The Communication Cube


E.g. by scottchiefbaker 1 hour ago:
“Looks it's going to a similar form factor to the existing Pi-Zero and will have 4x 1Ghz cores, 512MB of RAM, and cost $15.

And so we kind of backed into a corner and so it took us a long time to figure out how to get out. And Zero 2 is the product that is enabled by RP3A0, which you’ll see is written on top of the chip. That’s not silicon innovation, that’s packaging innovation. So effectively what that is is a BCM271081 die, the same piece of silicon that’s used in Raspberry Pi 3, put inside a package with an LPDDR2 memory die to make a finished object. And then on the outside it has our logo and RP3, and that’s what it is.

So what you’re holding is a slightly downclocked 1GHz versus 1.2GHz Raspberry Pi 3 with half as much memory and a smaller set of accessories around it on the board. And it’s 15 bucks, we have actually had to grow the price in order to do that. But it’s about 10 times the performance, for a multithreaded benchmark, of a Zero.”
 

Also bloated websites are bloated (check the number of downloaded elements in the following screenshot).

AOgEfhAI.png
 
From the latest Precursor update:

Compliance Update: We Will Boycott the UKCA (and You Should Too!)

The EMC compliance saga seems to be never-ending. The certification house is still picking over the verbiage in our user manuals (apparently, we need to explicitly inform EU users that it’s safe to hold a Precursor to your head), and we’re revising our labeling to fall in line with what they say are the minimum requirements. I guess if you’re an Apple or Samsung you can get away with simply “Apple / Cupertino, CA” or “Samsung / Seoul, Korea” as your “address”; but for a small player like us, apparently we need to include the entire postal address of our factory from the street number down to the postal code on the outside of the product. I’m not sure exactly what that’s supposed to accomplish, but when you flip over your Precursor, you’ll be greeted by a wall of text silkcreened on the radome, just in case you need to physically mail a letter to the contract manufacturer to inquire about compliance issues.

Also, to our current and potential users in the UK: apparently, as part of Brexit, your illustrious lawmakers have decided it’d be a great idea to refuse the EU’s CE certification, so in order to import products to the UK they must also get the “UKCA” mark. This was originally slated to go into effect on Jan 1, 2022, and I was preparing to inform all of you that I was simply going to cancel your shipments and refund your money. Fortunately for the early backers, that deadline was just extended to Jan 1, 2023, so you’ll be able to import a Precursor with the CE certifications that, with great effort and cost, we’ve managed to procure.

That being said, we plan to disallow new sales of Precursor into the UK starting in the fourth quarter of 2022, because it simply is not worth it for us to seek a separate regulatory marking for the UK. Although the UKCA has a 1:1 mapping to the CE today, there’s no guarantee it will stay that way. Furthermore, it is still a separate marking, which costs real money to process; and our manuals, boxes, and case parts would have to be scrapped or reworked to bear the mark. This is both wasteful and unsustainable, as the endpoint of this road is our products bearing the unique regulatory marks of hundreds of territories and regions with no substantive benefit to the consumer or the producer; it’s already silly that we even have to have to bear both FCC and CE markings.

Thus, I also want to send an unambiguous message that this return to pre-industrial mercantilism and rent-seeking behavior by the certification bodies will not be tolerated. I ask that other makers of hardware join me in boycotting the UKCA. The global certification regime is already fractured and frankly a bit silly, and we need to make it clear that there are real costs that we the manufacturers shall not bear when trade barriers are raised for the sake of political theater. If manufacturers keep on eating escalating tariffs and compliance costs, then there is virtually no pressure on politicians to reign in these kinds of trade policies: they are a cheap & visible political win, with no local economic cost.

Instead of creating fresh regulatory barriers for the sake of having barriers, we should be moving toward harmonizing the world around a single common compliance and safety data reporting standard. At the end of the day, the laws of physics are the same whether you’re in the EU, USA, China, or even the UK. We should be promulgating traceable, accessible calibration standards while lowering barriers to the submission and access of raw compliance data: let the data speak for itself, leave the geopolitics out of it!

Happy hacking,

- bunnie & Xobs
 
Nice. It's a little weird that those game buttons appear to be more or less completely flat; normal traditional game buttons have either a convex or concave top (I think US manufacturers mainly use the former, and JP makers use the latter). And I can't see whether that joystick is 4-way or 8-way, or even (god forbid) anaglogue. I can't even see the microswitches in that shot.

Looking at "proper" arcade buttons, this seems very cheap indeed. A single Sanwa is 6-7 Euros. Though I can't see myself spending that much on the whole affair. I bet there's a reasonably priced competitor.
Edit: I might have looked at a particularly expensive shop there.
Edit 2: the 8bitdo arcade stick looks great. But I am having great troubles with the Pro 2 pad's bluetooth connection as of a few weeks. It loses connection in every game or emulator, without blinking for help. A quick alt+tab away and back again makes it regain function immediately. And it happens only in Windows. Raspi and ubuntu X86 have perfect connection.
 
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Of course. I bought the old one just a week ago for almost twenty euromarks. *sigh*

I’d recommend checking out Jeff Geerling and Novaspirit Tech’s videos on the RPi20 as overall they did a better job (though JG forgot about zram rather than swap).
Quite surprised Leepspvideo didn’t do a video...
 
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