New(?) Boards A10 Lime, OrangePi PC2 and book progress.

Well actually an old board, not one I would normally consider as its a bit outdated but I need to recognize any board that has a following, and among hobbyists and gadget makers this one does


This is the OlimexA10 OlinuXino Lime -4G, though I didn't know it was a 4G when I bought it for 19quid on Ebay from a UK supplier who gave free postage, as well as a case for 5quid. Olimex themselves price this at 40euros and 7euros for the case, on their website with silly postage so quite a bargain.

The 4G means it has 4Gb of NAND memory on board which was not stated in the listing, and lo and behold when I fired it up without an SD card, it booted into Android, though its a Chinese version of Android and I can't really get it to update, but not too worried as I'll be trashing that soon. I must say I was quite impressed. Its only a 1Gz A10 (cortex A8) single core, Mali 400MP1 unit but it is one of the faster single cores and it runs Android fine.

I've only just finished downloading the Debian image, so no idea yet how it will do with that but on paper it seems to be a wee bit faster than A Raspberry Model  B+ and half the price on ebay. Nothing really to complain about.

I'll get it working in a day or 2, I'm just trying to finish up my explanation of 3D maths in the book so that the games make sense and can be fiddled with by the readers.

Also ordered this week, for $25, yes $25...including p&p!! Was a new Orange Pi PC2, which is hot off the press, a 64bit beast with a 6core Mali 450. Now this is potentially a mega machine, though I do find the Orange Pi range to be a bit hit an miss quality wise, a 64bit quad core,probably  running at 1.6Ghz (but not actually sure) with 6 core 450...wow.
Should be here any day now, I hope it works, though I have fund when clone makers produce a 64bit machine the 1st few iterations of the OS are beyond bad, so it might be a few months before this is actually usable.



The Arrow board, arrived last week too but I'm struggling with power on it, Even a multi volt unit I bought turned out not to have the ampage needed at 12v, so have ordered a better power unit which will be here in a day or so.

I dunno how much time I'll get to play with them though I really am on a home straight with the book and want to get 750 pages by the end of this week. I'm on 683 at the moment and about to paste in a lot of code snippets.  Aside from the section on Physics which is still only an outline, I'm struggling now with what more I can add, so its looking very complete, but a bit messy. hoping to start editing it down in 2 weeks.