2018 is almost over, and we have another year in the dataset: an improbable number of celebrities died in 2016. The stock market is down, and everyone thinks a crash is coming. Journalists are being killed around the world. Fidget spinners aren’t cool anymore. Fortnite. Trade wars.
But not everything is terrible: Makerbot released a new printer and oddly no one complained. It was just accepted that it was an overpriced pile of suck. Elon Musk is having a great year, press and Joe Rogan notwithstanding, by launching a record number of rockets and shipping a record number of cars, and he built a subway that we’re not calling a subway. FPGA development is getting easier with new platforms and new boards. There is a vast untapped resource in 18650 cells just sitting on sidewalks in the form of scooters, and I’m going to keep mentioning this until someone actually builds a power wall out of scooters.
What we haven’t seen in 2018
When it comes to small, portable Linux devices, there hasn’t been a better year than 2016. That’s the year that brought us dozens of new, fun boards that would certainly be the future of embedded computing. Take a look at the Pine64, the first 64-bit Linux-based single board computer. OrangePi did something that can be described as ‘cattywampus’. Even Intel got in the game, but they forgot to write documentation.
How about 2018? Well, Raspberry Pi released the Pi 3 Model A+, but that’s really just a Pi 3 Model B with fewer parts. Other than that, there’s not much. 2018 did not see dozens of single board computers based on smartphone SOCs. C.H.I.P. died, which is great for anyone who has to type ‘C.H.I.P.’ frequently, less so for people who were counting on Open Linux modules that had complete register documentation.
What caused the development of tiny Linux SBCs to stall? The reasons for this range from companies waiting for next-generation SOCs to come out (doubtful), to the fact that people simply aren’t buying them. Could it be that the general public is realizing that a cheap ARM board with zero software support is a false economy? I highly doubt this is the case, but then again I have a very low opinion of people.
Oh, but 2019 is going to be great
RISC-V has been on the tip of our tongue for a few years now, and already we have really fast microcontrollers based on this architecture (that are also really expensive, but that’s beside the point). 2019 is shaping up to be one of the biggest years yet for RISC-V, and with that popularity comes decreasing prices. SiFive is releasing a multicore processor that runs Linux. There are smaller, lower-power RISC-V cores and completely random online shops on TaoBao are selling RISC-V cores.
The RISC-V proposition has always been a weird one. Yes, it’s a big-O Open architecture for everything from microcontrollers to Systems on a …read more
Source:: Hackaday