I bought four of the Next Thing Co. (defunct since 2018) C.H.I.P. (CHIP hereafter) computers shortly after their successful Kickstarter campaign of 2015. The CHIP computer is an interesting beast. It was positioned as a competitor the orginal Raspberry Pi and only cost US$8.00 before shipping. The Raspberry Pi cost US$25 at the time. The CHIP had some features that the Pi did not at the time including built-in wi-fi and battery charging. It was also considerably smaller the original Pi.
The CHIP was shipped with Debian 8 (Jessie) and was a capable Linux computer. I had big plans for all of them, but the main use I put them to was as an ad-blocking Pi-Hole. They worked well for that.
They have been sitting idle for a few years and I thought it would be fun to put them back to use. I've started thinking about doing more IoT stuff, and these little guys are going to help me do it.
One of the four CHIPs is in a PocketCHIP shell which makes it a pretty cool handheld computer if you can get used to its keyboard. I think that this will be nice for remote control and monitoring of IoT gadgets. I have an HDMI "dip" that will allow me to connect one of them to a monitor as a desktop computer. The other two will be put to some sort of IoT "stuff".
Because it's been so long since I used them, I decided to flash them to their initial states and start again. The goal for the PocketCHIP is to bring it up to the latest version of Jessie, because I didn't want to break the Pocket Desktop interface, the goal for the HDMI CHIP is the same because I don't want to break the destop (at least for now), and the goal for the other to machines is to make them headless servers running Debian 11 (bullseye). I will also be adding software that I frequently use to all of them.
Unlike the Raspberry Pi which uses an SD Card to carry its operating system, the CHIP carries its operating system on onboard NAND memory, which requires the OS to be flashed. Of course nothing is available officially from NTC, but fortunately JF Possiblities created mirrors of the the information (including flashable system images) from NTC's long dead web site. Thank you to the person/people at JF Possibilities for doing this.
There are a number of web pages that try to explain how to flash the CHIP with a fresh system. I believe I tried all of the options and failed, until I installed Ubuntu 18.04 on an old laptop. Once I did this, the script on Thore Krug's github worked flawlessly (almost). I needed to install the pocketCHIP image to one of the CHIPs, the desktop image to another, and the headless server image to the two remaining CHIPs. For ease of use, the instructions from Thore Krug are duplicated here.
- Remove the C.H.I.P from its case (in case you have a Pocket C.H.I.P).
- Connect the FEL and a GROUND pin of the C.H.I.P (for example, with a paperclip).
- Connect the C.H.I.P its micro USB port to a USB port of your Linux machine.
- In the Linux machine:
- run
git clone https://github.com/thore-krug/Flash-CHIP.gitto clone this repository. cdinto the location where you stored this repository.- run
sudo chmod +x Flash.sh - run
./Flash.sh - Select the version you want to install.
- Wait until the installation finishes.
- Enjoy!