Last week i got my 9$ CHIP computer in the mail from NextThing.co which i bought through their KickStarter project. The 9$ price is not as cheap as it seems because i had to pay $14 shipping, but all together it’s still a bargain for such a small computer with Bluetooth LE, Wifi and lots of I/O pins available.
Standard you get a composite display cable with three connectors, one for video and two for audio. There is a VGA piggyback board available which will set you back 10$ and there is a HDMI board which costs 15$, but that kind of defeats the 9$ pricetag. Since i was planning to use CHIP headless i didn’t buy any of the piggyback display adaptors.
But to boot CHIP i needed the video output because i had to configure the wifi. Luckily i had a nice 4.3 inch display with composite input, which i bought from Banggood and that worked just fine. The display is so handy that i might keep it connected. One of the uses is to display the video from my webcams which i use as security camera’s.
At the moment i am using the iceweasel browser to connect to my webcam, and switch to full screen with the F11 key.
To prevent the display from going into a powernap, i use the following settings:
xset s off
xset s noblank
And to see all settings just type:
xset q
Other uses for such a cheap and small computer with wifi are endless, for instance Internet radio or displaying domotica info like temperature, humidity, etc. Since it has both bluetooth and wifi, i could also place it near my front door and record wifi and bluetooth mac addresses of people coming to the front door. That way i could detect the mailman before he rang the bell 😉
Have fun!