The world's first $9 computer - Chip - looks cool. Image via Chip Kickstarter
Chip, the world’s first US$9 computer, has been created in the US and, with most of the common connections associated with towers, it looks a nifty little machine.
Made by Next Thing Co, the company behind last year’s OTTO – which was essentially a hackable gif camera – it is currently destroying its Kickstarter target of US$50,000, clocking up nearly thirteen times that.
Bidding to use the fund – now in excess of US$625,000 – to purchase its components “on a massive scale”, the team’s open-source little device has quite a lot going on.
It has 1Ghz processing power, 512Mb of RAM and 4Gb of storage. With both WiFi and Bluetooth capabilities, Next Thing has also created additional VGA and HDMI shields (US$10 and US$15) respectively.
There’s a USB port, a Micro-USB port with OTG functionality support and a microphone jack that doubles as a composite video-out. It also features pre-loaded apps, gaming functionality, pre-loaded Scratch and software like LibreOffice and a Chromium browser.
“The US$9 becomes really interesting when lots of people can help make it awesome” said Dave Rauchwerk, one of Next Thing’s founders, when taking to Make. “We wanted to find a way to not only give everyone access to it but to give them the ability to participate in this process of developing it.”
All images via Chip Kickstarter page.
