Atomic Pi Intel Atom SBC

[Music] welcome to another video from explaining computers dot-com this time we're going to take a look at this the much requested atomic pie this is a single board computer with a quad core Intel Atom processor and the price tag are between about 35 and 50 dollars depending on where you buy the board because the atomic pie has got an x86 processor it can run mainstream Linux distributions as well as Windows so let's go and take a closer look right here we have the atomic PI from digital lovers and this was launched as a Kickstarter in December 2018 with initial price of $34 but the current list price on amazon.com is $49 95 and for this particular board shipped to UK I paid $52 42 or 42 pounds 75 including taxes and delivery which is not bad when x86-based computer so let's open it up nice and simple even for me there we are we've got a package inside anti-static thing and for the some sort of leaflet in the bottom that will ignore that for now just look at the package well there's open straightforwardly oh well that was simple and ah here we are I can get it out there is the atomic PI which is dominated as you can see by its he'd think it's rather a heavier single board computer and it's quite a large Singapore computer we compare that to a a Raspberry Pi and get those two on the screen together there you are you can see significantly bigger than that a Raspberry Pi and also significantly bigger than the other x86-based Singapore computers here for example we have a latte panda for 64 on the original x86-based Rutan pandas so let's take a closer look at the board and straight away you can see we've got a real-time clock battery on the atomic pikers that here it is that's good to see and then these thisa nice large heat sink we've clearly got the process of the Intel quad core Atom processor and specifically this is an x5 z 350 cpu running at one point four four gigahertz base frequency and with a burst rican c of 1.9 two gigahertz and then we've also got on here Intel cherry trail HD graphics running at between 200 and 500 megahertz in terms of memory on the board we've got 2 gigabytes of ddr3 RAM and we've also got some onboard storage we've got specifically 16 gigabytes of emmc flash storage on the atomic pi so we can either boot from that storage or from a microSD card or from USB in terms of connectivity wirelessly we've got a Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 802 1 1bg and an AC Wi-Fi and bluetooth 4.0 and then finally as a feature where I don't quite know where it is on the board but it's very exciting we've got a 9 axis inertial navigation sensor with a compass and if you're thinking why have we got that on the atomic PI well all become clear later in the video at least clearer than it is now so let's take a look at the front edge of the board and it does offend me this thing won't sit nice and level but it won't because of things underneath we'll see in a second but regardless of that in terms of connectivity we have got a Gigabit Ethernet and we've got one USB 3.0 type-a socket and then next to that we have got this connector here this is actually labeled as a webcam connector but in reality it is a USB 2 port you could connect to USB 2 port to that header next of that was some very tiny connected of no idea what they are I can't find that one out but I do know it over here we've got two little pads which are labeled as fan so you could attach a system fan to those if you needed it rotating around on the first short edge we can see the micro SD card slot which will take a card up to children 56 gigabyte bootable card and then we could also see in here the connector for the real-time clock battery lead going up there and then we've also got here a reset switch nice little clicky reset so moving to the second lung age you'll find we've got a full-sized HDMI connector which supports video output it up to 1080p 60 frames a second as far as I'm aware and then we've also got some antenna connectors we've got here a Bluetooth antenna connector and then two Wi-Fi antenna connectors although antennas to connect into these are not supplied with the board and then finally we've got two other connectors here one of which is for a volume control connector and one of which is for you want finally moving to the second short edge we find a whole cacophony of connectors and I wish I could tell you what they all did but I can't the ones I do know are these two though these are speaker connectors and so there we are we've looked at all the edges of the atomic PI so the last thing to look at is the underside of the board which is actually very important because there's only one thing on the other side of the board we need to take note of which is this which is a twenty six pin GPIO connector and often people don't use a GPIO connector not a single board computer they don't need them for that particular project but here we have to use the GPIO connector because the only way to power this board is by putting five volts of power into this a GPIO connector so it's absolutely critical to the operation of the atomic PI final thing I'd say here is that this board does require you to put power in there and it's also got this head as you might remember for USB to connect to which isn't currently in the form of USB 2 connector and because of that you can buy a base board for the atomic Pi which takes many of the connectors here out to screw terminals and proper USB ports and things and you can also buy a small power module which actually plugs onto the GPIO connector to give you a barrel Jack connector but I'm not going to be doing that I'm going to be rigging up my own means of powering the atomic PI to provide my atomic pie with life-giving electrical energy I'm going to use this which happens to be my rock 64 adapter as you can probably see written on the back the atomic pirate choirs at least two and a half amps at five volts this will supply three amps at five volts so that should be fine and well I done this is terminated in a barrel jack as you can see and I've made of this little connector of an old collector I had lying around not maneet his soldiering job in history but it'll do and that'll let go on to the end like that and that'll death or give us some flying leads I've got two to positive sand to grind rails coming off to make sure we've got enough power across and these will link onto the atomic pie I think it spins as three and five are these four like positive wires here and a two and four for ground and I'll put those onto the atomic pie and I'm also going to give the board some risers because clearly is if you're going underneath it to make things a bit better I'm going to take the board and to take some of these and put these through the holes and mount it up and the whole thing will look a bit like this and as you can see I've actually put two riders in to keep the board significantly off the surface which is to stop the appel wires going into the GPIO connector getting squashed and I've also added in a USB three hub here going into the single USB 3 port so I can connect in my mouse and keyboard here and there's two more USB 3 port round the back here and I've also added in a Wi-Fi antenna I had lying around which here will hopefully help us quitter Wi-Fi reception so there we are the atomic pi is all ready to be a powered up so let's see how it performs so here we are running lube unto on the atomic PI and this software came pre-installed on my emmc flash storage on the board I didn't have to install this I just booted up and er here we are and we can tell it's move on - because if I go to logout you can see that - yeah we are it tells us we're in Ubuntu and if I go to system information you can see that we've got the CPU information as we would expect the RAM there is 2 gigabytes graphics 1920 1080 motherboard information there is interesting I'll come back to what it is and what it means but later in the video and this is a nice very workable district you could certainly use this a very happily there's a reasonable amount of stuff for pre-installed so you can actually get on with doing things fairly quickly let's go to internet and go to say err Firefox and show you that comes up pretty fat it's a good browsing experience on this machine that's good to explaining computers and ER there we are it works and let's go to YouTube because I'm sure you'll want to go to youtube and see how that works and I can report YouTube playback is pretty good this is my sample at 1920 1080 clip hopefully ii will be able to go to a full stream there we are and this should be playing in make sure it's in 1920 1080 and as you can see it's playing very nicely no problems at all let's bring up stats for nerds but I don't think we really need it it's not dropping frames this works very well so if you want to use an atomic PI running that the default installed software which at least for me was asleep on - it's a very nice machine you can use it as a media player basic office work web browsing very nicely indeed this said I want to see what else we can do with this board we're going to x86 base Singapore computer here so let's see what else we can run on the atomic time guess what here we are booting into Linux Mint 19.1 64-bit edition on the atomic PI and yes this is absolutely bonkers this is far too heavy a distro to be running on an atom based board with a two gigabytes of RAM but I just want to see if it would work and in a second we will get there it's not the fastest booting up obviously because of the power of the machine were actually booting here off a USB flash driver got installed this on the EMC we're just booting from USB Drive but here we are it is arriving in the next mint here we are running Linux Mint on the atomic pipe and as you can see there's the atomic paese disk is actually things it's a micro SD card on there this system but it's working this is fantastic and we've got you know copper then explint running here we can go to the internet and go to say Firefox and it will run up I would hope it'll take a little second it's running off the USB Drive it's running on this atom based system but it does work come on work for me there we are it's worked and you've gotta talk to computers haven't you make them work and we can go to explaining computers income who first on comm I suppose I could type um website address eventually and yes it'll work we can get online with this system and we could run up things like say which is down here and graphics there we are let's run up and again it's gonna work I find this fantastic SBC's are for experimentation at time darling and I think the fact you can run a big mainstream Linux distro on the atomic pipe it is really cool I think this is absolutely great let's do that in a single window mode thank you very much so there we are I just thought I'd show you this it's not particularly helpful perhaps it's not the best just show to run you'll be much better running a lightweight district the world we've just seen but it's nice listen you can't run Linux Mint 19.1 on the atomic pi so I just thought you might be interested in taking a look at the BIOS on the atomic PI it's nice to see a BIOS on a single computer we have one of course because it's an x86 based machine and we move along here I'll just show you a few of the options here and a CPU configuration we can see a information on that Atom processor and if we go down to Hardware monitor we can see the thing is idling along an icer 42 degrees C I can report the heatsink barely gets hot with this machine even after intensive use which is is really good we look under chipset you can see where our memory information is there are two gigabytes of RAM running at 1600 megahertz and we can also here change the amount of memory allocated to the internal graphics which is a default of 32 megabytes but we can take that all the way up to what is it 512 megabytes that could be usefully want to use this for example as a media player we go to boot you see with various boot options some interesting options are in there and I think from that we'll just to escape under quit without saving I just want to give you a brief look at the BIOS the atomic pi is the cheapest x86 based single ball computer I've ever reviewed and it begs the question how can digital loggers purchase an Intel Atom CPU and two gigabytes of RAM and 16 gigabytes of onboard flash storage under other components and put them all together as the atomic pie and sell it for $35 or even $50 and still make a profit and the answer to that question as far as I can see is that they can't and whilst the atomic pie is a great board it's a fantastic value single ball computer it's not quite what it seems as you may have noticed the word atomic pie do not appear on the circuit board and this is because as far as I can tell the board was never manufactured to be the atomic pie rather the board is an A on em F zero zero one that was manufactured for a Bosch spin-off company called Mayfield robot specifically what is now sold as the atomic pie appears to have been the control board for a domestic robot called Curie that was announced at CES in 2017 but which never came to market you can learn more about Curie and its cancellation on this webpage that I'll link in the video description searching the web I've managed to find the specs for the MF 0 0 1 and which are identical to the atomic time I've also found the auction pages where the unused MF 0 0 1 boards from Mayfield robotics were sold off in late 2018 the repair to have been for lots each containing between about 5 and 8,000 MF 0 zero ones and quite how many of these digital loggers purchased and apparently rebranded as the atomic PI we can not guess but what all of this does almost certainly mean is that the atomic PI is a remaindered industrial component and therefore in limited supply now all of this doesn't really matter the atomic pi is a great value single board computer and indeed if you buy an atomic pi you're probably buying a computer where you're paying less than the cost of the components that make up the board this said if you want to get an atomic PI it really means you have to act quickly you have to buy one sooner rather than later because once all those MF 0:01 boards have gone they're gone in my next atomic päivi do I'll be comparing the board to the original lot a panda 232 but now that's it for another video if you've enjoyed it we've seen their Christmas card the like button if you haven't subscribed please subscribe and I hope to talk to you again very soon [Music] you

Channel: ExplainingComputers

Views: 201,546

Keywords: Atomic Pi, Atomic Pi SBC, Intel Atom SBC, Atomic Pi Intel Atom, powering Atomic Pi, Atomic Pi review, Atomic Pi demo, demo, review, Christopher Barnatt, Barnatt, Mayfield Robotics, Aaon MF-001, MF-001, Atomic Pi MF-001, Kuri robot, Atomic Pi Kuri, Digital Loggers, Lubuntu, Linux Mint, Atomic Pi Lubuntu, Atomic Pi media playback, Atomic Pi YouTube playback, Atomic Pi Linux Mint, media player, Atom SBC, x86 SBC, Intel SBC, x86 single board computer, LattePanda, Atomic Pi power

Id: CpMhsrsiV6Y

Length: 16min 38sec (998 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 23 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/Scarasyte]

This was the video that made me decide to purchase one. I'm usually a RPi user and I had heard of the APi before but was fence sitting. I should get mine in early July.

[u/shakaworld]

I was waiting for him to do the video on the atomic pi and as always he does a great job like he did in some of his other reviews.

[u/S_H_G]

Light on content, but nicely done; he alludes to a follow up video and does not seem to be a HackaDay.com believer that the Kuri board has "no community," and as such is "garbage."