Author Topic: Anyone have a Creator CI20? (Raspberry PI-like jz4780 based board)  (Read 595 times)

slaanesh (OP)

  • Posts: 554
    • Slaanesh Dev
Anyone have a Creator CI20? (Raspberry PI-like jz4780 based board)
« on: October 10, 2019, 11:55:01 pm »
Anyone doing anything interesting with their Creator CI20?
See https://elinux.org/MIPS_Creator_CI20

It's a Raspberry PI-like jz4780 based board. I got one when they first came out but it's not been very well received.
It's a pity as it's was pretty competent but I guess against the Raspberry PI was like David vs. Goliath.
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pcercuei

  • Posts: 1606
    • My devblog
Re: Anyone have a Creator CI20? (Raspberry PI-like jz4780 based board)
« Reply #1 on: October 11, 2019, 03:43:04 pm »
I have two of them, sitting unused in their boxes.
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jbanes

  • Posts: 86
Re: Anyone have a Creator CI20? (Raspberry PI-like jz4780 based board)
« Reply #2 on: October 12, 2019, 02:01:26 am »
I feel like the Ci20 board would be an excellent development tool for all these portable Ingenic devices. Normally you'd just compile for a desktop device, test, then recompile for the embedded device when you're ready.

The only problem with this plan is that a lot of these emulators support (or we'd like them to support!) dynamic recompilation cores. To make sure these work, you ideally need a development system that that execute the same ISA as your target device.

AFAIK, there are no good MIP32 development boards other than the Creator Ci20. Which makes me thing I should be getting one. :)
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jbanes

  • Posts: 86
Re: Anyone have a Creator CI20? (Raspberry PI-like jz4780 based board)
« Reply #3 on: October 23, 2019, 04:51:39 pm »
So I was able to acquire a board from RS-Components. They have about 100 left if anyone wants one. Pricey though. Also a bit of a paperwork hassle. They require forms promising not to become a nuclear terrorist with the components they send you.  :o (*shrug*)

The board itself is pretty nice. It's supposed to boot directly to Debian 7, but the NAND become corrupted over the years in storage. I re-flashed it to Debian 8 and it works now. Some pretty cool PowerVR demos are available that remind me just what a powerhouse that chipset was. (Dreamcast still looks frickin' fantastic to this day!)

Wifi is included on the board and the auto-DNS works. So that simplifies setting up the board for development. Just SSH into ci20.local with user/pass ci20/ci20. When in doubt, it's probably ci20. :P

Joining it to my network so easily means I can run my dev tools on a beefier machine while compiling and testing on the board. This is important because the board itself only has 1GB of RAM. While a lot by SBC standards, it's not much when you want to run a full IDE. Plus, if I crash it, I can just reset the board without losing anything.

This should be awesome for doing dynamic recompilation experiments.
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