Gadgetory

hello everybody my name is Gary Sims ranger authority we've got some really good feedback when we did the review of the MIPS EIA 20 creator that single board computer that rivals the Raspberry Pi but uses a mix based processor rather than an ARM based one today we're going to be looking at another single board computer this time with an ARM based processor it comes from solid run and it's called a humming board okay let's just quickly take a look at the board itself as you can see it's a very small form factor here is a heatsink above the dual-core processor which is buried beneath it here we have the set of GPIO pins here we have the audio out we have an infrared detector two USB port the ethernet connector the HDMI port and then the power port here which is a micro USB port there's also lots of several advanced different ports for things like LVDS displays and so on that you can find more about on humming boards website one interesting thing about the humming board is it has the same form factor as the Raspberry Pi here at the back I have a Raspberry Pi model B that's the right width PI one because of course the right way PI 2 has now also been announced and here is the humming board from solid run I've got a box over here and I'm now going to try and put this humming board into my Raspberry Pi box and see whether it fits and there you have it the humming board inside the case that used to house to my Raspberry Pi as a pretty good deal you can be able to find some accessories like for the Raspberry Pi that will work just as well on the humming board ok connecting out the humming board is quite simple first of all we're going to need the HDMI cable from a television which we plug just here in the HDMI port then we're going to I've already included the SD card that I put in earlier I'll talk about later how you can put different operating systems onto the SD card including Linux as well as Android we're going to need a Ethernet cable which I got over here just to plug that in there so there's the Ethernet cable this particular model doesn't have Wi-Fi by default though of course it is an option I'm also going to plug in a wireless mouse because if I'm using Android I want to be able to you navigate around the screen so there's my wireless mouse and finally it's powered by microUSB so all we do is connect in the microUSB and here and that's it we have the lock screen here so to use the mouse to drag that across to unlock and then we have a fairly standard desktop home screen we have the Play Store we have a whole bunch of Google Apps including Gmail and G+ and maps and so on some of these of course won't make much sense on a development board like this with max for example really won't be of much use but YouTube and Google Plus and so on really quite useful and as we can see there are many so there are multiple squeeze of a desktop here I've already installed a few applications which we're going to be looking at in a few minutes and here we have the app drawer this is using Google now launcher so we can see the kind of Android L type arrangement here and here is the interesting application the Ethernet app that comes in bundled by default it allows me to configure the Ethernet and if I this first window here this first icon lets me see that the Ethernet has in fact got an address from my router and then I can also do things like configure a static IP or stay on DHCP so on so that means now the ethernet is running on here which means I could probably go to something like google play and it should all come up and work without any problem there we have it Google Play coming up so there it is that's the initial things on what you get when you boot up the humming board into Android in terms of performance you aren't going to get any earth-shattering records out of this little device remember it's only a dual-core cortex a9 based device and has a Vivante GC 2000 GPU as you can see here on the screen the results from Epic Citadel showed just twenty four point four frames per second 720p HD and the highest performance level so this is gonna be good enough for Home Media it could be good enough as a desktop it's even to be good enough for love 2d games but don't expect anything really serious in terms of 3d gaming the Epic Citadel results are also reflected in the antutu score this particularly device scores just twelve thousand one hundred and ninety eight as a far cry from the quad-core an octa-core devices that were seeing in smartphones and tablets a day however again I just like to underline that for media consumption as a smart TV as a simple desktop and for 2d games that is more than sufficient however it isn't a powerhouse although the humming board doesn't do too well in 3d graphics and can't be compared with today's high-end smartphones and tablets when it comes to multimedia the board paves actually well there are two types of meter I suppose we need to consider one is streaming media like YouTube and Netflix and the other is media that is stored locally as you can see the YouTube streaming works absolutely fine now let's have a look at how it handles Netflix so the Netflix app installs and runs without any problem and as you can see I've been able to get into the Netflix and to what a bit of Doctor Who without any problem whatsoever it's also worth noticing that the sound comes through the HDMI cable and works on the television without any problem whatsoever I just want to quickly mention that you can run more than just Android on the humming board I'm going to cover this more when I come to review the cubox but basically you can run things like Arch Linux Debian Fedora Ubuntu and several other media orientated distributions like openelec and geek box the way you put new software onto the humming board issue download solid runs special firmware called ignition you download that from their website when you copy it onto an SD card using the win32diskimager program full instructions are again on solid runs website once you've copied it onto the flash drive you boot your humming board from the special firmware and you'll then get a menu that tells you all the different distributions that are available to be downloaded you need to have the Ethernet working you need to have the cable plugged in and then it will download and overwrite the ignition firmware with the Linux distribution that you want once the right is complete reboot the board and everything should come up as expected the humming board comes in three versions there's the humming board I won which is the entry-level board which has just 512 megabytes of memory and a single core cortex a9 CPU it supports Linux but unfortunate doesn't support Android however you do get Android on the humming board I - and the I - II X both of these have dual core cortex a9 processors the I - has a GC 8 800 GPU while the a2e X has the GC 2,000 GPU both have one gigabytes of RAM and the e X version has a hole more load of extra ports for connecting different things like displays and so on to the board which aren't in the cheaper I to the i1 costs just $70 the i2 $80 and the i2 e X a hundred and ten dollars and so there it is the humming board the same size as a Raspberry Pi they're a lot more powerful and with a lot more option my name's Gary Sims rounder Authority I hope you've enjoyed this video don't forget to follow me on Google+ you should also subscribe to and royal authority YouTube channel we all find loads of videos by all my brothers over at land royal authority including Jase Jo Josh lon Kevin the tech ninja ash and now Taylor Martin as for me I'll see you in my next video