Review: The Tiny Cubox Computer

It's not often that you get to play with a computer which is smaller than its own plug! This is the Cubox from Solid-Run. An impossibly tiny PC which is pitched at the hobbyist and developer market.

This will be a quick review based on half a day of mucking about with it.

A Warning

This is a toy for geeks. As such, there's lots of wandering around unmaintained Wikis, reading out-of-date forum posts, and fiddling on the command line to get this thing running.

While the Cubox isn't aimed at exactly the same market at the Raspberry Pi - it has the same sort of DIY mentality. Sadly, it doesn't yet have a large, committed community (or company) behind it to ensure the set-up process is easy for the newbie. Proceed with caution!

Cost

Depending on the spec you want, the Cubox retails for £90 to £110.

That's around 4 times the price of a Raspberry Pi. Sure, you get a nice case and a smaller form factor - but what's powering the device?

The Spec

As you can see from the photo, the Cubox has 2 USB ports, an e-SATA for external hard drives, HDMI out for video / audio, and an Ethernet port. On the front is an Infrared receiver, and on the other side is an optical S/PDIF port for audio, and a USB mini port should you wish to fiddle with the internals.

There's no hard drive - it boots off a MicroSD card (4GB minimum recommended). This means - so the manufacturer says - that it's impossible to brick. If anything goes wrong, just pull out the MicroSD and start again.

Its power plug is interesting. The device only uses 3 Watts when playing back HD (and much less on standby - but more on that later). There's no reason why this couldn't be powered via a USB cable like the Raspberry Pi, instead they've gone for a barrel connector. The one I got had an output of 5W and 2A - pretty normal for USB.

You can buy 3rd party USB leads which will work with a suitable adapter, should you want to.

The whole thing is powered by an ARMv7 i.MX6 with between 1GB and 2GB of RAM.

Here's the full rundown...

	CuBox-i1	CuBox-i2	CuBox-i4Pro
Chipset	i.MX6 Solo	i.MX6 Dual Lite	i.MX6 Quad
Core Count	1 @ 1 GHz	2 @ 1 GHz	4 @ 1 GHz
Memory Size	512MByte DDR3	1GByte DDR3	2GByte DDR3
Memory Config	32 bit @ 800Mbps	64 bit @ 800Mbps	64 bit @ 1066Mbps
3D GPU	GC880	GC880	GC2000
3D GPU Type	OpenGL|ES 1.1/2.0	OpenGL|ES 1.1/2.0	OpenGL|ES 1.1/2.0,OpenCL 1.1E
HW Video Dec/Enc	Multi Format	Multi Format	Multi Format
HDMI 1080p	1.4, 3D support	1.4, 3D support	1.4, 3D support
Ethernet	10/100 Mbps	10/100 Mbps	10/100/1000 Mbps (*)
USB 2.0 Host	2 x Hosts	2 x Hosts	2 x Hosts
WiFi 11n/BlueTooth	✓	Optional	✓
Micro SD Interface	✓	✓	✓
eSata II 3Gbps			✓
RTC With Backup Battery			✓
Optical S/PDIFAudio Out	✓	✓	✓
Micro USB to RS-232			✓
InfraRed for Remote Control	Receiver	Receiver	Receiver & Transmitter
Android	Good	Excellent	Excellent
XBMC	Excellent	Excellent	Excellent

(*) 1000Mbps link is limited to 470Mbps actual bandwidth due to internal chip busses limitation

Minor Annoyances

The MicroSD slot is not spring loaded. That means using tweezers or long finger-nails if you want to remove the memory card. Because of the positioning of the HDMI socket, it's virtually impossible to remove the card without first removing the HDMI cable. Which you'll need to do in order to remove the Ethernet cable! Because the socket is upside-down, you can't pull out the Ethernet without first removing the HDMI.

Still, not the end of the world - but some strange design choices to be sure!

The unit gets fairly warm to the touch. Not so hot it's dangerous - but passive cooling has its limits. It would probably benefit from having a few strategically drilled air-holes on the top of the casing to improve cooling.

Performance

I'm actually using the earlier prototype Cubox - so I'm not going to directly comment on performance except to say that the device is great at video playback. The on-board multi-media chips excel at video and audio playback. Sling XBMC or OpenElec on it and you've got a perfect little media centre.

There are two main bottlenecks to performance. The CPU is slightly underpowered - but that keeps everything cool, so it's a suitable performance tradeoff. However the main hard-disk is MicroSD - that means very slow read and write operations, even if you have a highly rated card. Boot up time is under a minute - so it's not dreadful, but you'll probably want to use eSATA or a NAS for storage.

For basic web surfing, and general purpose computing - this is fine. The selling point of this device is the form-factor, not the ability to play Quake at 60fps.

Uses

My first thought was to use this to power a 3D printer. It's small enough to sit on most printers.

It would also work quite well as a home automation server -

Finally, I wondered about something more malicious. You remember The Slow Invasion, right?

Would you notice a black cube stuffed in a cupboard? Or sat atop a vending machine? Or placed next to a printer?

The PwnPlug is a power extension cord with a nasty little secret - it's stuffed full of spying gizmos.

The Cubox isn't quite in the same league - but you can stuff Kali Linux on it should you wish to do some penetration testing.

Verdict

For £100, you get a lot of power in an intriguing form factor. The power consumption is tiny - even if it were consuming 3 Watts continuously, that would cost you less than a fiver a year to run.

The box is close to perfect for a media centre - more versatile than a ChromeCast, easy to tinker with, subtle form factor.

For general computing purposes, it's not bad either. Paired with a screen, it will run Ubuntu quite happily and make a serviceable desktop.

I think its real strength lies in being a micro server. With built in WiFi on the higher end models, you can just drop it in a cupboard and forget about it. You have an instant home automation server, or NAS, or anything you like.

It reminds me of the SheevaPlug - a microcomputer designed to be plugged directly into a socket.

This is where the future of computing lies. Not in multi-gigahertz processors and obscene amounts of RAM - but invisible computers which can be discretely situated and a perfectly tuned for their specific tasks.

The Cubox is available on Amazon - I can highly recommend having a play with one.