C.H.I.P. project
In the Elbow

"maddog" takes a look at the new C.H.I.P. project on Kickstarter that promises to produce a computer for nine dollars.
Last night, I joined a Kickstarter project [1] called C.H.I.P. that promised to create a computer for $9.00, delivered in December 2015. Although I purchased an Arduino computer last year for $9.00, other more powerful computers still were in the range of $35 or more. This Kickstarter project is a breakthrough for many reasons.
First of all, it has a 32-bit processor and can run a full operating system. I love the Arduino, but I want my computer to be able to run a full operating system as well as a single dedicated application. Knowing that the operating system is Debian based and is a modern ARM architecture gives me faith that many of the applications I use day to day will "just work."
Although C.H.I.P. has only half a gigabyte of RAM, that is the same amount as the original Raspberry Pi, and C.H.I.P. runs a newer version of the ARM architecture at 1GHz instead of 700MHz. Unlike the original version of the Raspberry Pi, it has 4GB of flash built into the computer and promises to run Debian with "over the air" updates.
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