I have the chip, esp8266, rpi, teensies, trinkets, arduinos... I studied electronics principles and built various circuits.. yet I have no idea what I can practically use these devices for in my life. They all sit in a box and I have a hard time justifying buying more of them.
Considering the fact that they missed delivery date of the previous one by at least 150% (I am still waiting) announcing new one with "Available Dec 2016" sounds like tasteless joke.
I order the original CHIP at end of May, and I still haven't received it today, it was supposed to ship by June. They kept getting delayed. Latest update is that the shipping is for November. Can't help but suspect they are doing this on purpose to wait for price drop on the components to sustain the business.
"Powered by a chip you can actually buy" - lets hope so.<p>Assuming thats a reference to the rpi Zero which, as of November, has been out a full year and still must be bought one at a time. Seems like we'll never be able to build more than one or two of something based on the zero.<p>Do wish nextthing would rebrand it because its impossible to Google "chip" and hope to find anything related to this. How about "NESOC" - pronounced "knee sock" and short for nextthing SOC?
How is it optimized for SMT? It seems like the PCB that you mounted it to would need to have a hole or milled pocket in it to accommodate the backside thickness of the CHIP. Not sure how feasible a pocket is, but a hole would mean you then lose all your layers/backside in that area.
Seems like a good enough prototyping kit for open source hardware.
I wonder why the 'no-price-scaling' per unit for bulk orders is considered a feature though.
I'm waiting for a PocketCHIP (mainly to mess with pico8) that I preordered at the start of this month, and it has estimated shipping of November.<p>I wonder if the Chip Pro shipping in December will have any impact on my order.
Great hardware, but do you really want to run a full Linux system on low-end IoT devices? That's what made the recent massive DDOS attack possible - lots of little machines with way too much network-side functionality.<p>Linux just has too much attack surface.
...Now if only we unwashed, non-kickstarter-using masses could actually buy a chip+pocketchip. I'd pay good money for it, but with orders this backed up, I'm not putting money in for a ticket to a waiting list that may never end.
A typo on the home page<p><pre><code> Powered by a chip you can actually buy.
R8 SoC + 256MB DDR3
1 package. 1 price.
$6 in any quantity.
</code></pre>
All the other references to the price are for $16, not $6.
<a href="https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/1065/9514/t/18/assets/chippro_alpha_img.png?3357780439954442636" rel="nofollow">https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/1065/9514/t/18/assets/chip...</a> Those USB sockets are mighty close together.
There's a post[1] on their forum for more detail. TL;DR they are announce 2 new hardware<p>* GR8 - a 14mm x 14mm System-in-Package, combines 1GHz R8 SoC with 256MB of DDR3 memory - $6 - available in any quantity in December 2016<p>* C.H.I.P. Pro - GR8 + 512MB NAND + WiFi/BT + ..., 76% smaller than C.H.I.P. - $16 - available in volume December 2016 and Dev Kits are on sale today for $49 shipping in December 2016<p>Having some hobby project with CHIP and loving it, but I have to say this naming of Pro sounds misleading, I'd rather call it Air :)<p>[1] <a href="https://bbs.nextthing.co/t/c-h-i-p-shipping-update-three-new-additions-to-the-c-h-i-p-family/10620" rel="nofollow">https://bbs.nextthing.co/t/c-h-i-p-shipping-update-three-new...</a>
Seems this is not the same form factor or pins as the CHIP.
So it can't be swapped out to upgrade PocketCHIP, etc. They seem to be missing an opportunity here to create a standard. Pity, I had assumed that was the goal.<p>(Of course, maybe there was a good reason to throw away the first attempt at a standard..)
Hoping to put this or RPi3 into foldable card cases and connect to power, vga/lcd monitor, keyboard and mouse for schools in developing world. Would the chip or chip pro be better than RPi3 please?