Exciting news for coprocessors, especially with the two MIPI camera ports!
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PoE hat, battery, and all better specs? Gee, can’t wait to not be able to buy one lol.
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Performance wise, with its similar set of quad Cortex A76 cores at 2.4 GHz, it performs comparably to an Orange Pi 5, which combined with the dual MIPI headers and PoE will likely shake up the current PhotonVision metagame.
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Along with the better specs, nice to see a 1st party active cooler. AI Performance seems better as well (but still skeptical whether it will push it into a “usable” state with the high frame rates used).
Pre-ordering bad, but you could https://www.sparkfun.com/products/23551
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Sad to see it priced at $60. I know the current reality of manufacturing electronics makes it tough to stick to the $35 price, but I always admired their commitment to an affordable platform so it would be easier to sell as an educational tool.
I am excited otherwise, though! Looking forward to compiling Dolphin on it, seeing it run kinda acceptably, going “cool”, then putting it in a drawer for a few months before trying to get box86 to work!
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Can we make it so that coin cell batteries are legal for powering RTCs/COTS Compute?
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R602 could already allow this, but I could see how it’s not self contained per say. The RTC battery is COTS and can be used without any modifications
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It isn’t clear to me if it is legal… and I’m loath to be told to look up the definition of “integral” again.
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I’m just going to say it: the “integral” rule is very silly. It makes no sense. We should be allowed USB PD battery banks or external battery backup hats for our processors. The rule as written does not delineate well enough between safe and unsafe setups, if that’s the original intent at all.
This looks like a great Opi5 competition, and at $60 it’s affordable too. The standard camera header instead of the weird one the Opi5 has is a huge upgrade too, making it far easier to add a COTS non-USB camera.
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Rpi is also easily overclocked, so it might even perform better with adequate heatsinking.
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I agree, but hopefully they’llLimelight, an integrated vision coprocessor operate this sort of like Apple’s iPhone pricing (where the base model stays around for a couple more generations at a lower price point). It’s not like the 3 or 4 are paperweights this morning. 
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Why does this have better specs than my server and personal laptop combined?
Jeff Geerling got his Alpha unit to a stable 2.6GHz but said it was flaky at 2.8GHz. We will have to see what the production units can do with better firmware
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We had good success with the Orange Pi 5 this year, as others have referenced above. It’s more expensive than the Raspberry Pi, but the “built-in AI accelerator NPU” makes computer vision possible at pretty decent framerates:
http://www.orangepi.org/html/hardWare/computerAndMicrocontrollers/details/Orange-Pi-5.html
https://www.amazon.com/Orange-Pi-Frequency-Development-Android12/dp/B0BN15SS83?th=1
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The current Rules (R602) do allow some USB PD - the original spec (2012) allowed for up to 2A at 5V, while rev 2.0 (released in 2013) allowed for up to 3A at 5V. I’m really not sure how the rules landed on 2.5A though, it’s odd to be halfway between them. I think limiting it to the 5V part of the spec was intended to help prevent teams from using USB battery packs to supplement their robot batteries.
It’s worth mentioning that all of those versions of the spec were pre USB-C. The current standard (USB PD 3.1, released in 2021) allows for up to 5A of current at a variety of voltages. Given secondary processor power requirements, it really would be beneficial to teams if the rule was updated to adopt at least some of the 3.1 revision specs - although I don’t think we need the full range of the spec (It goes up to 48V, and we still have R203 limiting us to 24V max on the robot).
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Dual mipi connection make for some interesting vision processing capabilities. Maybe a stereo vision limelight in the future?
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It may exist, but it can be a pain to actually interface with on the code end.
Source: I tried.
If someone has more time than I do, I’m happy to walk them through the steps of what should be done.
Which arguably could be raised for COTSCommercial, off-the-shelf to COTSCommercial, off-the-shelf devices that don’t provide any force/motion.
But do we really need that much? 48V at 5A is 240W. Even a modern, relatively powerful laptop doesn’t need that much (my Macbook Pro has a 96W input, and the Dell I use for work is 130W max). We certainly don’t need that much for your typical secondary processor used for FRC, like the RPi 5 here - but we do need more than what is currently allowed for USB battery packs for them.
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