Right, you are paying an extra $945 for them to install a wifi card/antenna and preload a bunch of open source software on it. I'm sure that for some people it is totally worth it, and others would rather do it themselves.
I mostly pointed it out because I've used the Mirabox for a bunch of projects and recognized it in the picture. Its a great little ARM box with 2 gigabit ethernet ports (hard to find a on dev board)and 2 USB 3.0 ports.
Have you ever used the Dreamplug? I'm still hanging onto mine but it sounds like the Mirabox might be a suitable upgrade. How's the kernel support? How's uBoot? (On the Dreamplug, you have to upgrade uBoot via JTAG once you get past a certain kernel version)
Yes I have used the Dreamplug, the Mirabox is a logical upgrade from that. The Mirabox uses a Marvell Armada 370 SOC. When I first got my Mirabox the kernel support wasn't great. But Marvell has been contracting with an embedded Linux contracting firm, Free Electrons, to get everything into the mainline. Free Electrons has done a great job and now you can run a stock kernel fairly easily.
The Mirabox comes with the Marvell fork of uBoot which is unfortunately quite old. It doesn't have support for device-tree, for example. I'm not aware of a newer working version from either Marvell or Globalscale. There was some initial work to get Barebox working on the Mirabox, but it is very feature limited.
On the plus side, you don't need a JTAG console to reflash the bootloader. Lots of Marvell SoCs support booting over a UART connection using an Xmodem protocol[1][2]. So you can reflash/unbrick your Mirabox using just the USB serial port. (I think that the Dreamplug also supports this protocol, but I have never tried to use it on one.)
>The Mirabox comes with the Marvell fork of uBoot which is unfortunately quite old. It doesn't have support for device-tree, for example. I'm not aware of a newer working version from either Marvell or Globalscale. There was some initial work to get Barebox working on the Mirabox, but it is very feature limited.
This was the situation with the Dreamplug before it got mainline uBoot support. Is there any hope for the Mirabox?
I mostly pointed it out because I've used the Mirabox for a bunch of projects and recognized it in the picture. Its a great little ARM box with 2 gigabit ethernet ports (hard to find a on dev board)and 2 USB 3.0 ports.