Snugly situated in an industrial section of Oakland, California, is Next Thing Co., a team of nine artists and engineers who are pursuing the dream of a lower cost single-board computer. Today they’ve unveiled their progress on Kickstarter, offering a $9 development board called CHIP.
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Next Thing Co. Releases “World’s First” $9 Computer
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C.H.I.P. is a computer for students, teachers, grandparents, children, artists, makers, hackers, and inventors. Everyone really. C.H.I.P. is a great way to add a computer to your life and the perfect way to power your computer based projects.
The board is Open Hardware, runs a flavor of Debian Linux, To cut down the price, CHIP packs a 1GHz Allwinner R8 Cortex A8 processor with a built-in Mali400 GPU, 512MB of RAM and 4GB of flash storage. It also features a micro USB port, composite headphone/mic port, WiFi + Bluetooth. Connect to the internet and attach a keyboard and mouse WIRELESSLY!
All this is powered by attaching a LiPo battery, DC power, or through the micro USB.
The hardware is powerful enough to power LibreOffice, the Chromium browser, and a whole host of games and programs to teach programming.
C.H.I.P. comes preinstalled with dozens of useful applications, tools and amazing games. Beyond those, C.H.I.P. can run THOUSANDS of free applications from the open source community.
CHIP itself won’t come encased for $9, but Next Thing also designed PocketCHIP, a cute case to hold CHIP. The $40 device (Kickstarter price) features a full keyboard, 4.3-inch touchscreen and a 3,000-mAh battery which promises 5 hours of battery life.
PocketC.H.I.P. makes C.H.I.P. portable! PocketC.H.I.P. gives C.H.I.P. a 4.3” touchscreen, QWERTY keyboard, and 5-hour battery - in a case small enough to fit in your back pocket.
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| PocketC.H.I.P. |
CHIP has blown way past its initial funding goal of $50,000 and raised over $2,000,000 on Kickstarter. We just can’t wait to get our hands on one. Next Thing should begin shipping CHIP in December, with the cases and additional adapters arriving in May 2016.
Obviously, you’ll have to spend additional cash for the VGA or HDMI adapters or any other additional hardware, but we’ll soon be able to buy a functional computer with a ten dollar bill and get change.
