ARM mini-computer ?

here is again the french newbie ! The frog who know nothing about RISC OS ;)

i have seen a lot of ARM PCB (like of course Rasp Pi), but does it exist ARM boxes/Computer/Mini computer/All-in-one with a correct price ? Something really nice, not a PCB with a generic plastic box.

A have found the Armini :
http://www.armini.co.uk/
But it is expensive for £499 !

Thanks !

If you are happy fiddling for yourself instead of the all-in-one-we-care-for-you-package that is the ARMini, have a look at a4com’s “BIK” (BeagleBoard-In-Kiste), which is basically the same hardware as the ARMini, but comes with no support, no OS licence, no shiny-ready-made RISC OS image. In PC world they would call it a “Barebone”. And you can also order the PandaBoard variant instead. You can even send them your PandaBoard or BeagleBoard-xM and they put it into their box.

http://www.a4com.de/riscos/

Should point out that CEJ Micros do the PandaRO which is similar to the ARMiniX. However if you want to buy a ready-made package I’m afraid you may have to face what seems “expensive” because its a hand-built item being sold on a commercial basis. Can’t be as low cost as mass-manufacture.

Jim

so apparently not a lot of computers… and no all-in-one keyboard/computer

I think RComp (and I assume CJE too) do a Raspberry Pi in a nice box. If you bang them an email I’m sure they can tell you more.

great links, thank ! The big cases for Rasp Pi are so expensive (about £250)…

thanks again

so apparently not a lot of computers… and no all-in-one keyboard/computer

Well, there’s one shown on this thread or you could go for a Fuze which would run RISC OS too, obviously.

Or there’s the Fairy Wren from Geekroo. And CJE Micro’s do ATX plates and adaptor brackets for about £20 so that you can source your own cables, cases and accessories. It’s a lot note fun to make your own up!

How cheap do you want this thing? £250 is too expensive for you?

I built one myself. My box worked out roughly £240 but it’s far from complete and that’s not including the price of the software and cabling I’ve bought on top of that let alone the items I already had such as the wireless bridge. I’ll find the list of components I wrote down and post it later.

£250 is too expensive for you?

Yes.

;-) Sorry, couldn’t resist.

Fun tng about the Pi is that you are a geek and have some bits around, you can get a Pi running pretty cheaply. Asides from the cost of the Pi, you can get a nice box off of Amazon for a fiver. You can get an RTC module from CJE for a tenner. You could sync with a time server at startup, but a real RTC isn’t expensive and a useful thing. The Vonets WiFi to handle non-wired networking is around £15. Keyboard and mouse are standard USB so you might have ones you can recycle. If not, a cheapie supermarket unexciting bland brand will suffice. Ditto USB hub. You can get HDMI→VGA adapters from eBay for about £10 or so allowing you to recycle an old analogue monitor. As most computers these days use digital signals, you can pick up perfectly decent analogue monitors cheaply. Then comes the power supply. A mobile charger probably won’t cut it unless you have a power hungry device like some of the higher spec Android phones or an iPhone/iPad. Actually, my Pi runs from my eeePC’s USB ports. A little on the low side, power wise, but it works.

tl;dr : you ought to get a Pi set up and running for half that… And if you don’t mind doing it incrementally, you can spread the cost of hardware over several months. Buy the absolute necessities at the beginning, then add stuff bit by bit to spread the cost.

thank you for all your posts

So I think that that best solution for me is FUZE, even if the keyboard is not a great one.

Keyboard+Rasp in a all in one for about 130€/£100… it’s not too bad.

The Vonets WiFi to handle non-wired networking

Maybe somebody can help me with the Vonets device. With it comes a teeny little CD, but I have nothing to read CDs with of any size. Would it have told me what I have to do to configure the device with the password string for my wireless router? It evidently needs something like that as it does not work out of the box. I have looked online for a manual, or for the data on the mini-CD, without success.

I have looked online for a manual, or for the data on the mini-CD, without success.

Found it in five seconds – “Vonets VAP11G installer”. Third or fourth link was to:

http://www.vonets.com/download.asp?id=1

YOU WILL NEED A PC RUNNING WINDOWS (pref. XP or 7). Sorry, that’s a must.

It evidently needs something like that as it does not work out of the box.

No, it does not work out of the box. Like any WiFi device, it first needs to be told your AP’s SSID, encryption (if any¹), password, etc…

The protocol to talk to the device is quite simple.

I was going to write a RISC OS utility to configure the Vonets, as this would solve a lot of problems (especially for those who are RISC OS only or shun Windows), but sadly the Internet sockets stuff does not appear to support plain Ethernet_II style packets (technically, socket type “AF_PACKET”, Steve thought I was talking about ARP requests, but I was talking about a custom protocol).
The protocol bounces messages back and forth as raw data to/from specific MAC addresses without TCP/IP headers (as you don’t necessarily know the IP of the Vonets, and it doesn’t necessarily know your IP, and changing IP settings if the two are on different subnets is a big pain in the backside for many people).

Setting up the Vonets isn’t hard. It’s just that RISC OS can’t do it and the Chinese maker can’t see beyond Windows…
The usual story, really… ☹

¹ You do run WPA2/AES with a looks-like-gibberish password, don’t you?

Looking at the Vonets site – this “hack” to use an external WiFi antenna might be useful.

http://www.vonets.com/serviceView.asp?D_ID=103

Just need to find myself a decent antenna now.

Given the walls around the house, maybe I ought to fit one of these? http://www.ebay.fr/itm/161321823140

Hehe, seriously though, this is more what I had in mind: http://www.ebay.fr/itm/400472449359

Ethertype 8888

I presume you’ve seen this page:

Actually, no. I had not seen that.
But it pretty much agrees with my own WireSharked examinations of how the Vonets talked to the host. [phew!]

I don’t appear to have dropped my taking-apart-the-protocol file online, but there is a sanitised version of one of the session captures: http://heyrick.co.uk/random/device_cature_sanitised.pcap

Thanks for the link to http://www.vonets.com/downloads.asp?id=1
I downloaded the VAP11G_SETUP stuff and the pdf howto file to my XP notebook. I connected the device as shown in the picture in section 1. My ip number is assigned automatically anyway.

2. Open the IE browser, enter http://vonets.cfg

At this point, things go wrong.

Internet Explorer cannot display the webpage

In fact neither IE nor Firefox appear to be able to get any webpages from the net. So I go back and set the DNS servers to what I had before (i.e. not automatic). Now the browsers work again, but neither can find http://vonets.cfg .

Rather curiously the howto pdf says nothing about the VAP11G_SETUP software or how you are supposed to use it. Running VAP11G_Setup.exe appears to do nothing. With it are two MediaPlayerLite files sysmacvo.dat and unins000.dat. When either is clicked a MediaPlayerLite window opens announcing that it cannot render the file. Hmmm – seriously under-documented, I think. No effort has been skimped on the license files, however. One RTF and one text file in English and a text file in Chinese.

Am I missing something?

You do run WPA2/AES with a looks-like-gibberish password, don’t you.

Yes. But it is not gibberish to me :).

I’m intrigued by the possibility of connecting a Raspberry Pi to my eeepc – a 901 running Xandros linux. How easy is it to set up?

I’m intrigued by the possibility of connecting a Raspberry Pi to my eeepc

I’ve tried every way I know (which isn’t much :-) to fettle remote desktop sharing between the Pi and my eeepc but without success. I can get it working OK between my Pi and W7/WXP but I’ve never really taken to Linux and I guess I just don’t know enough. I too would love to know if it’s possible to connect a Pi to an eeepc?

Linking to the eeepc should be very simple. Have a look at this for Ubuntu derived Linux.
https://help.ubuntu.com/12.04/serverguide/network-file-system.html

..and for Xandros theres a thread here http://pressf1.pcworld.co.nz/showthread.php?55760-Set-up-NFS-with-Xandros

so you need portmapper, nfs server and and create an export file. The Pi can run Sunfish under RiscOS.

Ned, thanks very much for taking the trouble to reply. I’m afraid I know very little about Linux, so I may be wrong here, but it looks like the two links you kindly gave may be to do with file sharing? It was really remote desktop sharing that I was after.

Using Adrian Lees’ vncserv 0.11 on the Pi and the ‘Remote Desktop Connection’ app that came with the eeepc, I can see the Pi’s desktop on the eeepc’s screen but when I click on anything on the screen I get a Connection Failure – “The connection to the host has been interrupted.” To give you an example, if say I have a text file already open in !Edit on the Pi, when I click on the close icon on the eeepc, the file closes OK but then I immediately get the error message and the connection is lost.

Although the eeepc is definitely making a connection, I’m not sure if I’m missing something somewhere in setting it all up. Also, despite all my efforts to date, so far I’ve not been able to find another client to try on the eeepc under Xandros, nor another server for the Pi. I’m stumped as to where to go from here – have you (or anyone?) got any suggestions as to what else I might try to get a remote desktop working from the RPi to the eeepc?

Ah not NFS. One thing you might try is looking at the screen display resolutions on the Pi. There’s no note in vncserv about this but it might be worth changing to/from 256 colour mode.
Theres another RiscOs Pi 32bit server “vnc_serv” http://www.flypig.co.uk/?style=11&page=riscos&dnload=risc%20os

For RiscOs Pi client to eeepc server theres !Avalanche http://effarig.co.uk/riscos/ and a RDP client !RDPClient http://www.orac2.demon.co.uk/software/rdpclient/rdpclient.html

The RDPClient is working fine. I try it with my Panda (the Pandora Monitor is the Win7 capture stick and I use KMSwitch to control the Pandora via Panda) and Pandora .
It works also with the RPi. But I have made no pictures.
Faster then VNC and full coloured.

There’s no note in vncserv about this but it might be worth changing to/from 256 colour mode.

Thanks again for your suggestions Ned. I tried vncserv at 256 colours on the Pi but no difference I’m afraid.

Theres another RiscOs Pi 32bit server “vnc_serv”

With vnc_serv I get exactly the same thing when I click on the Pi desktop on the eeepc’s screen, “The connection to the host has been interrupted.” This is at both 16m and 256 colours on the Pi. So, I’m getting the same thing with two different servers.

BTW, for some reason my monitor’s display won’t work properly at anything other than 16m colours so I have to load the module and then change to 256 colours (which makes the Pi’s display go black, with just the mouse pointer being displayed); changing colours whilst the module’s running wouldn’t make either server throw a wobbly would it?

For RiscOs Pi client to eeepc server theres !Avalanche

Avalanche works absolutely fine with the eeepc as server, Pi as client – if only I could get it to work the other way round…

Thanks for your reply Raik.

The RDPClient is working fine…. It works also with the RPi.

From what I gather, the pictures show RDPClient working with Windows? What I’m really after is getting a RISC OS VNC (or RDP?) server to work with a Linux eeepc VNC/RDP client if possible.

On that score, my eeepc runs Xandros – has anybody got a server on a RISC OS Pi running with a client under any other flavour of Linux?

I have/can try only with my Ubuntu-Laptop. After I install xrdp via synaptic; it works