CHIP $9 Computer

[Music] welcome to another video from explaining computers comm this time I'm going to take a look at the chip which is a nine dollar single board computer from the next thing company and for nine dollars you even get some onboard storage which is pretty good isn't it so let's go and take a closer look so here we have the chip in the anti-static bag in which it arrives you can hopefully see on there it says what a bag of chip can you see that there we are bag of chip for nine dollars not bad for a computer is it so let's get inside taking out the anti-static bag I can't even get into an anti-static bag surely I won't be defeated by such a simple piece of on packaging and here we are this is the chip a really tiny weenie matchbox site computer now if I turn the thing over we'll start with the specs looking on the back you can on the back we have the processor the system-on-a-chip sitting in the middle map and the chip here is an all winner r8 which includes a one gigahertz arm cortex a8 CPU and an armed ally 400 GPU and just beneath this chip you can see down here we have some memory this is a 512 megabytes a half a gigabyte of RAM and I'm assured that this is a Samsung Ram and it's a ddr3 now if we turn the board over you obviously see the stuff on top of the board as well let's look at some of the chips here the first chip may be to look at is that this one this chip here is the onboard flash storage four gigabytes of on-board storage now let's have a look at some of the other chips here we move down a little bit you can see well I'm going that way there we've got two other chips here we've got over here this is a power management chip and you've got to have a power management chip to make your board work this is an ax P 209 if you particularly care about that but you're probably more interested in the module we have over here this is a wireless networking module this isn't our TL 872 3 B s and this gives you onboard Bluetooth 4 and onboard Wi-Fi 802 1-1 B G and n which is clearly very handy also on this side of the board you will see we have got a 2 millimeter jts pH battery connector which means if you want you can power the chip from a three point seven volt lithium polymer a lipo battery and there's even a charging circuit in this if you pair it by the 5 volt connector I'll show you in a second also on this side of the board finally to point out we have got a power button a reset button which is sitting just there turning to the other end of the board we've got some connectors not least you'll see we've got a full-size USB 2 connector just one of them that we have got USB on this board and we've got a micro USB connector for connecting 5 volt power although apparently it is possible to reconfigure up for the purposes if you're using the other power connector on the other end of the board also here we've got a 3.5 millimeter tt-rs or tip ring ring sleeve AV jack and this allows us to connect the chip to a composite monitor and to stereo audio although again it is possible to reconfigure this socket so you can use it from microphone and stereo audio if you're getting your video from an add-on card you can just change that over by doing some solder connections on the board I'll say a bit more about how you use this connector in a few minutes time and finally two nodes on the end of this board the chip also has two tiny little LEDs which are just in here which are used for power and indicating what is going on with the chip finally and as you can't have fail to have noticed unless you came out this morning where you're dark black I don't with a certain thing glasses on the top of the chip we have 240 pin headers here and here this will really stand out don't they and they give you lots of connectivity from those pins you've got things like AV connectors power connectors you can connect in an LCD display you've got eight readily available GPIO pins what they call X i/o pins so although the chip is a fully blown computer clearly it's got a lot of microcontroller opportunities given its size and its price and you've got all that connectivity on these headers often with a computer like this people say to me what about a case how would you keep this thing all in nice good condition how would you protect the processor on the bottom of the of the chip board and the answer that is that they do actually sell a little case for $2 each here if I can get it out of its little a little bag let's try and get out that for you twice I spent the extra $2 to get the case in the bag which is completely impossible to open I can't get into the burg what's going on you must be able to get the bike over there we are and here it is and I wouldn't exactly call it a case myself although that's what they said has it's a piece of plastic which you can fit your chip on top of I think it goes on like like this and holds like that well quite nicely actually and that just gives you a bit of support so it just has one screw goes in unfortunately the screw supply they give you two screws look but the screw is self tapping don't like that but I will fit that and then we'll think about connecting this thing up right I've now screwed the chip into its small plastic case thing and a very nice it looks they're all protected on the back with its piece of plastic and it's now time therefore to connect things to it and to show you what it can do so first of all we need some sort of mouse and keyboard device and so I'm going to use this which is my right eye eight and the reason I'm going to use this it's the only device I own combines a keyboard and a mouse device into one device with one USB connection by this little dongle so I will connect the dongle into the front of the chip we've got it's one USB connector there it is I have tried the chip with all sorts of different keyboards and mice and they work perfectly well but because you've got one USB connector here you are going to need a hub and preferably a powered hub or most certainly a powered hub if you're going to use standard keyboards and mice with the chip so in this case the yi8 is a useful choice having said that of course once things are running the chip does have its onboard bluetooth so you could use a bluetooth mouse and/or Bluetooth keyboard that will work perfectly well now you're also going to need to use a power adapter of course this is a standard USB 5 volt power adapter let's get this on Wyatt this happens to be a 1 point 5 ampere tap to that fan that works perfectly well they do recommend a 2 amp power adapter by I've had no problem with 1.5 although I've tried to 2 amps too so we'll take that and also connect it in to the chip like that so that's going to give us power and mouse keyboard functionality and then finally we need to connect to the 3.5 millimeter jack a cable which we'll take out via composite video and audio and you must remember this is a 4-pole 3.5 millimeter jack one of the less common kinds and the lead is more difficult to get hold up now they will sell you one of course from next tinker when you buy your chip but you might have one lying around I did have a lead lying around if I'd had two of these leads lying around which have on one end of 4-pole jacket on the other end 3 phono connectors I found the lead wire different wage round there is no standard way to get it out of the way there's no standard way to wire these connectors and even here on lead that will work and here it's not the right colors which doesn't really matter but you'd expect normally yellow would be your video connector here red is the video connector and the other one white or the audio connectors if you look at this diagram you'll see how its things you need to be wired up in terms of the tip and the two rings and must leave to wire your connector to use composite video and audio from your chip so I'll just connect that into the chip that goes in there like that and our chip is now ready to be booted up right so here we are sitting in the dark and I'll go to boot up the chip so I'll hit the switch by the power adapter there we are you probably heard that and the chip should now be boot here yes there it is we can see a little chip on the screen I'll show you the whole boot up sequence I won't speed through this you can see how fast the chip is now currently we're watching a chip connected via the composite video output I showed you in the last segment and it's important to note that by default a chip uses the NTSC composite video system which is a composite video system using United States and some other parts of the world so if you're in the lighted stage you should be able to buy a chip plug it into a television or monitor with a composite video input it'll work fine however if you're in say a PAL region of the world uses the PAL video system like the UK you may struggle i've tried today again again again to get a chip to output a standard pal composite video signal and i failed and other people are found on the internet have failed as well so do be aware of that i'm lucky at my monitor here we'll take a NTSC video signal I can't record one of them by pointing a camera at it but at least I can see the picture but if you're not in an NTSC video region do be aware you may have problems using the composite output on the chip anyways you can now see the chip is booting up the picture won't look brilliant because I am pointing a camera screen and B we're running from a composite video signal with a resolution of 640 by 480 pixels but it does work here we are on the chip desktop and the chip operating system I'm sure you would get is a Linux distribution it's a Debian distribution which has been customized for the chip I let the top he'll have computer things in pink and if we click on that you'll see all sorts of things are pre-installed we've got same office packages pre-installed the ABI word word processor Lee Jinu Barracks spreadsheet and there's a internet stuff here we've got a Firefox web browser which is a branded as iceweasel down there but it's definitely Firefox I've tried it out there's a couple of games there there's various accessories all sorts of settings there is a setting here for display if I can find it again there it is but it wouldn't help me get to power video out but unfortunately and there's also appear a file manager if I go into that I I don't like the look of this it's very retro computing isn't it I really liked chipper for that and if I click on that file system you will see if I just need my cursor that we've got a 3.2 gigabytes free out of the three point eight gigabytes onboard storage so even with the operating system and some programs installed you've got quite a lot of space to work with on the chip so there we are that's the basis of what you get when you boot up a chip so as we've seen by default the chip connects to a monitor using it to composite video connector is 3.5 millimeter jack however the next thing kohu make the chip do make a range what they call dual inline packages or dips that allow you to connect with chip to an HDMI or VGA monitor and here as you can see I've got the HDMI dip this costs of $15 it's $10 if you want the VGA one so I thought we'd have a go using this first of all to get in here we'll take a a label off quite an important label which has got some important instructions we'll come back to that in a second but hopefully I can get in without damaging that too much yes I think I can and hopefully Deary me getting in there now we are getting in and it's all wrapped up in pink foam all come off some pink okay we are eventually high here we are here is the HDMI dip for the chip and I guess this is must have connected us presume presume onto that which could be quite sharp this is a all that we are yes whoa vicious-looking fingers it misses via the dip for the chip for HDMI so a very rich look and this love a stick fit on the top of the chip to give it a HDMI capability but before we put one on I do need to notice that a second ago what's on the label here which tells us we have to update the chip before we can use the dip the HDMI adapter and to do that you need to go to a Chrome web browser and go to updates get cheap calm it has to be the Chrome web browser apparently and you install an app and you install some drivers when you go to a page for four-flushing the chip and once you've done that you take your chip and you have to put a jumper in piece of wire even a paperclip if you like between a couple of the pins and one of the headers and you plug in a microUSB cable and then you plug the chip into your computer by standard USB cable in the other end and it will appear and it will detect the thing and then you can go through a process of selecting the particular version of a chip operating system you need it has dip support and that will download and install on your chip as you're seeing here and I have to admit it's a bit of a fraud process it doesn't work perfectly first time some of the windows drivers are a bit flaky they keep failing to it to work properly but eventually I go to work it's one point said it would take well over two hours but it took me about half an hour to go through the process and I've now got my chip hopefully set up to do that so the chip we've got here has been through the flashing process so we're already in theory to take the HDMI dip and to fit it on top of the chip it's exciting isn't it all this so I think it goes on that way around so you end up with the the connectors for USB and power will end in the HDMI connector out the other so basically I just put that thing on top like that and give it a nice gentle crash down this is a case of doing things very carefully I think oh there we are it hopefully carefully there and that that's done you can see now why the case attorney on the bottom of a chip because the top is now occupied by the V HDMI adapter so this is now ready to use again I think we'll now see if we can boot up a chip with itself HDMI dip on the top right well here I am again running the chip you can see it's all connected up there with the HDMI dip on the top and the flashing it's lovely pink LEDs and if we look back on the screen we're now running in a 1280 by 720 resolution which is a bit nicer to it to work in if I go to a computer things we've got the same menu as before it's not quite got the same retro feel as it had in it in this improve resolution but it's much more usable let's just show you a few more things of what chip can do now we've actually got it running here and there's things like the a dispro cheetah but you're dying to see the spreadsheet let's just launch shut up see if that works it's so yes there we are you see we could do lovely spreadsheet stuff on the on the chip if we wanted to but er I don't think I will right now and the thing I'm probably more interested to see is the web browser that's run up there the web browser this is a version of Firefox I'm pretty certain so that will run up might take a second or two vector no there it is thought it wasn't go right but it is going to right definitely Firefox look we can see that on the Firefox logo ething let's maximize that that's all very exciting but I think I'll go in there go to my history and where I drop down and nip off to all my own websites I always do that though just to show you a website works there we are we're online with the explaining the future website and it all seems to work so you can see you can have a reasonable browsing experience on a chip yes it definitely definitely works what's it doing there I don't want to go into read of you don't you wish web browsers stop trying to be clever these days they could just get on being web browsers rather than all that other stuff but there we are we're now proving to ourselves that we can use the chip with it HDMI dip on top makes it more usable but probably slightly less exciting to some extent but there we are the chip definitely a workable and working single board computer no doubt whatsoever that for $9 the chip though there is some fantastic computing value now absolutely you have to add on certain things to make it work a power supply and leads and stuff and you might want to buy all sorts of accessories and they do push the price up but providing you've got basically a USB power supply the means of connecting it to a composite monitor or television then the chip really does work for nine dollars now I'm sure when we've been watching this video you've been thinking the chip well that's that's a competitive the Raspberry Pi isn't increased what about the Raspberry Pi and I've not mentioned the PI during this video but in two videos time I will be comparing the chip head on with the Raspberry Pi zero the five dollar computer from the Raspberry Pi foundation and that will be an interesting comparison to make which is best the chip or the Raspberry Pi is zero but now that's it for this time if you've enjoyed this video please press that like button if you haven't subscribed please subscribe and I hope to talk to you again very soon [Music]

Channel: ExplainingComputers

Views: 2,843,215

Keywords: CHIP, single, board, computer, $9, low, cost, Christopher, Barnatt, Next, Thing, Co, Company, Debian, OS, HDMI, DIP, flash, CPU, demo, review, setup, video, composite, lead

Id: 3FuDWQwA0dI

Length: 18min 28sec (1108 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 08 2017