On 22.07.17 06:07, Gene Heskett wrote:
> I did get an up board. SOB has a uefi bios, and would not boot anything I
> tried. So I went trolling thru the bios looking for a way to turn that
> crap off. The only thing I could find was to disable the tcp chip.
> Bricked it. According to their web site, a $400 jtag programmer and an
> 80 dollar adapter are needed to rewrite the bios in that event.
> Questions beyond that on the forum have been ignored. IOW, that board,
> while seemingly have great specs, has a windows only attitude. UP is
> otherwise totally unresponsive to users problem.
>
> As far as I'm concerned, I got screwed out of a 100 dollar bill and a
> week.
"UP" stands for Unix Prohibited?
> The last price I saw for a Udoo was in the neighborhood of 150 dollars. I
> can get a std mobo, with cpu and enough memory for that. So 4 questions
> now that its shipping:
>
> 1. Udoo X86 Ultra, $267.00 on the Udoo site today. Thats not even close
> to realistic. The dual/quad is $135 but I can't find any other data on
> it quickly. Ah, its an arm, claims to be an rpi3 performance wise.
Yeah, add the optional M.2 on-board SSD, and you're up to around A$400
just for the Advanced, but then ours is only worth 3/4 of one of yours.
And mount that on the back of a monitor, add a wireless keyboard &
mouse, and you're good to go. I don't think there's any need for an
Ultra unless you're into games.
I can't see any sense in buying cheap if all it gets you is another RPi
pig-in-mud. How usable is Machinekit? A Beaglebone is pretty
competitive, isn't it?
> 2. can any UEFI bios BS be turned off w/o bricking it?
I briefly saw some UEFI nonsense while installing debian, told it to
shut up and write the MBR, and I haven't had any problem. I think it
does mean that I can't dual boot MSW, but I've never let that crap into
the house on my boots, anyway.
> 3. Does it have a working spi driver so I don't have to throw away $250
> in interfacing hardware and start writing my configs all over again? The
> spi must be clocked at at least 25 mhz. Alternatively, can it emulate
> an EPP port at equ of 5 megabytes a second both ways?
Interface specs are a bit thin. I don't even know if some of the digital
I/O is on the Braswell (64 bit 4-core X86 host chip) or all on the 32 bit
sidekick. It says: OTHER INTERFACES: Up to 20 external GPIOs
LPC - 2 x I2C - GPIOs - Touch Screen
Management signals on expansion connector
I'm not too clear on the difference between SPI and I²C, so can't
advise.
> 4. How big is it?
It's 4.72 inch x 3.35 inch (12 cm x 8.5 cm). That's as wide as my palm,
and 1.5 times its length - with 256 GB M.2 on-board SSD hard drive included.
> Their site is slow, and has this annoying pop-over asking where you are
> nearly everytime you switch pages. All the specs are buried in a pdf
> download which is near impossible to read as they chose a very light
> color on a white background for the text. That tells me they have
> something to hide. I did find the size, about an inch bigger than the
> pi, both ways.
I view the pdf with xpdf, and have set it for a grey background. That's
not perfect with the light colours, but a damned sight better than
white. The inverse video produced when selecting a text block with a
mouse drag is perfectly readable. There's not an excess of "All the
specs", just some basic numbers.
I've never seen any pop-over asking where you are, on that site.
> All of this is why I'll be watching the rock64 board at $44 fully
> stuffed, Claims it doesn't have the pi's i/o bottleneck. And that would
> be huge.
Best of luck. I'll be waiting for your review. It could be a good little
unit, if it pans out.
Erik
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