My first impressions - pcDuino

Thought I'd share my first impressions of the **broken link removed**. (And for those in Australia & New Zealand, I got my **broken link removed** from **broken link removed** at the AU$ equivalent to what you buy in US$, but with local shipping costs).

A Raspberry Pi on steroids running PC like OS that can use Arduino shields

Taking it out of the box and plugging in, it starts up with Ubuntu straight out of the box. No need to first get an OS image loaded. It certainly felt much quicker than the Raspberry PI which is not surprising when looking at the specs. The processor runs at 1GHz. The ARM Cortex A8 has both the Mali-400 GPU and the ARM NEON instruction unit. The NEON does audio/video codec decoding on hardware. Give the board 1GB of RAM instead of 512k and you have something quite generous from a horsepower perspective especially for the hobby electronics space.

Looking around Ubuntu (or Lubuntu, a cut down Ubuntu for embedded systems), I noticed an Arduino folder with a number of examples. This board has Arduino headers on it. Do note they are not in the right position to be able to plug a shield directly into it and the board is 3.3V so some voltage level translation is required with 5V boards. So I know what I'm doing this weekend. Trying out Arduino sketches on it.

Had a go at putting Android on the device to see how that worked. Downloaded the image from pcduino.com downloads page, put it onto a SD card, started the pcDuino and waited for the OS to install onto the board. Then pull the SD card and restart. I had Android running, so off to Googles app store and install some stuff. YouTube ran excellent in high def.

It doesn't have SATA or IDE style ports for HDD though, but not sure if that matters now days with high speed SD cards and having the OS run on the board instead of from an SD card. Would be good for mass storage though.

**broken link removed** product page has a number of links to useful information so was very quick to find what I needed.

In summary, I'm quite impressed. I think this is going to be a good base for a number of projects.

Hi smitthhyy,



I just received my PCduino board from supplier, and I am very excited to start, but despite your fine explanations and this fun video (), it still not clear to me if it is required to plug an SD card on slot to work, and if need to be formated at FAT16 or FAT32.

Could you give this information ?







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Hi Andre,
Apologies for the delay in getting back.
No you do not need an SD card like you do with the Raspberry PI to get started. The OS is installed to NAND (https://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/NAND-flash-memory). You can however also run an OS from SD card if you like, but it is not needed. Just connect up a monitor, keyboard, mouse and network cable and turn it on. It will start with Ubuntu which is pre-installed for you.

Andre,

So what do you think about the AllWinner Tech A10 ARM?

It seems to have some very nice features for the price point. I actually considered purchasing a few development boards from **broken link removed**.

However, it seems a detailed datasheets or user manuals for the AllWinner Tech line of ARMs is essentially unobtainium.

The closest document to a datasheet I could find was the attached sparse PDF.

After experimenting around with a couple of Raspberry PIs and essential running up against a similar documentation wall over the Broadcom BCM2835, I opted for purchasing a couple of BeagleBone Blacks.

At least TI provides complete documentation for their Sitara AM3359 and TI's technical support has been excellent.

Anyway, if you come across any more extensive documentation for AllWinner Tech ARMs, please let me know.

BigDog

Hi Big,


I assume that didn´t performed a more detailed research about the core.
Concerning documentations, once it is intended to run programs over operational systems ( QT/Linux ), it is not yet demanded, at least for while.

The feature that attracted me to purchase this PC-like breadboard is the hardware support to OpenGL, and. HDMI output.
Regarding to take more informations, I subscribed to PCDUINO forum, and could take some sparse helps.


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Yes, with only 83 pages, I have PIC datasheets which are more extensive.

I did come across the following archive of AllWinner Tech documentation:

**broken link removed**

Which includes some additional datasheets related to the A10.

Also checkout the**broken link removed**.

Let me know of your progress.


BigDog