HackBerry AllWinner A10 Board is Now Available for $60

The Hackberry “development board” is now available for sale on Miniand. This board powered by AllWinner A10 processor comes in 2 versions: 512 MB RAM version – Available now for $60 1GB RAM version – Available by the end of the month for $65. Both boards features a 4GB Flash, a SDHC slot, 2x USB 2.0 port, 10/100 Ethernet, Wi-Fi, HDMI & composite outputs,  headphone & microphone ports and a IR sensor. The good thing is that serial interface and FEL connectors will be soldered on the board for easy debugging and recovery. The FEL recovery port allows to reflash the board using Livesuit. As a side note, Henrik, a developer involved in Allwinner A10 software development, has done some work to reverse engineer FEL USB protocol, wrote a small program to enter into Livesuit mode with an SD card (Go to the bottom of the page section “Forcing FEL […]

AllWinner A10 Initramfs Support and Linaro 12.07 Image

An initramfs is a minimal root filesystem that is loaded at an early stage of the boot process, before the rootfs partition is mounted. This is optional but is now used by many Linux distributions such as Ubuntu in order to speed up boot time among others things. Up to recently, there was no support for this in the AllWinner A10 nightly builds, and there would be lot of error messages due to ureadahead process with Ubuntu, but I’ve changed that by: Using a boot.scr file (U-Boot Script) for each supported device in order to either follow the default init boot method or do an initramfs boot if uInitrd file is present in the FAT partition. Adding a script (a1x-initramfs.sh) to generate and install uInitrd initramfs in the rootfs. The initramfs can’t be generated at build time since the hardware packs are (mostly) distribution agnostic. If you want an initramfs, […]

AllWinner A10 Based H6 Android 4.0 Netbook Sells for $140

I’ve been tipped yet another time by one of my reader (Thank you Alex!) about an interesting low cost ARM device. H6 Netbook is powered by AllWinner A10 processor with 1 GB RAM and 4GB Flash, features a 10″ display (non touch) and runs Android 4.0.3. I wrote about the Sunlike UMPC-1021 in April, but the H6 is the first AllWinner A10 netbook – that I know of – that is available for retail. Here are the specs of this ARM netbook. CPU – AllWinner A10 @ 1.0GHz (Cortex A8;) with Mali 400 GPU System Memory – 1GB RAM Storage – 4GB Flash + SD Card slot (up to 32 GB) Display – 10″ LCD Display (no touchscreen) with 1024×600 resolution. Connectivity 10/100M Ethernet Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n built-in 3G support via external 3G dongle: E1916, ZTE AC2736, HUAWEI E1750, HUAWEI EC122, HUAWEI EM770W… USB – 3x USB 2.0 Host ports […]

$77 Mini Xplus Media Player with Android 4.0 and 1GB RAM

I previously wrote about Mini X media player, an Android mini Media Player powered by AllWinner A10 with 512 MB RAM that runs Android 2.3. Its price has been reduced by about $10 to $67.60, and it now has a big brother called Mini Xplus that looks exactly the same except it runs Android 4.0 and comes with 1GB RAM according to Deal Extreme. Here are the device specifications based on Deal Extreme overview: CPU – AllWinner A10 (Cortex A8) with Mali-400 GPU @ 1.2 GHz Memory – 1GB DDR3 RAM Storage – 4GB NAND Flash, microSD slot Video Output – HDMI 1.3 and Composite USB – 2x USB 2.0 host Connectivity – WiFi 802.11 b/g/n Video Formats –  MKV, TS, TP, M2TS, RM/RMVB, BD-ISO, AVI, MPG, VOB, DAT, ASF, TRP, FLV etc Video Codecs – MPEG1/2/4, H.264, VC-1, Divx, Xvid, RM8/9/10, VP6 Subtitle – SRT, SUB, IDX, SSA, SMI […]

Smallart U-Host mini PC Unboxing and Review

I’ve just received a Smallart Uhost mini PC based on AllWinner A10 from the “The Cubies hacker shop” on Aliexpress. The device features 1GB RAM, 4B flash, includes 802.11 b/g/n built-in, USB ports, HDMI output and a microSD card. It costs $70 including shipping. I received the device in the simple package below. There is a whole bunch of stuffs inside the package. A USB to mini USB cable for power and to connect the device to PC to act as a USB drive, the Smallart U-host mini PC itself, a user manual in English, the power supply 5V/2A with a USB port, an HDMI female to male cable. The USB to mini USB cable has actually 2 large USB connector in order to provide up to 5W power (2  x 500mA x 5V). The mini PC has several connectors including an HDMI male connector, a USB Host port (for […]

Stella Mira Pocket Console AllWinner A10 mini PC with Built-in Bluetooth and Up to 128 GB Flash

Stella Mira, a new technology startup, has come up with a new Android mini-PC based on AllWinner A10 (how original!) called the Pocket Console (aka MiraPC). What makes it stand apart is that it comes with built-in Bluetooth, has several versions based on the NAND flash size: 8GB, 16GB, 32GB, 64 GB and even 128 GB, and the company plans to release a 3G version in September. The company also provides a dock, the Stella Mira Pocket Dock, that comes pre-loaded with one of supported Linux distributions, without the requiring the knowledge and time to configure microSD card for Linux. The company will provide 4 Linux distributions: Ubuntu 12.04 (Custom build – Ready) Lubuntu 12.04 (Custom build – Ready) Xubuntu 12.04 (Custom build – Final stage of development) Fedora 17 XFCE (Not officially supported, but backed by a large development community) Beside running Linux, the Pocket Console can also “run […]

Zero Devices Z902 Android mini PC based on AllWinner A10

Zero Devices will soon announce a new AllWinner A10 mini PC called Z902 which is similar to the upcoming Rikomagic MK802 II, with 3 USB ports (1 full size USB, 2 micro USB ports), a full HDMI male port, 1GB RAM and 4GB Flash. I’ve received two somewhat blurry pictures of the PCB. as well as preliminary specifications. Model ZERO Devices Z902 OS Android 4.0 CPU Allwinner A10/ 1GHz Cortex-A8 Memory 1 GB Storage 4 GB Graphical processor 2D/3D/OpenGL ES2.0/OpenVG1.1 Network Wireless 802.11b/g/n Expanded Memory micro SD card slot (Up to 32GB) IO/Ports 2x micro USB; 1x USB 2.0; 1x HDMI (Up to 2160p); Audio AAC, AAC+, eAAC+, AMR-NB, AMR-WB, QCP, MP3, WMA, WAV, MIDI, M4A Video WMV/ASF/MP4/3GP/3G2M4V/AVI/MJPEG/RV10/DivX/VC-1/MPEG-2/ MPEG-4/H.263/H.264 Power Input 5V – Powered by the USB port Dimensions 9.7 x 2.8 x 1.2cm Total weight 200 grams The device is supposed to come with a micro USB to USB […]

Nightly Builds for AllWinner A10 U-boot, Linux Kernel and Hardware Packs

Kent of SCUZ Technologies has graciously provided a build machine (Intel Xeon E5645) for Rhombus Tech (and possibly other) open source projects, and I’ve setup nightly build scripts for AllWinner A10 kernel, bootloader (u-boot) and hardware packs for Mele A1000 (HDMI), Mele A1000 (VGA), A10 mini PCs (using MK802 script.bin) as well as a server build for Mele A1000. The nightlies are built using  a10-hwpack-bld.sh script which is available in github, and can be downloaded from http://dl.linux-sunxi.org/nightly/ The resulting files are copied to a dropbox folder, until a better solution is found. For each build, you’ll find the following files : u-boot.bin – U-boot sun4i-spl.bin – U-boot SPL uImage – Kernel image product_YYYY.MM.DD.log (e.g. mele-a1000_2012.07.20.log) – The build logs whether the build succeeds of fails. One per hardware pack. product_hwpack_YYY.MM.DD.log ( e.g. mele-a1000_hwpack_2012.07.20.7z) – The hardware pack with the kernel, u-boot which can be used with a1x-media-create.sh script to create […]

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