allwinner ARM based linux systems with various processors and features such as HDMI out, 1GB or so of ram, a microSD slot, internal NAND, a SATA connector and in the case of the nano a gigabit LAN interface.<\/p>\n<p>So SATA and Gigabit LAN and the nano was &#8216;only $40 delivered&#8217;. I guess I thought &#8216;how bad could it be for $40&#8217;.<\/p>\n<p><!--more-->So I&#8217;ve been playing with it for a few weeks now. I haven&#8217;t figured out anything specific to use it for so far but;<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Speedwise in the lubuntu UI its on the sluggish side, but its not bad really. The default Xorg setup does not include the fbturbo acceleration &#8230; which is kind of annoying to set up. Not sure why they don&#8217;t include this in the Lubuntu image<\/li>\n<li>The default desktop includes chromium and some other standard stuff, but I quite like that the Arduino IDE is included and you can get up and running very quickly doing examples hitting the GPIO pins. So hardware interfacing-wise you can have it hooked up to something on a breadboard very quickly (though it is a 3.3V system).<\/li>\n<li>Updating the kernel is a bit odd. I assumed you just needed to dd the kernel in, but the linksprite site will often post the kernel in one or two forms. If they don&#8217;t post the dd version of the kernel, you have run some strange looking Windows only Allwinner programmer for writing to Allwinner chips (Phoenixcard).<\/li>\n<li>Gigabit ethernet didn&#8217;t really work properly when the nano first came out. It was like gigabit that really really wanted to run at 100MBps &#8230;. but a kernel update seems to have corrected the gigabit. Its still no Intel Pro1000 gigabit. I was just doing some reads off a NFS mount as a vague benchmark &#8230; and was getting around 250MBps. Running ttcp on my home network reckons there is 600Mbps available on my home network between the nano and a modern linux \u00a0intel box. I am not sure I believe that.<\/li>\n<li>There are some weird bugs. A really strange one is that the arduino IDE can completely lock and kill the machine. There is a forum thread ;<a href=\"http:\/\/pcduino.com\/forum\/index.php?topic=4509.0\">Arduino IDE crashing pcduino<\/a>3. \u00a0According to the thread the bug is fixed. I find it is fixed so long as I never ever run the IDE from a terminal prompt. If I run it from a terminal prompt it pretty much consistenly locks up the nano. However, a really strange behaviour is that if I redirect text output to dev null it does not lock up . e.g.: \u00a0arduino &gt;\/dev\/null 2&gt;&amp;1 . UPDATE: 26.12.2014. I did a apt-get update\/upgrade &#8230; and now Arduino IDE just locks up all the time now<\/li>\n<li>I&#8217;ve now got the right SATA\/Power cable hooked up to it and have the root fs on a mechanical hard drive. Its hard to know if speed wise it is any different, but at least I don&#8217;t feel like I am destroying the micro SD card<\/li>\n<li>I knew ahead of time that the Allwinner chips were probably not a good choice if I wanted to run XBMC, so I haven&#8217;t played around with much. I didn&#8217;t get this to run XBMC.<\/li>\n<li>A lot of the howto information on the linksprite site is in the form of video instructions. Personally I find this highly annoying, especially if you have to refer back to something later.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>So, for $40 I probably can&#8217;t complain too much. However, the bug where the Arduino IDE kills the machine is a bit scary &#8230; so far as reliability goes. Having now ventured into these tiny ARM computers &#8230; it has made me more curious about the Raspberry Pi and all the similar tiny systems.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>So I recently bought a pcduino3 nano . I have completely avoided the Arduino and Raspberry Pi crazes. Especially for the Raspberry I never quite saw the point of a computer that used an SD card as a hard drive and had no sata connector. However I did like the idea of a very tiny [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-748","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-linux"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kernelcrash.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/748","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kernelcrash.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kernelcrash.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kernelcrash.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kernelcrash.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=748"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.kernelcrash.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/748\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":812,"href":"https:\/\/www.kernelcrash.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/748\/revisions\/812"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kernelcrash.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=748"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kernelcrash.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=748"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kernelcrash.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=748"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}