Re: [DIYbio] Amazon unintentionally solves "low cost lab automation device" challenges

I suppose on-subject; I recently came into possession of a CHIP (the
open source 1Gz ARM board for $9), and I'm really impressed even though
I've done next to nothing so far with it. The *details* are what impress
me:

* The USB power socket also handles data, so you can plug it into your
laptop and then send/receive serial data over the same wire. Apparently
you can also multiplex somehow to do OTG through the same wire, perhaps
when a battery is attached (see below).
* It also has a single USB A socket on board, don't know much about
current draw so far but I expect they learned RasPi's lesson about
delivering insufficient current.
* Wifi/BLE
* A socket for a LiPo battery, and an integrated charging circuit wired
from the USB power supply, with automatic power switching so a cheap
LiPo gives you a UPS or on-the-go power supply
* Compatible with Debian, mine came pre-flashed
* 4 GB storage onboard

So that's a $9 computer that can easily connect via bluetooth or wifi to
controlling devices, with enough beef onboard to handle moderate data
processing, and enough storage onboard for pretty generous logging.
Coupled with a cheap or free service to expose local servers on
convenient domain names (such as ngrok.com or pagekite), you could very
easily set up "garveylab-pcrblock.ngrok.com" or similar and have a rich
webapp for setting up, logging from, and tearing down experiments.

Anyways, sorry to gush. I'm excited about uses for this thing, wish I
had five more so I could more easily commit to at least one idea without
feeling I'm wasting it. :)

On Mon, 2015-12-21 at 11:19 -0800, Jonathan Cline wrote:
> The low end Fire supports USB On The Go, therefore connecting custom
> external peripherals is possible via USB. This is from the xda dev
> pages:
>
> Working
> Full size Qwerty Keyboard
> USB Mouse
> USB to SD card converter
> USB Ethernet
> USB to Serial (FTDI)
> USB Webcam
> Not Working
> USB to Serial converter (?)
> Parani-UD100a USB Bluetooth Adapter
> Parani & TP-Link did not show in Network Info II app
> " It does not appear to support OTG + charging."
> Reference:
> http://forum.xda-developers.com/amazon-fire/general/otg-2015-fire-kffowi-ford-t3245644
>
> Overall this is pretty good convergence to tactile electronic paper.
> My design suggestion for a production product (not talking educational
> or toy use) would be to use a Microchip PIC18 or PIC24 both of which
> have full speed USB and solid peripherals on chip (such as 16-bit A/D
> on PIC24). Software development with MPLABX toolchain. Or for the
> non-C programmers, an option is to write in python and use micropython
> on chip. Unfortunately these days I'm away from my lab setup
> otherwise I'd have a demo up already.
>
> By the way to answer a previous comment, the MIPS cores, such as 4K
> (now considered a microcontroller range), and MIPS-based chips are
> technologically superior to ARM in many ways. There's a billion types
> of ARM based chips out there because ARM licensed the core in a more
> widespread way (but not the bus!) based on royalty whereas MIPS did
> not license their IP in that "saturate the market" type of way. Also
> from a software developer standpoint it is usually better to go with
> the vendor with the more singular solution (MIPS in this example)
> rather than the highly branched solution (such as, ARM core in ST chip
> which uses a third-party ARM peripheral bus running with third-party
> software tools and open source libraries and bundled driver libraries
> that are demo quality in my opinion, if you look deep into the code,
> and incredibly bloated).
>
> > On 12/3/15 4:21 PM, Bryan Bishop wrote:
> >
> > > Amazon Fire and other Android tablets can run debian chroots and
> > > a number of other alternatives are possible with the android
> > > kernel kvm branch. You don't need to write Android apps to use an
> > > originally-Android device.
> > >
>
> If the device (tablet in this case) is customized, then that is
> branching off of the convergence line. The result in the long term
> will only gain from the technology convergence up to the point of the
> branch, and won't benefit from the further technology gains (without
> continual custom development). Stay on the convergence curve, rather
> than branch off, for best results. That means building software
> which is distributable directly on amazon's default app store and
> accessory hardware which plugs in without hardware modification.
> However - it's more rare for companies take the approach of building
> an accessory for a device on the convergence curve because the
> priority of a company is to create ecosystem lock-in, basically the
> expression "We don't want to be a peripheral on someone else's
> device." Fighting the "Let's just branch!" instinct can be difficult
> on both the business side and the developer side.
>
> The major limitation of these tablets is that they are not readable
> under sunlight - so outdoors use in the field could be limited. The
> e-ink readers would be the natural choice but the software development
> is more difficult (proprietary libraries, and custom development).
>
> ## Jonathan Cline
> ## jcline@ieee.org
> ## Mobile: +1-805-617-0223
> ########################
>
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