Not doubting your achievement. I think its great that you have gotten it working - I went looking to see what th Atomic Pi was - but I had to laugh at this review
Could the Atomic Pi be the single board computer that finally brings the folks from Cambridge to their knees? Is this the computer that will revolutionize STEM education, get on a postage stamp, and sell tens of millions of units? No. The answer is no. While I’m not allowed to call the Atomic Pi “literal garbage” because our editors insist on the technicality that it’s “surplus” because they were purchased before they hit the trash cans, there will be no community built around this thirty five dollar single board computer. This is a piece of electronic flotsam that will go down in history right next to the Ouya console. There will be no new Atomic Pis made, and I highly doubt there will ever be any software updates. Come throw your money away on silicon, fiberglass and metal detritus!
Allow me to paraphrase a known quote: “I don’t care what the editors say about Atomic Pi as long as they spell it’s name right.” I Await for what Oz will have to say about this “piece of electronic flotsam” cause I am after a dedicated lightburn streamer near my cutter.
They are surplus computers that were decommissioned from a robotic system that never came to fruition. The CPU is a quad-core atom processor. It just depends on what you expect out of the system.
I don’t mind reading negative reviews but they are meaningless when they provide no data to back them up. And since we are not talking about any GPIO bit twiddling here and just loading and running off the shelf software on an x86 architecture, what support would you need which is not part of the decades of support already provides by the Linux community?
It works, is working well for me so get one while you can(or two) or don’t.
If I get around to cleaning up my office a bit I will post a video of this "garbage ".
Not to mention a lot of those geek blog guys get inundated with cool kit all the time. Their piece of dross could be just the $40 sbc that I was looking for.
Slightly off the original topic, but I have found the HP Stream11 netbook - Atom-processor based - has been great for LB. And I can get them only slightly used for not much money in Australia, since (IMHO) Windows10 is far too bloaty an OS for them, and punters only discover this when they’ve bought one Buy cheap on eBay, install a Linux flavour, typically Xubuntu, and they are fabulous
Agreed, and any laptop with 2GB or more of RAM would work as long as you can install the light weight Linux desktop OS’s like Xubuntu or Lubuntu. I looked and found the HP Stream 11 on ebay for just under US$100. If you don’t have an LCD, keyboard and mouse around they’d have to be purchased and added to the $40 Atomic Pi so the total cost would be in the same $100 range.
@nitrogen_widget I had purchased a 2nd one a while ago when they added the camera to the bundle and never tried the 2nd unit. After your comment I had to see if it worked. So 100% working out of 2 units.
But I could not get the atomicpi/atomicpi login to work but I have a few USB thumb drives around with boootable Ubuntu on them and all I had to do was stick one in the USB hub and reboot. Once running from the USB drive, I mounted /dev/mmcblk0p1 edited etc/shadow* and removed the password for the atomicpi user in both files. At that point rebooting without the USB drive got me to the login, enter with no password and I was in. I then opened a terminal window and set my password( passwd atomicpi ) and all is good.
It is a bit easier fixing x86 stuff than ARM because I can boot off of USB pretty easily and test things before mucking with the installed system.
I’ve seen people mention accidentally hitting the RTC Reset button near the power input jack and not being able to boot from the onboard EMMC after that. I also noticed that the thing had booted with the BIOS saying it can’t find the system disk but waiting about a minute it then boots perfectly well.
I will have to dork with the GPIO to see what else can be done besides using it like a standard computer. ie like driving servo motors and accessing external sensors.
And since it has an older version of Ubuntu on it and a new LTS version has been released, the archive URL needs to be adjusted to get updates to bring it to 18.04.5.
Basically, edit /etc/apt/source.list and change “archive…” to “us.archive…”
I was quite surprised to see that WiFi still worked without an external antenna. It was a weak signal but enough to get a network and do the updates just fine.
Buy cheap on eBay, install a Linux flavour, typically Xubuntu, and they are fabulous 