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BSD Operating Systems Hardware

New $149 NetBSD Single Board Computer Port 113

Posted by CowboyNeal from the of-course-it-runs-netbsd dept.
An Anonymous NetBSD User writes "NetBSD now supports a new ARM board, the Technologic Systems TS-7200. The TS-7200 is a low cost ($149!) mass produced embedded single board computer that runs on less than 2 watts of power."
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New $149 NetBSD Single Board Computer Port More

New $149 NetBSD Single Board Computer Port

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  • Fun! (Score:2)

    by BrynM ( 217883 ) *
    Makes me want to build a new firewall/ssh server. Now what interesting thing to mount it in...

    • Re:Fun! (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Won't be so fun to have a firewall with a single NIC.

      Might as well get a Soekris net4801 (www.soekris.com). You get two more ethernet ports (three total), a faster processor (266Mhz x86 compat vs. 200Mhz MIPS), more RAM (128MB vs. 32MB), and a compact PCI and a real PCI slot (3.3v cards only).

      It costs $50 more, and you get tons more features, most of which are mandatory for a firewall.

  • Direct Link to the Board (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 11, 2005 @04:01AM (#11318806)
    Is Here [embeddedarm.com]

    Keep It Real, Lameness Filter(TM)
    • TS-7200 Single Board Computer 200 MHz ARM processor for Linux ARM9 processor with MMU 32 MB SDRAM 8 MB flash drive (16 MB optional) 10/100 Ethernet Compact Flash 2 USB host ports 2 COM ports 20 DIO PC/104 expansion bus Optional A/D and RS-485 Optional 802.11b WiFi
    • It's not expensive, but $150 doesn't seem like Rollback Prices for what you get. A nice microcontroller or all-in-one embedded computer.

      Granted, you have to pay quite a bit extra ($180) to get the kit with a power supply (gotta have one of those), and a CompactFlash card (also gotta have one of those. 8MB RAM(or 16 if you get the $165 version) is going to fill up quickly.)

      • True, but have you checked out the competition? (Score:4, Interesting)

        by epseps ( 39675 ) on Tuesday January 11, 2005 @09:41AM (#11319864)
        Here are some ARM based boards to compare:

        Microcontrollershop.com [microcontrollershop.com]

        Here is a similar Atmel board but this is only 8 bit and $153. Atmel Ethernut Board [microcontrollershop.com]

        8MB or 16MB flash with 32MB ram on a 32 bit processor is a good deal in the world of small low powr computers. (but still expensive compared to x86 desktop)

      • Re:Direct Link to the Board (Score:1, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward
        Its 8MB of on-board *FLASH*, not RAM. There is 32MB of RAM. This flash is always on the board regardless of whether the compact flash is populated. There is an RTOS (eCos/RedBoot) on the onboard flash and you can still boot the board via NFS root even without anything in the CF.

        How many microcontrollers do you know of that will run Apache?

        5V power supplies are ubiquitous and can be purchased for like $4 at allelectronics.com. CF cards also and can be purchased for $26 elsewhere, even Target has them.

  • Funny this should come up (Score:4, Funny)

    by skinfitz ( 564041 ) on Tuesday January 11, 2005 @04:19AM (#11318852) Journal

    I've recently been looking at small / quiet form factor boards from places like Mini-ITX [mini-itx.com] - I'm embedding an X terminal into my glass topped dining room table.

    I've had it with desktops; time for the X table top.
    • That sounds like quite an interesting project. I have been pondering for some time building a complete media center setup, with an HTPC plugged into the TV, my main server with all my movies and saved shows, and a small PC embedded in the living room table to act as the mother of all remote controls, so even my dad could use it because everything would be handled in one place, from changing the channel, to browsing archived videos on the server, without ever being able to lose the remote, or carry it into

  • Crack-influenced flash prices... (Score:5, Informative)

    by rossifer ( 581396 ) on Tuesday January 11, 2005 @04:24AM (#11318871) Journal
    The computer itself seems like a steal for the specs they're claiming but their prices on CF flash are more than a little silly. You can get Sandisk Ultra II 512MB for $60 from any online meta-retailer and these guys are offering an unknown 512MB CF card for $145.

    I've seen this kind of thing from several of these kinds of suppliers and I don't quite get it. They don't seem to realize that things like flash are fully commoditized and are still thinking they can get away with a 100% markup...

    Oh well, if they can actually sell CF at those prices, then they deserve the money. Kudos for such a sweet, low power, inexpensive computer either way.

    Regards,
    Ross
    • I was thinking the same thing - reminds me of Apple [apple.com] RAM pricing. Obviously the thing to do is buy it without the CF if possible and get the CF cheap elsewhere.
      • Reminds you of Apple RAM Pricing?

        Take a look at Dell's RAM pricing sometime.

        My company always buys our Dell machines with the minimal amount of memory and then buys the amount of memory we're actually going to use from somewhere local.

        I'll never forget one time when we saved almost $500 doing things that way on a single server...
        • HP is just as bad. I refuse to ever power on a new machine without the max amount of RAM the board will take. When I bought my new laptop, HP wanted $1600 for 2 GB of RAM. Crucial wanted $998 for their awesome RAM. HP shipped me the laptop with a 256 MB stick I replaced with the Crucial before powering it on. I saved a great deal of money and have better RAM in my machine.

          Now, I just need to take the time to ebay that 256 MB stick.
      • Most system manufacturers charge a lot for RAM. If you want real extortion, take a look at Sun video cards. Recently they were charging around $400 for a Radeon 7000, which is identical to the Mac version of the same card (retailing at around a fifth of the price).

    • Re:Crack-influenced flash prices... (Score:5, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 11, 2005 @11:08AM (#11320702)
      I work at embeddedARM.com, we know we're aren't competetive on CF prices and even suggest to cost sensitive customers to go get their CF's from Costco or what-not. We sell them at all just so we can be the one-stop shop to customers if they need them with the board, and pre-installed with Linux, etc..

      Also, some (not all) of our CF are inflated because they are the the "industrial" class CF's. These have extended rewrite cycles, higher G ratings, and work in extended temperature.
    • PC Engines [pcengines.ch] offer single board computers from $120 and up.

      Their 2-NIC model (for use as firewall) goes for $140.

      Their flash is not overpriced either ($17.25 for 128MB CF).

      I run OpenBSD on one of those, so I am pretty sure NetBSD should run on them too.

  • it does give us more choice, but not too significant.

    • I'd be very suprised if Debian actually supported it as well as NetBSD, based on the dubious support for non-i386 architectures. Debian's Sparc support is hit and miss, and their SGI MIPS support is a joke.

  • SBCs (Score:5, Informative)

    by dmiller ( 581 ) <djm AT mindrot DOT org> on Tuesday January 11, 2005 @05:13AM (#11318986) Homepage
    This looks like a nice SBC, but I am really happy with my little Soekris' [soekris.com]. With case, the 4501 is cheaper than this ARM board (the board alone is more expensive) and has three ethernet interfaces.

    • Re:SBCs (Score:4, Informative)

      by batobin ( 10158 ) on Tuesday January 11, 2005 @05:23AM (#11319014) Homepage
      I have to agree. All the networking guys I know love these things.

      I've even talked to one guy who was using one at a remote radio tower which serviced an entire town of wireless users. He had a cheap solar panel hooked up to a little battery, both of which powered the soekris for years without problems.
      • He had a cheap solar panel hooked up to a little battery

        How much does a setup like that cost? Where can I find out more? Just curious, there's a lot of useless crap when I try to figure it out with google. It'd be great to hear from someone who has been successful with it.

        • Re:SBCs (Score:1, Interesting)

          by Anonymous Coward
          solar generally goes for no less than $3.50/watt when you buy the big (150-200W) panels, and more when you're getting a smaller one... you'll need to multiple the board power requirements by six or eight to account for night, clouds, etc.
          then you just need a simple lead-acid car battery, anywhere from $50 to $150 IIRC. and a charge controller to keep the panels from overcharging the battery.
          • Designing a good solar power system is not a trivial task. Obviously you need panels, but there are polycrystalline and mono, the mono being nicer but more expensive. There's the weatherproofing: you need a strong covering that is quite transparent over a wide colour range - even UV, and something that will not decay over time, nor allow water to bead. The support mechanism needs to be strong, and provide maintenance access. Photovoltaic cells are much more efficient when cold, so ventilation is important,

    • Re:SBCs (Score:3, Informative)

      by aivarsk ( 725586 )
      Except that Soekris 4501 uses 5 times as much power as TS-7200. o.O

    • Re:SBCs (Score:4, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 11, 2005 @12:07PM (#11321314)
      (I work at Technologic Systems)

      We are a company purely of computer engineers and cheap case design is not really our specialty. We are indeed investigating cheaper case designs and 2/3 ethernet variants and in the future will have no trouble undercutting Soekris. :-) This is somewhat of a new market for us as we have traditionally targetted industrial embedded uses (hence PC/104 and RS485 com ports), where 3 ethernets is a bit of an odd request.
      • Cool - I'll watch with interest!

      • Re:SBCs (Score:1, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Coward
        I have a couple of freebsd router appliances I have built with 4 interfaces (separate nics for internet, my trusted subnet, guest subnet, and one to wireless bridge). It takes a substantial amount of CPU to route and firewall 100Mbs and more for each interface and especially if the appliance generates the traffic via samba or nfs. Also, not all nics are equal, I've seen 3x speed difference between different nics, probably dependent upon hardware checksumming.

        I'd love to replace my appliance with a low po

      • Re:SBCs (Score:2, Insightful)

        by stratjakt ( 596332 )
        3 ethernets is an odd request?

        Isn't the "Internet, LAN, and DMZ" paradigm pretty common for routers/gateways?

        • Re:SBCs (Score:2)

          by mph ( 7675 )
          3 ethernets is an odd request?

          Isn't the "Internet, LAN, and DMZ" paradigm pretty common for routers/gateways?

          Try reading the whole sentence. He isn't talking about the router/gateway market.
        • Isn't the "Internet, LAN, and DMZ" paradigm pretty common for routers/gateways?

          For routers/gateways, yes. For something like, say, an irrigation system controller, even one ethernet is somewhat unusual.

      • Can you put a guess time on "in the future". This interests me but putting things together might get expensive quickly. Being new to the idea I'm not sure where the inexpensive routes are.

  • Actually, 1.875 Watts. (Score:3, Informative)

    by Perdo ( 151843 ) on Tuesday January 11, 2005 @05:14AM (#11318989) Homepage Journal
    Comparable to VIA's Eden-N at 2.5w at half the size.

    I'm pretty sure NetBSD has already got an x86 port too...

    An extra $50 can buy a lot more technology elsewhere.

    • Yeah, but let's be fair. The Eden-N is meant for end-user applications, for the most part. It's built in such a high volume that it should be pretty cheap.

      The TS-7200 targets a different market. I don't think anyone is under any sort of illusion that this is going to sell a lot of units; it's a prototype board for developers. If you judge it by the standard of oddball-architecture boards, its price is extremely reasonable.

      Doesn't seem very good for development, though, with only 32MB of RAM.
    • Looks like the Via motherboards use around 10 watts watts because of all the heavy video stuff on them (they are intended for media centers etc). On the other hand the ARM chip has no floating point processor. I've been looking for a small, low-powered board that can run an Ogg Vorbis encoder, which uses lots of floating point. Nothing looks attractive yet.
      • Pentium M:

        http://www.lippert-at.com/index.php?id=21

        Best FPU per Clock of any current microarcitecture:

        http://www.cpuid.com/PentiumM/index.php

        At 2 Ghz it should be to OGG encoding what a GPU is to Graphics Rendering.

        - expect to pay laptop prices for it -

        How fast do you want to spend?

        • I just need to encode Ogg in real time. My P3-750 laptop does it at maybe 5x real time, so I need the equivalent of about a p3-150. A 400 mhz XScale would probably be fine if it had floating point. Know of anything?
          • You might get away with a faster processor but using software floating point instructions. This way you can stick with a clean architecture and still get the floating, just with less efficiency.

            But if it was up to me I'd look for a MIPS R5000. They have good floating point (powered the multimedia machines of the last generation, mostly SGI boxes) and maintain the advantages of low-power low-heat processors. They can also run in 64 bit mode but not many free OSs support this properly.

            Try this out: Find y
  • Good story; this is what I like to see from Slashdot is links to interesting products.
  • If you want to go cheaper, got fo an NSLU from Linksys (http://nslu2-linuxorg). It's a 100 dollar ARM board w/ Ethernet, and two USB ports. It comes running Linux, but there has been some work with getting NetBSD running on it according to the mailing lists. It's a 233MHz ARM, 32MB RAM, 8MB Flash. It also has 1 1/2 serial port which you can solder on with little effort. The 1/2 serial port is only pinned out for an RX, no way to transmit with it, so it's kinda useless in that regard.
  • This SBC looks really great for a project I might be taking up, but there is one problem.

    I need it to be able to withstand operating temperatures as low as -40C, since it will be outside in the winter (and later this week, it will be -38C here, so it really does need to handle -40C).

    I suppose some sort of heater in the enclosure would be one way to deal with it, but I'd love to know if this board or a similar one could handle the temps without any extra effort.
    • is power a huge concern or could you put a lightbulb in the enclosure?
      • Power isn't too big of a concern. I'm just wanting to keep costs down.
        • Thank you all for the replies.
  • It's getting to the point where we shouldn't hear about the architectures NetBSD supports, but rather, the ones it doesn't. ;)
  • If you are in the market for something like this, try a Gumstix (www.gumstix.com). They are 200/400 mhz xscale boards with 4 meg of flash and 64 meg of ram, running 2.6 linux kernel. They have 2 serial ports, usb client, bluetooth, MMC card, GPIO. I believe the new versions with ethernet and CF slots are getting close to competion. They are also TINY and consume around 100mw going full blast (at least that is my experience). They also provide a toolchain and everything needed to build your own kernel.

    • Re:Gumstix SBC (Score:3, Insightful)

      by setagllib ( 753300 )
      You'll have a hard time convincing anyone in-the-know to run Linux on anything that isn't x86. Its strategy towards porting is "convince the rest of the kernel it's an i386 and work like that", which fails on a lot of systems which are fundamentally different from i386, even if they have some things in common (ISA isn't the same everywhere, for instance).

      NetBSD is portable in the Right Way. It actually abstracts architectures, busses, etc. completely, with nothing i386-specific leaving the i386 world (to
      • I think you entirely missed the point of my post, which was that the Gumstix is a fantastic, featureful and inexpensive SBC. I'm sure the (in your opinion) superior NetBSD would run on it just fine, considering how common the arch is.

        • Yeah, there's that, but you also advertised its 2.6-ness and toolchain to build a new kernel. So it's not like the software on it didn't interest you :)

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