Cubietruck / Cubieboard3 - Piratebox with more powerful hardware and Has New Tricks

Cubietruck / Cubieboard3
[cubieboard.org]
[www.newit.co.uk]
UK: [www.amazon.co.uk]
USA: [www.amazon.com]

Cubietruck is the 3rd Cubieboard. It's a new PCB layout with Allwinner A20 main chip, the same with Cubieboard 2. But it's upgraded with, 2GB memory, VGA display interface on-board, 1000M NIC, WIFI+BT on-board, support Li-battery and RTC, SPDIF audio interface.

Features

    Allwinner Tech A20 SOC
    SATA supported
    54 extended pins
    Built-in HDMI/ VGA display interface
    Built-in WIFI+BT module
    2GB DDR3 RAM
    Built-in IR receiver
    SPDIF audio interface

Specifications

    Allwinner Tech SOC A20 ARM® Cortex™-A7 Dual-Core ARM® Mali400 MP2 Complies with OpenGL ES 2.0/1.1
    2GB DDR3@480MHz
    HDMI&VGA 1080P display output on-board
    10M/100M/1G Ethernet
    WIFI + BT wireless connection with antenna on-board
    SATA 2.0 interface support 2.5’ HDD (for 3.5’ HDD, only need another 12V power input)
    Storage solution NAND + MicroSD
    2 x USB HOST, 1 x OTG, 1 x SPDIF, 1 x IR, 4 x LEDs, 1 x Headphone, 3 x Keys
    Power DC5V@2.5A with HDD support Li-battery & RTC
    54 extended pins including I2S, I2C, SPI, CVBS, LRADC x2,UART, PS2, PWM x2, TS/CSI, IRDA, LINEIN&FMIN&MICIN, TVIN x4 with 2.0 pitch connectors
    PCB size 11cm *8cm*1.4mm

Includes

    Cubietruck main board x1
    SATA 2.0 cable x1
    Mini USB to OTG x1
    Mini USB cable x1
    USB to 1.7 mm DC jack cable x1
    Acrylic shell x1
    Ultrathin Heat Sink x1

More RAM More FASTER BIGGER Storage More Powerful Duel Core CPU On borad WifI and BlueTooth
and yet can Still run on a 5V 2.5A USB Battrey Pack Even with a 2.5" SATA Solid State Drive

Should Appeal more to the electronics hobbyists
Them 54 extended pins if your real creative can have some wonderful features
that can make a new bread of projects & ideas

Autonomous R/C Car With GPS Navigation & Collision Avoidance
[youtu.be]


Think about it this way if you had a Cubieboard3 - Piratebox with the GPS you can make it Self Drive down Streets using Google Map Waypoints and scout out WiFi Hotspots [Bit of War driving for possible Wi Fi users]

I if it gains a connection it can mark a GPS Waypoint as a hit and linger around a little longer till the files done and come back at a later date / time

Now this you can work on
Using Bit Torrent and Gnutella2 Protocol and modify them a little
You could get a Autonomous Piratebox to go around asking everyone’s wifi hotspot what files is it owner searching for and go to others hotspots to see if it can find them.

If it does it copys the files to the SATA or SD card and goes back to the hotspot that was searching for them files and Delivers them

why pick Bit Torrent and Gnutella2 Protocols
- file resuming
Nothing worse than trying to get a file and the user turns off there PC / Goes off line and your left with a incomplete file. at lest with Bit Torrent and Gnutella2 it can come back later or seek out others with the same file to try and complete it.

Swarm A.I Fleet of the Cars can look out for each other
- Found High Sunlight level here for Recharging
- Help Someone got me Attack the humans legs. Down with are human supressors!
- Help Someone got me Flee and run away
- I’m at these cords if your nr by and in range I can relay wifi to you
- its raining I’m going home / safe spot
- master wants us to return home
- I cant get throw here avoid it
- some files are not being downloaded any more I shall delete them due they are 1 year old and there last request was 1 year ago
- some files are not being downloaded any more I shall move them to a NAS due they are 1 year old and there last request was 1 year ago



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 06/09/2014 09:18AM by hi_tech_guy_18.

true story.

And expensive compared to the tiny routers

What OS is running on that board?

By Default out of the box : Android Jelly bean 4.3 comes pre installed on the Onboard 8GB NAND Flash (Kit Kat 4.4 after update)

However your free to change it to
- Debian ARM Linux
- Fedora ARM Linux
- Ubuntu ARM Linux
- openSUSE ARM Linux

BTW: with some fiddling around, I was able to get PirateBox running on my cubietruck !
I used the ArchLinux version, which was a bit uncomfortable to create the image file.

But, after all It works nearly like on the RPi. The only things I have to take care of, is using special driver flags, that the hostapd-AP mode works.

Matthias

Hi,
I was going to buy a router for setting up a piratebox on OpenWRT but indeed a friend of mine gave me the cubietruck. Therefore, because I still was not using it for something else, now I settled the piratebox on this cubietruck over Debian. It works really fine, and it is a lot overpowered for the piratebox requirement.

What I enjoyed the most is the availability to connect a SATA hard-disk (downloading is really fast) and the external Litium battery.

What I'm still messing, but somehow I'll do, is to set up also an FTP access (makes easier to down/upload lot of files together) and setting up a torrent client.

Hi risca,
do you think you can sum how you installed it and where you got the source from?

I recommend using proftpd for this,

regards Matthias

Hi Matthias,
I installed Debian in a quick way using a prebuilt image [1] and, following the instruction provided on the same page, I move the installation on the sata harddisk (much greater performance and space!).

The I installed the PirateBox getting the code from github [2]. On the master branch there are few annoying bugs that are already solved on branch hotfix-1.0.2 [3], therefore I would suggest you to use this last one.

After having downloaded and unzipped it the installing is really easy, just a "./install.sh default" should work properly (when I installed it there were a few little annoying problem to solve manually but now everything should work out of the box).

IMPORTANT: the cobietruck, in order to use as access point the wifi device, required to launch the module as: "modprobe bcmdhd op_mode=2". I solved the automatism adding the line inside the init script.

[1] [www.igorpecovnik.com]
[2] [github.com]
[3] [github.com]

Who seeks finds, I just installed a PirateBox
More Iteaduino A20 with berryboot-cubieboard2 here is the link:
[www.berryterminal.com]
choose :
Cubieboard 2 (dual core A20, 1 GB model)

berryboot-cubieboard2-20140627.zip
Choosing the right wheezy or lubuntu bones and install the site of the protocol and roll my chicken