[HN Gopher] The Luckfox Pico Mini B - Linux in a Thumbnail
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       The Luckfox Pico Mini B - Linux in a Thumbnail
        
       Author : rcarmo
       Score  : 35 points
       Date   : 2024-07-20 17:39 UTC (5 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (taoofmac.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (taoofmac.com)
        
       | zxcvgm wrote:
       | I think the Luckfox Pico series is the lowest cost ARM-based
       | board you can buy (that runs Linux) at the moment. Even the Pi
       | Zero is $10. Prior to this, it was a board based on the Allwinner
       | F1C100, but I don't think anyone made and sold a dev board except
       | for a DIY business card [0].
       | 
       | [0] https://www.thirtythreeforty.net/posts/2019/12/my-
       | business-c...
        
       | zrail wrote:
       | That's a pretty cool little board. It looks like they have
       | versions with 10/100 Ethernet for not a lot more as well.
        
         | rcarmo wrote:
         | Yes, and those have more I/O pins exposed.
        
         | megous wrote:
         | Also pretty useless with mainline because it's not
         | straightforward to get embedded ethernet phy working, even
         | after doing pretty much what BSP code does to power it up.
         | Access to it times out.
         | 
         | (That is if you want to run some code that's anywhere close to
         | mainline Linux on this board, and not some non-maintained BSP
         | fork.)
        
       | megous wrote:
       | Yes, it's nice. Good for making Linux based USB devices (based on
       | gadget subsystem).
       | 
       | It can run Arch Linux ARM if you enable swap on uSD card, and
       | don't overdo it with your RSS. Systemd doesn't really support
       | 64MiB RAM out of the box, though. It runs, but systemctl daemon-
       | reload fails, eg.
       | 
       | You can ignore systemd boot flow and run Arch Linux using busybox
       | or other init process, so you get all the Arch software/pacman +
       | low memory use of cheaper PID 0 process and startup scripts. :)
       | 
       | The board runs best with pure statically compiled busybox running
       | from initramfs. Boot times of the kernel are like 150ms because
       | there's not really that much HW in the SoC or on the board to
       | initialize. So you can plug the board into PC and you get USB
       | device ready in ~2s.
       | 
       | Fun tiny thing to eg. hide your secret material from your PC.
       | 
       | I wrote a simple 8 KiB bootloader for RV1103/6 so that I don't
       | have to mess with porting U-Boot to this, and made it run with
       | Linux 6.10/11.
        
         | rcarmo wrote:
         | That's nice to know. I didn't have nearly as much time to play
         | with it as I originally planned, and the post is essentially my
         | notes from a month ago, with a few odds and ends trimmed.
         | 
         | Do you have that bootloader published someplace? I'd like to
         | get a more recent kernel going...
        
           | megous wrote:
           | I have a kernel here
           | https://megous.com/git/linux/log/?h=luckfox-6.10
           | 
           | Bootloader will be at https://xnux.eu/log/ when I get to
           | releasing it.
        
       | walterbell wrote:
       | $10 Linux sidecar to 10X utility of $1000 Apple M4 iPad Pro, e.g.
       | bypass censorship of trusted JIT code.
       | 
       | Radxa Zero, https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2023/10/07/1830
       | 
       | Pi Zero 2W, https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2023/09/09/1820
       | 
       |  _> iPad as a smart terminal and the Pi as a tiny portable
       | server, and the combination is what makes it work for me.. I can
       | code, run all kinds of services and do all sorts of development-
       | related tasks that I (still) can't do on the iPad by itself.._
        
         | rcarmo wrote:
         | The Zero is _easily_ the best bang for the buck of all the SBCs
         | I've used over the past few years. I use it daily from my iPad
         | (actually just installed BasiliskII on it to open and possibly
         | convert some old Mac files).
        
       | andrewstuart wrote:
       | Pretty amazing that this has a video encoder in the chip:
       | 
       | https://www.rock-chips.com/uploads/pdf/2022.8.26/192/RK3588%...
       | 
       | Much more amazing if there is any workable software to utilise
       | it.
        
         | rcarmo wrote:
         | There is a set of tools and libraries for that listed in their
         | wiki. I gather it works pretty well, just didn't have the time
         | to get around to it...
        
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       (page generated 2024-07-20 23:09 UTC)