MIPS Creator CI20 Review – First Look
Hardware Compatibility
During testing the Creator CI20, I ran across an unexpected hardware incompatibility with the Logitech EX 100 wireless keyboard/mouse.
Fortunately, the CI20 does work with with K400r rf keyboard/trackpad and the Microsoft Wireless keyboard/mouse 800.
The 26 pin GPIO header should work with Raspberry Pi add-on boards that can be used through sysfs or whose support software can be recompiled for the MIPS CI20.
Let’s try three of my boards and see if they are compatible with the MIPS Creator CI20…
RoboPi
All I had to do to get RoboPi running on the CI20 was re-compile the interface library for MIPS, and comment out the ttyS0 spawn in /etc/inittab
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I have not ported my Python library for RoboPi to the CI20 yet, but I will port it should there be a need.
RoboPi has now been qualified for the MIPS Creator CI20 platform!
Pi Jumper
As I expected, Pi Jumper worked perfectly with the MIPS Creator CI20 – I just had to use the sysfs interface.
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I added the export statements for the GPIO’s to /etc/rc.d as shown on the previous page.
EZasPi
As a prototyping board, it just worked 🙂
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If I need a larger prototyping board, I’ll just use my EZasPie Proto 300.
WiFi and Bluetooth on-board
Having an on-board WiFi adapter moots the need for WiFi USB Adapter compatibility testing – you get WiFi out of the box!
It was easy to configure the on board WiFi from Menu->Settings->Networking I just entered the SSID, selected WAP, and entered my key. It worked immediately, but felt slow.
As a bonus, you also get a built in Bluetooth adapter!
Unfortunately I only had a bluetooth keyboard handy, which was not discovered. I’ll have to look into this more in the future.
Documentation
I found the documentation available for the MIPS Creator CI20 to be quite good – for developers. Between the information on elinux.org, the massive data sheet for the SOC (NOT for beginners), and kernel sources there is plenty to digest.
There is a dearth of tutorials and HOWTO’s, but developer information is there – this makes sense in light of the intended use of the MIPS Creator CI20 as a development board for those wishing to develop products using the SOC.
If a large enough user base becomes available, there will no doubt be tutorials and HOWTO’s.
Benchmarks
I am introducing a few new benchmarks with this review – namely timing (with a stop watch) common operations.
The new benchmarks are:
- how long it takes to boot to the desktop, with all desktop icons rendered
- how long it takes to open icewasel or the default web browser, including rendering the default page
- how long it takes to open the web browser a second time (ie it is cached)
- how long it takes to open a ternminal session
- how long it takes to open a terminal session a second time
- how long it takes to open a file browser
- how long it takes to open a file browser a second time
- the load average a few seconds after all of the above new benchmarks are executed
When an application is opened for the second time (above), the first instance is closed first.
I went back to a Raspberry Pi and a Banana Pro to find out how they perform the above tests in order to have a basis for comparison.
Article Index
- CI20: Introduction, Does the MIPS Creator CI20 look like a Raspberry Pi?
- CI20: Closer Look at the MIPS Creator CI20
- CI20: Feature Comparison, Operating Systems
- CI20: Software Compatibility, Debian, Common Application, GPIO, Multimedia
- CI20: Hardware Compatibility, RoboPi, Pi Jumper, EZasPi, WiFi and Bluetooth, Documentation
- CI20: Benchmark Results (Launch times, SysBench, iperf, nbench, UnixBench, dd, hdparm)
- CI20: Power Utilization, CI20: Support, Conclusion
