[GTALUG] "Atom Pi"

[D. Hugh Redelmeier]

| From: Stewart C. Russell via talk <talk at gtalug.org>

| Something like 28,000. There's a bit more on the Mayfield Robotics Kuri, the
| machine that had the Atomic Pi as its core, here:
| https://hackaday.com/2019/06/06/the-atomic-pi-is-it-worth-it/

That review's opinion is brutal.  It also fills in a bunch of the
backstory and is quite detailed.  Very useful: thanks!

I can imagine use-cases for this board, even so.  I just don't have
any of those at the moment.

The main negative points:

- when they are gone, they are gone.  This means that one should not
  use these in a project that expects system replication over time.
  [Few of my projects are intended to be replicated.]

- no future support from the source [but that's true of almost all
  Chinese SBCs and people still find them attractive]

- no community support because 28000 isn't enough for a user community
  to form.  [That seems wrong to me.  True, it's not anything like the
  Raspberry Pi base.]

- the I/O is mediocre [should be good enough for many uses]

- the power supply is a problem [odd, but solved; may interfere with
  access to I/O pins]

- no shielding on WiFi and Bluetooth [isn't that true of other SBCs?
  I don't know enough to say if this is a problem]

- 16G is not enough eMMC for Windows [I don't care about Windows; many
  SBCs have none; enough for a tight installation of any full-fat
  Linux and generous for light distros]

- not enough CPU compared to a current desktop [a strange bar to set]

| > How do you know when an SD card is "the right card"?
| 
| I think it's a U1 or A1 or A2 card. Not sure.

Those are useful labels for consumers (which we are).  I thought you
had some technical issues in mind.

Based on NO actual experience at the low level, and a scan of the
Wikipedia article <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SD_card>

- the first MMC cards were dead simple to read and write.  I think that
  a simple parallel port could do it (slowly).  One data pin!
  I daydreamed about adding a disk to my Altair using this simple
  interface.

- SD Express (2018) adds one PCIe lane!

Between those two was much incremental development.

There was a lot of care put into backward compatibility.  But just because 
a card works does not mean that its speed can be exploited.  I'd like to 
have card readers come with specs about which standards they implement.

The original Raspberry Pi could not exploit the higher performance
modes of the fastest cards.  Most devices don't disclose this
information but there are hints when they specify the largest card
capacity that they support.

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SD_card#Comparison>

Confusing all that, pre-3 Pis have firmware that cannot boot from
exFAT.  SD cards larger than 32G are supposed to be delivered
formatted with exFAT.  But that's not exactly hardware.
<https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/installation/sd-cards.md>

The real trouble is that everyone involved thinks that giving us all
the technical details would confuse us or embarrass them.  So we get
incomplete information, confusing me even more.