This makes no sense. (I do electronics)<p>"Hand-solderable"? Every QFN package is hand-solderable, too, using hot air, and is much smaller than the TQFP. And what is the benefit of "hand-soldering" if you still need to use DDR3 DRAM? It won't come in TQFP, and for good reasons, and good luck connecting it to that Allwinner CPU.<p>If you want tiny chips that can be hand-soldered, go with microcontrollers (ESP32 or Kinetis), which have everything on-board. You really do not need the overhead, complexity and incidental bugginess of Linux for most things, trust me. Also, choose QFN, not TQFP, use hot-air and have the entire thing soldered in 30 seconds.
If you want to hand solder a Linux SoC into a hobbyist project it's generally a whole lot easier and cheaper to stick some headers on and piggyback a $5 Pi Zero or similar board.<p>Board layout for one of these things and the associated DRAM etc. is not exactly a trivial task either. I really don't think that the sort of person who can't be bothered to set up a toaster oven for reflow soldering is going to be able to make a functioning board using this chip.
I had to deal with theses processors this weekend (Allwinner H3) for a side project (Pandora Box5 Jamma, an arcade system), the documentation is awful, i was unable to find the "real" SDK, the boot0 is a proprietary blob, but i found this awesome project <a href="https://linux-sunxi.org" rel="nofollow">https://linux-sunxi.org</a> if you want to work with these kinds of processors.
> The chip in question, the Allwinner A13, is a 1GHz ARM Cortex-A8 processor. While it’s not much<p>When did 1 GHz cores become "not much" for small embedded systems?
What is with the obsession with hand soldering everything? I did all of the pre-production prototyping for a startup several years ago using low temp solder paste, laser cut stencils, and a hotplate.<p>It was way easier than trying to solder everything by hand. I started out only using the hotplate for the stuff I couldn't get in a through-hole package, but I eventually moved almost everything over to SMD.
From the comments, a complete hand assembly system using a similar chip with onboard RAM (allwinner v3s): <a href="https://github.com/petit-miner/Blueberry-PI" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/petit-miner/Blueberry-PI</a>
We're in an amazing technical availability era. For the nearly same price and form-factor size you can either have a 4 MHz low-power microcontroller working in your custom TV remote controller or a (headless) machine capable of running RetroPie and C-64 games.<p>And the part that stands out to me is the draw toward the obvious path of least resistance. Why program any of that in assembly, when you can put together a few bash scripts with LIRC?
> it should be noted that like all of these random Linux-capable SoCs, the software is a mess<p>Such nonsense. A13 is almost fully supported in the mainline kernel.<p><a href="http://linux-sunxi.org/Linux_mainlining_effort" rel="nofollow">http://linux-sunxi.org/Linux_mainlining_effort</a><p>And datasheets are available:<p><a href="http://linux-sunxi.org/A13" rel="nofollow">http://linux-sunxi.org/A13</a><p>So I'm not sure what the author is missing.
"There is no HDMI support, you’ll need to add some more chips (that are probably in a BGA package), but, hey, it’s only a dollar."<p>And a power supply, IO, RAM, ROM, board, etc. The BOM quickly adds up.<p>I don't know what the price of the RPi CPU is, but my guess is it's not far off $1 in bulk.
I think this is roughly the chip in CHIP, from Nextthing Co; I've got a few floating around my desk. I think the Pi Zero killed their party, haven't looked them up in a while.<p>But I have a CHIP at a location running autossh for a permanent tunnel into that network...
Can anyone explain a real world use?(even a DIY use)<p>What would you use Linux for when embedded systems usually are written in mostly C.<p>Easier libraries and access to web? I cant quite understand how this can be used.
It isn't anywhere close in perf but the i.MX23 is also in a 128 pin LQFP package.<p><a href="https://www.digikey.com/product-detail/en/nxp-usa-inc/MCIMX233DAG4C/MCIMX233DAG4C-ND/2660586" rel="nofollow">https://www.digikey.com/product-detail/en/nxp-usa-inc/MCIMX2...</a>