OAKLAND, Calif.—Tucked away in a small office on a side street in the historic industrial zone of West Oakland, something magical is happening.

Dave Rauchwerk and a team of eight people are creating a $9 computer, designed to dovetail the success of their $249 Raspberry Pi-based camera. Their $1 million venture-backed startup, Next Thing Co., aims to put this crazy-cheap, hackable computer into the hands of as many people as possible.

The computer—known as the CHIP—hit Kickstarter on Thursday. Already it’s blown through its target goal of $50,000. As of this writing, the company has raised over $407,000 from over 8,000 people, including this reporter.

The CHIP is in the vein of small, Linux-based, inexpensive computers, like the Raspberry Pi and the Beagle Board. Crucially, though, it has built-in Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, so you won’t have to sacrifice a USB port. The computer runs a 1Ghz R8 ARM processor and hums along with 512MB of RAM, and 4GB of flash storage. It also has a full-sized USB port, and a composite video out, so it can work with older televisions.

In many ways, the CHIP is the antithesis to the company’s previous Kickstarter-funded project, the OTTO camera: an extremely well-designed Raspberry Pi-based "hackable GIF camera." (That camera is shipping now.) While the OTTO is relatively expensive (at $249) and is a modern, retro-inspired goofy toy, the CHIP, meanwhile is much more basic.

After Next Thing finished the OTTO, the team sought to make a cheaper computer, Rauchwerk explained to Ars on Saturday morning.

"We didn’t want to compromise anything, but [we realized] the computer that powers it is really expensive," he said. "So we went to China and had conversations and knew how much it needed to cost—we ended up with a $9 computer. $9 isn't the magic number, but $99 is the magic number for selling products."

One of those first sub-$99 products is a "hacker Game Boy," better known as the "Pocket CHIP," a $49 handheld touchscreen, case, five-hour battery pack, and stripped down keyboard—containing the CHIP itself, naturally—that is a fully-functional Linux computer.

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/05/move-over-raspberry-pi-this-startup-is-building-a-9-computer/

Interesting little board

Pity it costs so much to add a digital video output to it, otherwise it might have possibly been a ridiculously cheap Kodi box. At $24 for the CHIP with HDMI adaptor, the quad-core Pi2 seems like the better deal.

Interesting little board

Pity it costs so much to add a digital video output to it, otherwise it might have possibly been a ridiculously cheap Kodi box. At $24 for the CHIP with HDMI adaptor, the quad-core Pi2 seems like the better deal.

yeah, the Raspberry Pi 2 was like 40$ and had 4 USBs, quad core, HDMI and LAN

I also like the microSD storage not 4GB

but I guess some people could make use of this board, quite limited even if cheap tho

Windows10 iot (similar to server core) is now available for the Pi as well: https://dev.windows.com/en-US/iot

The Pi2 is 1155 Baht in Thailand, the B+ is 880 Baht.

http://th.rs-online.com/web/generalDisplay.html?id=raspberrypi