The $9 CHIP Computer Is Shipping

http://makezine.com/2015/09/24/the-9-computer-is-shipping-today/

by dcschelt • 11 years ago

157 53 11 years ago

makezine.com

tmaly• 11 years ago

I ordered one with the video attachment months back. I am not sure when it is supposed to come.

sophacles• 11 years ago

According to the kickstarter - spring 2016

dcschelt• 11 years ago

My understanding after talking with Rauchwerk today is that the boards are shipping out on the timeline they've outlined on the kickstater page. The only divergence from that schedule is that Kernel Hacker Backers will get their first board in 5-9 days and their second -- which is a bonus board -- in mid-October.

alexeyza• 11 years ago

Yeah, I added one of the add-ons for a video adapter, so I think my order will be shipped much later. But, I'm excited to play with it, and see what other people can do with it.

tracker1• 11 years ago

It will by interesting to see what comes from this, I think it's really interesting how far things have come... once we see python and node running on this, there will be some significant proliferation of projects that can target it.

Hopefully direct sales orders are coming soon, I missed the boat on this... then again, I've given away a couple of Raspberry Pis over the years mainly because I never got around to doing anything with them.

robalfonso• 11 years ago

I'm glad to hear this, I have a pile of pi's and I haven't used them (plenty of ideas, no time). I was feeling really guilty..glad I'm not the only one.

ozzmotik2• 11 years ago

I'll gladly pay for shipping and handling and as much as I can to take one of those off your hands if you have no use for it. I desperately need one, but I honestly don't have the funds to actually purchase one.

ozzmotik2• 11 years ago

If you're at all interested, please email me.

i.am AT ozzmotik.com

nivla• 11 years ago

I think chip might end up somewhere between Arduino and Raspberry Pi. If it builds a good community around it, I might consider getting one.

IshKebab2• 11 years ago

Please correct the title. It is $39 after the kickstarter. Plus $15 for HDMI output if you want to compare it to the Raspberry Pi.

https://olimex.wordpress.com/2015/06/05/how-to-get-in-the-ne...

makomk2• 11 years ago

No, a company that makes competing single-board computers claimed that Chip will have to go up in price to $39 after the Kickstarter. The actual manufacturer never said it's going up in price, and I doubt it'll cost anywhere near that much because it wouldn't be competitive. The higher-end Orange Pi PC is currently selling for $15 with a quad-core processor, 1GB of RAM, 4K video decode in hardware, and Ethernet and HDMI out: http://hackaday.com/2015/09/05/orange-is-the-new-15-pi/ (No onboard WiFi or Bluetooth on that, but there's plenty of free USB ports to plug an adapter into.)

IshKebab2• 11 years ago

a company that makes competing single-board computers

Allwinner aren't CHIP's competitors - they're their suppliers! However CHIP have claimed that it will stay at $9:

http://bbs.nextthing.co/t/final-price-of-c-h-i-p-ntc-confirm...

akhilcacharya• 11 years ago

Not everybody is looking to replace an RPi. I like it because I want a networked headless computer.

justinlardinois3• 11 years ago

I had a professor who liked to say things like "RAM is free" when talking about how the cost of computers has come down over the course of his life. I always rolled my eyes and thought yeah, it's basically free when you're an accomplished academic who brings in untold amounts of grant money and makes even more from consulting than you do from your university salary. But to a broke college student, anything that costs more than a few hours of minimum wage =/= free.

I really like this concept of cheap, all-in-one computers. We've had Arduinos and Raspberry Pis, but stuff like this really opens a lot of doors. $40 is a great price for a computer, but I would never consider using it for a project where its destruction is a legitimate risk (anything exposed to the elements, or liquid, or drones, for example), but with a $9 computer I would.

shanemhansen• 11 years ago

I hope he wasn't a professor of computer science.

justinlardinois3• 11 years ago

He was; it was a course on operating systems. As darkmighty noted, what said made perfect sense from a math perspective.

darkmighty• 11 years ago

I think you grossly misunderstood him. He's just saying that it's many orders of magnitude cheaper (more available) than in his days, if you go back a few decades you had to do serious bit wrangling in almost every application to get things to fit in memory, while those days no one cares your app uses 1kb more or less of RAM; he's probably not talking about how much specific RAM cards cost on your PC, or how much those dev boards cost.

On a side note, if you compare how much you pay for your college, directly or indirectly (including housing, books, food), $40 for an educational kit that you spend many hours on is almost free.

justinlardinois3• 11 years ago

I understood him perfectly, and he had plenty of stories about limited resources back in the old days. One of my favorites was about the time he rewrote a routine his boss had implemented so it ran in O(log n) instead of O(n^2), only to be fired by his boss for one-upping him and then rehired by his boss's boss the next day. Overall his class was a great experience.

I just think that, especially when it comes to money, there's a disconnect between Fermi estimates and reality.

larrys2• 11 years ago

A multi user system that I bought in the mid 80's held a max of 4mb of memory and a max of 144mb hard drive. I think the memory was something like $4000 (in 80's dollars, that's close to $9000 today) for 2mb of memory. So that was just the cost of the memory. On that system by the way you could hook up 26 Wyse terminals. We had maybe 12 terminals hooked up with 2mb of memory and a 72mb hard drive. No graphics everything was pretty system. It ran accounting and job scheduling systems (some of which I actually wrote myself as a non-programmer). At the time I think dinner for two was about $35 for a nice place. Healthcare was $65 per month for the best possible plan. IIM I was a few years out of college at the time.

larrys2• 11 years ago

"But to a broke college student, anything that costs more than a few hours of minimum wage =/= free."

With all due respect to a college student today there are so many things you can do to make money that your professor couldn't do back in his day. It doesn't even come close. And back in his day (if it's the same as my day) if you hustled (which I did for example) you never ever earned minimum wage. I did (as I am sure many people did) many things on the side in order to make money. And that was back when I have to say it was a bit more difficult than it is now.

Florin_Andrei3• 11 years ago

We've had Arduinos and Raspberry Pis, but stuff like this really opens a lot of doors.

I think this is an inflexion point for IoT at amateur level. We have the CHIP for RPi-level devices, running full Linux, with WiFi and BT onboard.

We have particle.io and soon digistump.com for Arduino-level devices with WiFi and soon cellular onboard.

My prediction: the number of IoT projects I'll see next time at the Maker Faire will just explode.

I have a Photon (by particle.io), I've preordered a CHIP and an Oak (by digistump.com). Very excited to play with the new toys.

bsder• 11 years ago

Power is still a problem for IoT.

In addition, this thing will not ship for anything close to $9 in the near future.

The BLE and WiFi bill of materials is more than that-it's why the BeagleBone Black and RaspberryPi don't include them.

MegaDeKay• 11 years ago

ESP8266 is where the excitement is now. You can buy three ESP-12's on Aliexpress for the price of a CHIP and get free shipping to boot. No Linux, but you can program it now with the Arduino IDE. FCC approved 802.11 b/g/n built-in, SPI, UART, a few GPIOs, faster and more RAM / FLASH than Arduino, etc.

https://nurdspace.nl/ESP8266#Technical_Overview

mintplant• 11 years ago

Any word on the Pocket CHIP? That was the most interesting part of the Kickstarter to me.

mitchty• 11 years ago

Agreed, that is the thing I want. It would be like a proper sane calculator.

lifeisstillgood• 11 years ago

Somewhere in a Terry Pratchett book he opines that the best thing governments can do is build libraries and schools and leave the doors open. I think that we are at or very near the point where you could similarly write "just fly over countries, parachuting down single board computers and solar cells"

kijin• 11 years ago

Don't forget Wi-Fi dongles! Otherwise you're just parachuting down a bunch of libraries without books.

I'm not sure whether Elon Musk is trying to take over the world with his "free satellite internet for everyone" plan, but if that network ever comes online, it could be a game-changer for people in developing countries. Too bad it probably won't be compatible with regular Wi-Fi.

jack12• 11 years ago

This article is very confusing in the way it refers to "early backers", I think it's leaving people with the wrong impression of what is shipping. They are shipping "alpha" CHIP computers only to the 150 people who backed at the "KERNEL HACKERS" tier for $150+S/H [1]. They've also announced that they'll be shipping an unexpected second alpha unit to each of those 150 backers again next month, partly because the first batch won't have any boot images programmed.

This initial shipment of 150 was scheduled for September from the beginning of the kickstarter, but it's not until December that the "$9" tiers begin to ship, and not until May 2016 that the majority of their rewards are due. It's nice to see them more or less on schedule with the roadmap in the original kickstarter, but this isn't anything unexpected.

There are people who say the $9 price point is unrealistic, and that the company will have to start taking additional "preorders" at higher prices just to afford to manufacture the preorders they already have, or that it's relying on corporate partnerships and funding to sell at a loss until enough interest is built up that they can increase the price. This is a fairly small shipment, which probably won't change any minds on that subject.

[1] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1598272670/chip-the-wor...

jdietrich2• 11 years ago

$9 is substantially less than the BOM cost, even assuming huge quantity discounts. A small American startup does not have access to some secret source of ultra-cheap components. The price is marketing spin, nothing more.

kefka• 11 years ago

I don't buy that.

The OrangePi is crazy for what you get. And it's $15 with $3 shipping.

I don't see a reason to buy the CHiP, given I can get a OrangePi ordered right now and have them in 3 weeks.

dwild• 11 years ago

I remember when I tried to order it, the shipping itself was 20$, and there was no way to order more than one. I often order stuff way larger than that, that come to way less than 20$, all in, from China. I'm pretty sure that's part of their margin.

noodles23• 11 years ago

The price the manufacturer is looking to sell, this doesn't make sense. Sure it offers more hardware flexibility than a PI, but its ultimate form factor makes it at best a pi type substitute rather than opening up new possibilities like what the Arduino Nano does.

LandoCalrissian• 11 years ago

Wow, I had not heard about this before. For the price and spec that can't be beat. I would've expected the maker scene to blow up over this but I haven't heard anything. I have a ton of projects that could leverage this. How did they make this so cheap?

The $9 CHIP Computer Is Shipping

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