MIPS Creator Ci20 Review!

**The MIPs Creator CI20: A Comprehensive Review**

**Introduction**

In the ever-evolving world of computing, compact and versatile devices continue to capture the attention of tech enthusiasts. The MIPs Creator CI20 is one such device, often compared to the Raspberry Pi, designed for a wide range of applications. This article provides an in-depth look at the CI20, detailing its components, functionality, and performance.

**Unboxing the CI20**

Upon opening the box, you are greeted with a simple yet functional design. The packaging is environmentally friendly, using brown cardboard with minimalistic branding. Inside, you'll find:

- **Power Adapter:** Equipped with multiple international plug options, ensuring universal compatibility.

- **CI20 Board:** Nestled securely within anti-shock packaging.

- **Documentation:** A brief guide and a letter from MIPs, welcoming you to the CI20 community.

**Hardware Components**

The CI20 board is a marvel of compact engineering, featuring:

- **Processor:** A dual-core MIPs processor running at 1.2 GHz, providing ample power for various tasks.

- **Connectivity Options:** Ethernet port, HDMI output, two USB ports (compatible with standard devices), and an OTG micro USB port for additional flexibility.

- **Storage:** An SD card reader and internal flash memory for data storage needs.

- **Audio:** A 3.5 mm headphone jack and Bluetooth support for audio connectivity.

- **Expansion Ports:** Camera module connector, infrared receiver, and a JTAG debugger port for advanced hardware development.

**Booting Up with Android**

The CI20's versatility is evident as it supports both Android and Linux. Upon initial boot-up, the device displays a red power LED, transitioning to a steady glow once fully powered. The default OS provided is Android 4.4.2 (KitKat), offering a vanilla build without Google services, which limits access to the Play Store.

**Challenges with Android**

While the CI20 runs Android smoothly, there are notable drawbacks:

- **Lack of Google Services:** Without Google Play, app acquisition is challenging, though third-party stores exist.

- **Limited App Compatibility:** Apps optimized for ARM processors dominate major stores, leaving few MIPs-compatible options.

- **Hardware Limitations:** External USB drives aren't recognized, and audio output via HDMI or Bluetooth isn't functional.

Despite these issues, the CI20 serves as a solid proof of concept, showcasing its potential with future updates promising improvements, including Android 5.0.

**Introducing Linux on CI20**

For those seeking a more customizable experience, Debian Linux offers an excellent alternative. The installation process is straightforward:

1. **Prepare SD Card:** Download and install Linux from the MIPs website.

2. **Jumper Configuration:** Adjust jumpers to direct booting from internal memory.

3. **Flashing Process:** Insert the prepared SD card, power on, and initiate the flashing procedure.

Once installed, Debian provides a feature-rich environment with access to precompiled repositories, making it ideal for developers and enthusiasts alike.

**Conclusion**

The MIPs Creator CI20 is a commendable entry into the world of compact computing. Its robust hardware and support for multiple OS make it a versatile tool for various projects. While challenges remain, particularly with Android's ecosystem, the device lays a strong foundation for future updates and improvements.

**Final Thoughts**

Priced at $65 or £50, the CI20 offers excellent value for its capabilities. Whether you're a hobbyist, developer, or educator, this board promises endless possibilities. Stay tuned for upcoming developments from MIPs as they continue to enhance the CI20's potential.

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This article provides a detailed exploration of the MIPs Creator CI20, offering insights into its features, functionality, and future prospects, ensuring readers are well-informed about its capabilities and opportunities.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enmy mips creator ci20 has just arrived if you haven't heard of one of those it's a small board computer that a lot of people are comparing to the Raspberry Pi and now I'm going to open the box pretty simple box just Brown plain cardboard with a sticker there in the corner easy to lift up greetings welcome to your new CI 20 micro computer a little letter there from mips some protection and then inside we have the power adapter with a variety of plugs for different parts around the world we'll just put all those to one side for a moment seems to be just about every connector you could need there and it looks here as if this is where the board is kept very simple just get it out now here of there just see if we can screw it out there it is right let's just push that lot away for the moment let's use this bit here and so there it is the myips creator ci20 so let's run through the different parts of the ci20 board let's start with some of the big items here we have the ethernet port then next to that we have the HDMI port and here we have two USB ports and there's also an OTG micro USB port but that can't be used in parallel with these ones you have to use this one or these here's the SD card reader and here in the middle is the myips processor it's a dual core processor clocked at 1.2 GHz some of the other smaller items here is the um jumper that sets where the device should boot from whether it boots from the internal flash memory or from the SD card here is the power connector and here is a 3.5 mm headphone jack over here you have the camera connector so you can add in a camera module this is a port to for infrared to receive from an infrared remote control this is the power LED over here we have the memory chips as 1 GB of memory on board on this device and over here we have the JTAG debugger Port if you know about developing Hardware if you know about developing embedded Hardware then you'll know what a JTAG debugger is if you don't don't worry about it it's not important to understand that at this moment and that's it that's everything you need on the board processor memory a whole range of ports lot of expansion opportunities the board will run Android the board will run Linux and it runs under the myips architecture so I've gone on ahead and connected everything up here here you'll see the HDMI cable that's connected to my television here is the power supply which comes with the unit and here is a wireless mouse dongle I'm using a mouse obviously this isn't a touchscreen system so I'm using the mouse a click is the same as a tap and here is the LED which shows that the unit is powered on if you do get hold of one of these boards what happens when you boot up is the red light comes on instantly it then blinks on and off and then stays on that mean that shows you that the system is working and it's in the process of booting and then after a Time Android will come up on the display normally the board comes with uh Linux pre-installed but the kind people at mips knew that I worked for Android authority so they've put Android on here by default I've booted up and here is the default desktop so let's just start to play around and see what this is like as as you would imagine it's nor Al Android we've got the apps draw down here a few pre-installed apps including M22 a browser the calculator the clock and so on and the settings it's going to here let's go down to the about tablet and let's see what it says it's the open- source version of Android running on the ci20 Android 4.4.2 that's great so geekbench has completed it's saying it's a score of 164 for single core tests and a score of 311 for the multicore tests as we can see down here it's just repeating that this is the ci20 with Android 4.4 to 1.2 GHz processor and here it gives you all the different benchmarks for the different test that it performed 164 single core 311 multicore and so here we have Android authorities website running on the web browser on a MIP powered ci20 running Android 4.4 the Android firmware provided by imagination is a vanilla build based on the publicly available source code that means it doesn't include any Google services which means there's no Google play this can make getting apps for the ci20 a little hard I tried using Amazon's App Store but because Amazon's Kindle Fire tablets all use arm-based processors there aren't many mips compatible apps in their store there are maybe 10 or so there are of course third party stores and it may be possible to side load Google's apps onto the ci20 but I haven't tried there are also a few other minor problems with the ci20 having used several different arm-based media boxes I had high expectations of this board I had visions of being able to build my own media box using the ci20 however there are several key things that don't yet work under Android the most important of which is support for external USB drives although SD cards can be used and I was able to play a mov from the SD card without any problems I was unable to use an external USB flash drive it simply isn't recognized by Android unfortunately when playing a movie from the SD card the sound didn't work over the HDMI cable and neither did it work via a Bluetooth speaker also while Wi-Fi works there are no settings for the ethernet what all this means is that the current version of Android available for the ci20 is a good proof of concept and it shows the versatility of the board it also shows that Android is fully miip compatible however there's still some work to be done I have heard that imagination are going to release Android 5.0 for the ci20 but as yet there's no official information about that okay now that we've looked at Android it's time to see what this board can do with Linux I've downloaded and copied Linux onto an SD card and there are some instructions on how you flash a new operating system onto the machine first of all you got to make sure the device is powered off and then we have to move these two jumpers here from positions one 2 to positions 2 3 so I've just moved the jumper there like that now we need to put in the SD card here's the SD card that I prepared I put Linux on there you can get Linux from the uh website okay and then now we have to power on the device let's plug the power in here right now the fact that the light's gone blue tells us that the protein has started to flash the internal memory with the Linux operator to copy the Linux operating system from that SD card onto the internal memory this takes about 10 minutes so we'll come back in a minute and see how it's doing okay as we can see the LED is now changed to Red that means the flashing process has finished so all we need to do now is to turn the power off remove the SD card switch this jumper back from pins 2 three to pins one two and now we need to go and plug it in and we'll see that it's running Linux okay so I've connected up the board in the same way as I did for the Android test and now here we can see Linux booting up as before I've connected a mouse to the to the board and here we have full Debian running on the television here you've got access to all the repositories that have been pre-compiled for the myips processor over here are some demos to just show you what this can do we'll just let that run for a second won't stay too much on Linux but just to know this board can run Linux and Android very flexible and there it is the create a ci20 small board computer using a MIP space processor you can pick one up for just $65 or £50 my name is Gary Sims I hope you enjoyed this video you can follow me on Google Plus don't forget to subscribe to Android Authority's YouTube channel where you'll find videos by Jace Joe Josh Lan Kevin the tech ninja and Ash and I'll see you in my next videomy mips creator ci20 has just arrived if you haven't heard of one of those it's a small board computer that a lot of people are comparing to the Raspberry Pi and now I'm going to open the box pretty simple box just Brown plain cardboard with a sticker there in the corner easy to lift up greetings welcome to your new CI 20 micro computer a little letter there from mips some protection and then inside we have the power adapter with a variety of plugs for different parts around the world we'll just put all those to one side for a moment seems to be just about every connector you could need there and it looks here as if this is where the board is kept very simple just get it out now here of there just see if we can screw it out there it is right let's just push that lot away for the moment let's use this bit here and so there it is the myips creator ci20 so let's run through the different parts of the ci20 board let's start with some of the big items here we have the ethernet port then next to that we have the HDMI port and here we have two USB ports and there's also an OTG micro USB port but that can't be used in parallel with these ones you have to use this one or these here's the SD card reader and here in the middle is the myips processor it's a dual core processor clocked at 1.2 GHz some of the other smaller items here is the um jumper that sets where the device should boot from whether it boots from the internal flash memory or from the SD card here is the power connector and here is a 3.5 mm headphone jack over here you have the camera connector so you can add in a camera module this is a port to for infrared to receive from an infrared remote control this is the power LED over here we have the memory chips as 1 GB of memory on board on this device and over here we have the JTAG debugger Port if you know about developing Hardware if you know about developing embedded Hardware then you'll know what a JTAG debugger is if you don't don't worry about it it's not important to understand that at this moment and that's it that's everything you need on the board processor memory a whole range of ports lot of expansion opportunities the board will run Android the board will run Linux and it runs under the myips architecture so I've gone on ahead and connected everything up here here you'll see the HDMI cable that's connected to my television here is the power supply which comes with the unit and here is a wireless mouse dongle I'm using a mouse obviously this isn't a touchscreen system so I'm using the mouse a click is the same as a tap and here is the LED which shows that the unit is powered on if you do get hold of one of these boards what happens when you boot up is the red light comes on instantly it then blinks on and off and then stays on that mean that shows you that the system is working and it's in the process of booting and then after a Time Android will come up on the display normally the board comes with uh Linux pre-installed but the kind people at mips knew that I worked for Android authority so they've put Android on here by default I've booted up and here is the default desktop so let's just start to play around and see what this is like as as you would imagine it's nor Al Android we've got the apps draw down here a few pre-installed apps including M22 a browser the calculator the clock and so on and the settings it's going to here let's go down to the about tablet and let's see what it says it's the open- source version of Android running on the ci20 Android 4.4.2 that's great so geekbench has completed it's saying it's a score of 164 for single core tests and a score of 311 for the multicore tests as we can see down here it's just repeating that this is the ci20 with Android 4.4 to 1.2 GHz processor and here it gives you all the different benchmarks for the different test that it performed 164 single core 311 multicore and so here we have Android authorities website running on the web browser on a MIP powered ci20 running Android 4.4 the Android firmware provided by imagination is a vanilla build based on the publicly available source code that means it doesn't include any Google services which means there's no Google play this can make getting apps for the ci20 a little hard I tried using Amazon's App Store but because Amazon's Kindle Fire tablets all use arm-based processors there aren't many mips compatible apps in their store there are maybe 10 or so there are of course third party stores and it may be possible to side load Google's apps onto the ci20 but I haven't tried there are also a few other minor problems with the ci20 having used several different arm-based media boxes I had high expectations of this board I had visions of being able to build my own media box using the ci20 however there are several key things that don't yet work under Android the most important of which is support for external USB drives although SD cards can be used and I was able to play a mov from the SD card without any problems I was unable to use an external USB flash drive it simply isn't recognized by Android unfortunately when playing a movie from the SD card the sound didn't work over the HDMI cable and neither did it work via a Bluetooth speaker also while Wi-Fi works there are no settings for the ethernet what all this means is that the current version of Android available for the ci20 is a good proof of concept and it shows the versatility of the board it also shows that Android is fully miip compatible however there's still some work to be done I have heard that imagination are going to release Android 5.0 for the ci20 but as yet there's no official information about that okay now that we've looked at Android it's time to see what this board can do with Linux I've downloaded and copied Linux onto an SD card and there are some instructions on how you flash a new operating system onto the machine first of all you got to make sure the device is powered off and then we have to move these two jumpers here from positions one 2 to positions 2 3 so I've just moved the jumper there like that now we need to put in the SD card here's the SD card that I prepared I put Linux on there you can get Linux from the uh website okay and then now we have to power on the device let's plug the power in here right now the fact that the light's gone blue tells us that the protein has started to flash the internal memory with the Linux operator to copy the Linux operating system from that SD card onto the internal memory this takes about 10 minutes so we'll come back in a minute and see how it's doing okay as we can see the LED is now changed to Red that means the flashing process has finished so all we need to do now is to turn the power off remove the SD card switch this jumper back from pins 2 three to pins one two and now we need to go and plug it in and we'll see that it's running Linux okay so I've connected up the board in the same way as I did for the Android test and now here we can see Linux booting up as before I've connected a mouse to the to the board and here we have full Debian running on the television here you've got access to all the repositories that have been pre-compiled for the myips processor over here are some demos to just show you what this can do we'll just let that run for a second won't stay too much on Linux but just to know this board can run Linux and Android very flexible and there it is the create a ci20 small board computer using a MIP space processor you can pick one up for just $65 or £50 my name is Gary Sims I hope you enjoyed this video you can follow me on Google Plus don't forget to subscribe to Android Authority's YouTube channel where you'll find videos by Jace Joe Josh Lan Kevin the tech ninja and Ash and I'll see you in my next video\n"