Raspberry Pi Pod and micro:bit base

A small company called Next Thing Co. has recently launched a Kickstarter to raise funds for C.H.I.P., the so-called “$9 computer”. It has almost reached the $1.2 million mark with over 23,000 backers. Many people in the industry and in the press have been calling it a “Raspberry Pi killer” so I thought I’d give my opinion on the product and the campaign and look deeper into the claims of it being the Next Big Thing. In particular, I wanted to look at the value-for-money of the CHIP compared to the Raspberry Pi.

Company background

Previously, Next Thing Co created and Kickstartered the OTTO animated gif camera using the Raspberry Pi Compute Module. They have literally only just started shipping the OTTO, so fair play to them that they waited to announce the CHIP. Reading between the lines of their new Kickstarter for CHIP, one gets the impression that they were somehow unhappy with the Compute Module as a platform and decided to build their own board. I wonder, therefore, if they aren’t more interested in it being a replacement for the CM rather than for the standard Raspberry Pi 2.

The specs

The CHIP is a single board computer that includes the following features: 1 GHz processor, 512MB RAM memory, 4GB onboard storage memory (for the operating system, software and your files), on-board wi-fi and bluetooth and the ability to be powered by a LIPO battery. It is, on the surface, a capable, though not outstanding, machine. Let’s look at each element and compare it with the Raspberry Pi 2.

• Allwinner R8 1 GHz processor (which, I think is a single core) – the Raspberry Pi 2 has a 4-core 900MHz processor (0.9 Ghz) which can be overclocked to 1 GHz without much effort. This means that the Pi 2 is much better when it comes to doing more than one thing at once. (More on the decision to use an Allwinner chip later…) The CHIP does, however, compare very favourably with the Raspberry Pi A+.
• 512MB RAM – clearly the Pi wins on this one as it has twice the memory at 1GB, up from the 512MB onboard the B and B+. If you look at the Pi A+, though, the CHIP has twice the amount of memory.
• 4GB onboard storage – this is an interesting one. Using onboard storage does, of course, have its advantages: you don’t need to buy an SD card and it feels much more ‘immediate’, more ‘plug-n-play’. Then again, using an SD card has advantages too: you can swap out a different operating system, or different set of software, or different projects with the Pi. You can have much more storage available with the Pi by simply getting hold of a larger SD card and plugging it in. I, personally, would rather have the flexibility, but others may prefer the convenience of on-board, particularly for portable applications where stability of storage is key.
• On-board wi-fi and bluetooth – the wi-fi, in particular, is a very powerful addition. Bluetooth I’m a little bit “meh” about – I’ve always found it a bit unreliable – but others may have a different opinion.
• USB – the CHIP only has one USB port, forcing you to use either a hub or bluetooth devices if you want to plug in a mouse and a keyboard at the same time. The Pi 2, of course, has 4 USB ports, making it much more capable for everyday use. The A+, with it’s 1 USB port, is looking more like the thing it should be compared against, actually.
• Video output – the CHIP has a 4-pin 3.5mm jack similar to the Pi 2, giving it composite video output and/or audio output through the same port. The Pi also has an HDMI port for connecting to a monitor making it, again, much more capable. It is possible to add ‘shields’ to the CHIP giving it HDMI and VGA output, but these cost a bit and, naturally, add bulk to the small board as well as taking up all the GPIO pins.
• LIPO battery input with charging circuit – this is an interesting thing that the Pi does not have. It enables the CHIP to be run off a battery. It reminds me of the ODROID-W board. Of course, you can get a very similar effect with the Pi by using a USB battery (one of those phone charging ones will do), but for those looking for an easy way to power their single board computer, I’d imagine this to be very attractive, as long as you don’t mind the inherent problems with keeping LIPOs and treating them gently.

The $9 price tag

Clearly, the CHIP wins out on price, or at least on the surface. Let’s examine things a little more closely, shall we? First of all, the spec analysis above clearly shows that the Pi is simply the better computer and is certainly worth the extra money you pay. Secondly, the international delivery costs are immense. If you don’t live in the USA, you’re expected to pay a $20 delivery charge. Is this really what it costs? Or is this a cynical way of making the CHIP more profitable by stealth while keeping the headline-grabbing “$9” price tag? I know very little about postal charges from the USA, but if it were going from the UK to the USA, it would cost very much less than $20. They have said that they’re trying to lower the postal costs, but I’m almost certain that won’t affect existing backers. As I understand it, all of the international backers (of which there must be thousands) would have to change their pledges themselves manually. Not a viable option. I wonder how much effort they’re really putting into finding cheaper shipping options, apart from just saving some money for the company?

So, that’s covered the postage, but what of the extra ‘add-ons’ for the CHIP? For a decent option for display, you’re paying $10 for a VGA shield and $15 for an HDMI shield. This takes the cost of the CHIP from $9 to $19 and $24 respectively! This does rather take the shine off the $9 claim.

The other thing to bear in mind is future pricing. Whereas the Pi’s price is fairly fixed (and in some cases, like the B+, it’s actually going down) the price of the CHIP after the Kickstarter has finished can only go up. Going by what’s on the board, the profit margin on the basic $9 model must be tiny – they are clearly bolstering the low-low price with the shipping and the add-on boards. The other worrying thing is that so far Allwinner hasn’t publicly announced the price for the R8 chip that is the processor on the CHIP – can it really be low enough for them to put it on the board?

Where does the money go?

We all know that the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s primary aim is to increase the amount, and improve the quality of, computing in education as well as a general aim of supporting STEM, particularly in schools. These idealistic aims are entirely in keeping with the RPF being a charity. So where does that leave CHIP? It’s a business, pure and simple. The money will end up in the hands of the creators (and their investors) and won’t be used for the same sort of goals. Does this matter? Well, from my point of view it does. I would rather spend the equivalent of $35 for a Raspberry Pi and know that my money was going to a good cause rather than spend $9 for something which a) isn’t as good technically and b) doesn’t support our children in their learning. That’s just me, though. You may have a very different view. I am in no way anti-capitalist, but I do think that the Foundation deserve to be encouraged in their mission. You could, of course, back the CHIP and then donate money to an educational charity (Yeah, like that’s going to happen!)

What will it be used for?

Let’s take a look at the different claims made by the campaign page. What do they expect it to be used for?

• As an internet access machine – the CHIP’s creators maintain that you can “Use the Chromium browser to surf the web. Check out websites, send emails, watch videos, and more.” Now, as anyone who has used the Raspberry Pi B or B+ knows, desktop usage is extremely limited. It’s slow, it doesn’t cope. So, unless they’ve done something radical to the software (and all indications are that they haven’t) it’s going to be as slow as a very slow thing, even with the extra 300Mhz and a more modern CPU.
• As an office machine – the creators say that you can use LibreOffice to create documents etc. Again, if you’ve used LibreOffice on an earlier Pi you’ll know that the experience is a bit slow. Of more concern is that the standard requirements for LibreOffice on Linux is 1.55GB – that’s a massive chunk of the 4GB available gone just on that one package.
• As a code teacher – in this instance, the CHIP will probably do well. The 512MB of memory and the processor are good enough to run Scratch and Python.
• As a games machine – again, you are going to be restricted by the processor, the memory available and the 4GB storage. It will play games, both natively and through retro emulators, but performance will never match the Pi 2.
• As a portable computing platform – this is where the CHIP comes into its own. It’s small and it’s able to be powered by a LIPO. The PocketCHIP, which I haven’t mentioned so far, is a lovely device, too – a fully integrated keyboard, a touchscreen and a 5-hour battery at a good price. If you want something similar to, say, an old Blackberry, the CHIP delivers. In my opinion, the PocketCHIP is a bit gimmicky, but I can see a lot of people going for it. The ability to power it from a LIPO shouldn’t be overlooked either – I can see a lot of Internet of Things projects benefitting from that.

GPL violations

The Allwinner chip is, clearly, a “good buy”. It’s cheap, cheerful and is widely used, or at least the A13 that it’s based on is widely used. However, several people have commented on the campaign about how Allwinner have violated GNU General Public Licences. I’ve not got much of a legal brain so I leave it up to you to dig into the details by visiting this link.

It’s also up to you to decide whether that means anything to you or not. You may be happy with Licence conditions being broken. I’d rather see everyone be on the level about such things. Maybe, in time, Allwinner will mend their ways but until that time it is a consideration.

Open Source

Again, going by the comments that have been made both on the campaign and elsewhere, the company’s claim that the project will be open sourced seem not to ring true. Unless they’ve managed to convince Allwinner to completely open source everything to do with the chip, my guess is that the CHIP will be about as “open” as the Raspberry Pi is. i.e. Some parts, especially the core software, will be open sourced, the design of the board will be open sourced, but some of the low level stuff will be hidden inside binary blobs. Again, Allwinner may fix this in time, but for now it is another concern, especially when you consider the GPL violations as well.

Delivery/Fulfilment

This being a Kickstarter, there is, of course, no guarantee that the CHIP will ever be delivered, but let’s say for a moment that everything goes according to plan (unlikely) and that the CHIP makes its way to the hands of backers. For regular pledge levels, the CHIP is expected to be delivered this time next year. That’s right: a whole 12 months away. This raises a few questions: How far along is the project really? 12 months seems like a very long time unless they haven’t actually settled on the silicon yet in which case the whole product falls down. Another question that should be asked is: What else will be on the market by that time? Will people still be waiting when a much better board arrives for a low price? What if (and I really have no idea what’s going to happen) there is another Raspberry Pi by then? What capabilities will that have? 12 months is a long time in the land of technology – isn’t the CHIP going to be out-of-date before it ever reaches the hands of consumers?

Software optimisation

One thing the Raspberry Pi Foundation has been very good at is developing an in-house software team and a community of non-staff developers. They have made massive improvements to the UI, to the web browser, to the fundamentals of the operating system. The CHIP creators, on the other hand, don’t seem to be interested in developing that core functionality themselves. They have instead created a pledge level for ‘hackers’ that will help them to develop the software. They’re even managing to make them pay for the privilege of contributing. From a business point of view, this is very clever and quite impressive, but from the point of view of improving the software stack, I can’t see how they can just rely on volunteers. I might be reading this wrong, of course, but if they had an in-house software team, wouldn’t they say? There is the possibility, of course, that using the Allwinner chip will mean that less optimisation is needed. I’m not convinced though – it’s still a single-core 1GHz processor at the end of the day.

Community

The CHIP is a brand new product, one that is not likely to have any user base until 12 months from now. The Raspberry Pi has been available for a little over three years and has established a huge user base. The value of a good community cannot be overlooked. If you want some code to put on your small computer board, or if you need help to debug it, or you’re just really confused and don’t know where to start, you need a community of users to help you. 12 months from now, the Pi community will have matured even more whilst the CHIP community will only just be starting up. So, you might think that $9 is a great deal – but what will you be able to do with it? And who will there be to talk to about it? Something to think about.

Value for money

I guess the only way to really compare the two is to try and do it like-for-like: take the CHIP and then try and work out what to do to make it the same as the Pi, and to make it usable. Some things you can’t do anything about: the CPU, the memory and the storage. So, what’s left? Here’s a table of the similarities and differences and what it costs to replicate them. I’m ignoring postage because it all depends where you are and it wouldn’t be fair to compare a local postage charge for the Pi with international postage for the CHIP. You might find that you don’t agree with the way I’ve analysed it and clearly you don’t always need everything, like battery power for instance. This is just one way to slice it. I’ve compared it against both the Pi 2 and the A+, just for fairness.

	Raspberry Pi 2	CHIP	Raspberry Pi A+
Base price	$35	$9	$20
CPU	Quad core (overclock to 1GHz)	Single core (1 GHz native)	Single core (700Mhz native, overclock to about 900Mhz)
Memory	1GB (fixed)	512MB (fixed)	256MB (fixed)
OS storage	8GB SD card (+$10)	4GB onboard (fixed)	8GB SD card (+$10)
Wi-Fi / Bluetooth	USB dongles (+$10)	Onboard	USB dongle (+$10) – you can only use one on the A+
USB ports	4	1 (let’s say you need 4. Add either a decent hub or bluetooth keyboard/mouse. Either way, +$15)	1 (let’s say you need 4. Add either a decent hub or RF keyboard/mouse. Either way, +$15)
GPIO	40 pins	Unsure at the moment but it looks something like 30 pins. Only 8 digital input/outputs though. If you use one of their HDMI or VGA shields, though, you lose all of these.	40 pins
Composite audio/video	Onboard	Onboard	Onboard
HDMI video	Onboard	Via expansion board (+$15)	Onboard
Battery power	USB charger (+$10)	Onboard, needs a LIPO battery (+$10)	USB charger (+$10)
Mains power	PSU (+$10)	PSU (+$10)	PSU (+$10)
Total cost	$65	$59	$75
Delivery	Immediate	Next year (maybe never, this is Kickstarter after all!)	Immediate
Operating system	Raspbian with dedicated software development team plus volunteers	Volunteers (as far as I can tell)	Raspbian with dedicated software development team plus volunteers
Number of units out there	> $5 million	20 prototypes (my estimate)	> $5 million
Size of community	Large	Non-existent	Large

Now that I’ve finished doing this table, I’m not sure how helpful it is. It very much depends on what you’re using the board for.

Pi Killer?

That’s the big question.

Is the CHIP likely to supplant the Raspberry Pi as the go-to cheap computer in the market at which it is aimed? In my mind, there are two key factors at work here:

1. Value for Money
2. Community.

On the Value for Money side, I think I’ve proved that the extra money for the Raspberry Pi 2 is entirely justified. Especially when you consider what people will use their CHIPs for and what people will use their Raspberry Pis for. There are four main uses: programming, learning, general office use and entertainment.

• For programming, it all depends on what you’re going to be doing. If you want to write internet-of-things applications or home automation utilities, there’s not much in it. The CHIP is entirely capable of running most simple programs at a decent speed. The small size of the CHIP makes sense in these circumstances. However, more complex programming will struggle on the CHIP. Multi-threading, intensive graphics and general performance will be handled better by the Pi 2. If you want something portable, the CHIP is extremely good value-for-money, especially when powered by a LIPO battery.
• For learning, I’d like to particularly highlight the storage options offered by both computers. With just 4GB storage, the amount of software you can install on the CHIP will be limited, particularly if the operating system you use is a bit bloated. On the Pi, of course, you just use an SD card of whatever size you want (to a point, there is a limit) and install as many bits of software as you wish.
• For general office use, you’re probably going to be looking at installing LibreOffice. Office applications will always prefer to have more memory and more processor cores. I’d much rather have a quad-core processor and 1GB of memory to play with, and that’s what you get with the Pi 2.
• For entertainment, i.e. using the computer as a media centre, the Pi wins hands down. With a better processor, more memory, more storage options and onboard HDMI, as well as a high performance graphics processor, the Pi 2 is very impressive considering the cost. I don’t believe that the CHIP has what it takes to be a media centre – it certainly won’t compare to the Pi 2.

Community-wise, the Pi wins hands down any day of the week, just by pure virtue of the fact that there are around 5 million of them out there and the community has had three years to grow. I’m not saying that the CHIP will not generate a decent-sized community eventually, but to start with it’s going to be an uphill struggle, just as it was for the early adopters of the Pi. We should also bear in mind that according to this article there are currently 80,000 Pis a week being created. Suddenly, 23,000 backers doesn’t seem like a lot.

The bottom line

From this blogger’s perspective, the CHIP is not a Pi killer. It will doubtless gain a lot more support than it already has, and it should do. $9 is a tempting, though potentially misleading, price tag and the form factor of the device is great when size is an issue. Portability via the LIPO battery is also a great feature – possibly the “killer” feature of the CHIP. It seems to be the natural successor to the ODROID-W (which was a short-lived Pi-compatible board that also had a LIPO connector).

In my opinion, though, for general use (and for the uses that the campaign is aiming at) the Pi 2 wins in both the value-for-money stakes and it has a trump card: a community that cares.

From my personal perspective, the goals of the Raspberry Pi Foundation also count for a great deal – the future of technology is at stake and the Foundation is trying to ensure that our children are a part of that future, and that’s a marvellous thing.

I guess we’ll see in 12 months how the CHIP stands up to whatever else is out there. My feeling, though, is that it will be obsolete by that time. Whether it’s a new Raspberry Pi or something else that obsoletes it is another question entirely. We just don’t know.

For more on the CHIP, and more opinions, take a look at this ars technica article and the comments section.