The story of the C.H.I.P. reads like one of those modern fables where early enthusiasm slowly gives way to disillusion. This miniature computer promised to democratise embedded computing at a price nobody could match. Thousands of makers and hobbyists believed in that vision and put their money and their trust into an ambitious project. Behind the tempting promises, however, sat an unforgiving industrial reality that would turn a technological dream into a logistical nightmare.
How the C.H.I.P. won over the maker community
In May 2015, the Californian company Next Thing Co. launched a bold Kickstarter campaign to fund the C.H.I.P., billed as the world's first nine-dollar computer. The initial target of 50,000 dollars was smashed within hours. The campaign closed with almost 40,000 backers who had collectively pledged more than two million dollars. Those numbers spoke of an appetite the community had been nursing for a long time.
What made the C.H.I.P. so appealing was a price-to-specification ratio nobody had seen before. For under ten dollars, buyers got a credit-card-sized board built around an ARM Cortex-A8 clocked at 1 GHz, with 512 MB of RAM and 4 GB of flash storage. WiFi and Bluetooth came as standard, which removed the need for bulky external dongles. That configuration was enough to run a full Linux distribution, which opened up an almost unlimited range of uses.
The project's open source philosophy added to the attraction. Next Thing Co. published its hardware schematics and source code, so the community could contribute to development and adapt the system to its own needs. That transparency stood apart from the proprietary approach of many competitors and gathered a committed user base, people who were glad to share what they had built and what they had learned โ the same logic that keeps tools like the engines compared in our piece on choosing between Godot 4 and Unity alive and improving today.
The Oakland-based company was not content to offer a bare board. The PocketC.H.I.P. embodied a more ambitious idea: turning the C.H.I.P. into a complete portable computer. That clever little device packed in a 4.3-inch touchscreen, a physical keyboard, accessible GPIO pins and a battery good for five hours. The whole thing assembled without screws or glue, the C.H.I.P. simply clipping into its casing. The modular approach appealed in particular to people building portable projects and to anyone nostalgic for the first home computers.
Why C.H.I.P. production fell so far behind
The first warning signs appeared soon after the funding campaign closed. Next Thing Co. had planned to start shipping in spring 2016, but the schedule quickly proved optimistic. The company first sent alpha units to backers who had chosen the "Kernel Hacker" reward tier, as early as September 2015, while mass production kept slipping.
Manufacturing an electronic product at such a low price point created considerable difficulties. Holding a margin while respecting the promised nine-dollar price meant squeezing every component and every production step to the limit. Next Thing Co. was permanently juggling quality, cost and component availability. Every price fluctuation, every change of supplier, every technical adjustment had an immediate effect on whether the project still made economic sense.
Supply problems got worse month after month. The Allwinner R8 processor at the heart of the original C.H.I.P. had limitations that pushed the company to develop its own improved version, the GR8. The change did improve performance, but it complicated the supply chain further. Next Thing Co. now depended on its own ability to produce a critical component, which added another layer of complexity to an already strained situation.
Communication with backers swung between forced optimism and painful honesty. Regular updates promised imminent deliveries that never matched the announced calendar. Frustration grew across the community. Some backers had been waiting for months, in several cases more than a year, without receiving their order. The official forums filled with worried comments, refund requests and speculation about the real health of the company.
How the C.H.I.P. Pro was meant to save the day
Faced with the difficulties surrounding the original C.H.I.P., Next Thing Co. changed tack and launched the C.H.I.P. Pro in April 2017. This professional version dropped the consumer positioning to target manufacturers and developers of commercial products. The price climbed to 16 dollars, with specifications adjusted accordingly.
The C.H.I.P. Pro came in a more compact format with castellated edges, so it could be soldered directly onto a parent board. That system-in-package approach simplified integration into finished products. The standard connectors of the original C.H.I.P. disappeared in favour of a design optimised for industrial production. The improved GR8 processor brought better stability and slightly higher performance.
Next Thing Co. justified the new direction by the need to stabilise its supply chain. The professional market offered, in theory, more predictable volumes and more comfortable margins than the hobbyist segment. A development kit including the I/O expansion board was offered at 49 dollars to make prototyping easier. The company hoped that revenue from professional sales would fund the fixes the original C.H.I.P. still needed.
Part of the community took the strategy badly. Early backers who were still waiting for their nine-dollar C.H.I.P. watched the company pour its resources into a new and more expensive product instead of solving the delivery problems that already existed. That sense of abandonment fed resentment and eroded trust in Next Thing Co. The forums filled with messages accusing the company of betraying its founding mission of making computing available to everyone.
Despite the criticism, the C.H.I.P. Pro had undeniable qualities. Developers who managed to get hold of one appreciated its compactness and its integrated features. Several commercial projects started using it, among them the Voder, a car dashboard assistant developed by Next Thing Co. itself. That diversification looked promising, but it came too late to change the company's financial trajectory.
Which technical obstacles held back C.H.I.P. adoption
Beyond the logistical trouble, the C.H.I.P. had technical limitations that kept it behind better-established competitors. Power supply was one of the main weak points. The board was unusually fussy about the quality of the current fed through its micro-USB port. Apparently identical power supplies gave different results, some working perfectly while others caused instability or simply refused to boot the system.
Onboard storage was another sore point. The 4 GB of embedded NAND looked generous on paper, but reality was less cheerful. The operating system already took a substantial share of that space, leaving little room to install applications or store data. The flash memory also had limited endurance. Repeated write cycles could lead to gradual degradation and eventually to complete failure.
The peripheral ecosystem struggled to grow. Next Thing Co. offered a handful of expansion modules called "DIPs" to extend the capabilities of the C.H.I.P., notably to add VGA or HDMI output. Compared with the wealth of accessories available for a Raspberry Pi, though, the catalogue stayed skeletal. Makers who wanted to build the C.H.I.P. into complex projects often had to design their own hardware solutions, which added time and complexity.
Technical documentation swung between excellence and frustrating gaps. Some parts of the system came with detailed explanations and well-built tutorials, while other important features stayed under-documented. Developers had to dig through forums, read the source code or experiment by trial and error to understand certain behaviours. Anyone already comfortable with the languages usually found on this kind of board, C, C++ and Python, coped reasonably well; less experienced users were the ones the inconsistency discouraged.
How the community rallied despite the setbacks
As Next Thing Co. ran into ever deeper trouble, the C.H.I.P. user community showed remarkable resilience. The official BBS forum hosted by the company gathered more than 10,000 registered members, with hundreds of active users trading tips, fixes for technical problems and creative projects every day. That energy said something real about how attached people were to the product, imperfections included.
Users worked out alternative ways to flash the boards when the official tools let them down. The Chrome plugin Next Thing Co. provided to install the operating system on the C.H.I.P. Pro turned out to be temperamental and frustrating. Community members put together procedures based on Vagrant and VirtualBox that worked around the limitations of the official tool. Those home-made solutions took more effort, certainly, but they were far more reliable.
Community projects flourished in spite of the constraints. People turned their C.H.I.P. into a network print server, a retro games console, a connected weather station or a home automation controller. The PocketC.H.I.P. was a particular magnet for creative minds: some added 3D-printed parts to improve the ergonomics of the keyboard, others wrote games tailored to its constraints. One especially daring project, the Pockulus, even turned the PocketC.H.I.P. into a rudimentary virtual reality headset.
All that vitality made a cruel contrast with the slow decline of Next Thing Co. The most involved members sensed the coming disaster and started taking precautions. Initiatives appeared to archive the documentation, the system images and the resources hosted on the company's servers. Those preservation efforts would prove crucial once the situation tipped for good.
Why Next Thing Co. eventually went bankrupt
March 2018 brought the C.H.I.P. adventure to an abrupt end. Next Thing Co. formally entered liquidation and closed its doors without warning. The website vanished, the Facebook page went quiet and the Oakland offices were marked "permanently closed" on Google Maps. Hundreds, possibly thousands, of customers were still waiting for orders placed months earlier. Any hope of receiving their hardware evaporated overnight.
The precise reasons behind the bankruptcy remain partly opaque, but several converging factors explain the collapse. The business model of the original nine-dollar C.H.I.P. had probably never been truly viable. A number of people in the industry had voiced doubts from the launch about the possibility of producing and shipping such a product at that price while still making a margin. The sceptics were proved right in the end.
Competition had intensified while Next Thing Co. was battling its production problems. The Raspberry Pi Zero, launched at five dollars, captured a large share of the ultra-affordable miniature computer market. It initially lacked wireless connectivity, but improved versions filled that gap quickly. The mature Raspberry Pi ecosystem, its immediate availability and its solid technical support made it a far safer choice for most projects.
The failure of the C.H.I.P. Pro to generate enough revenue finished off the company's finances. The pivot towards the professional market needed time to bear fruit, and time was exactly what Next Thing Co. no longer had. Assets and intellectual property were sold off during the liquidation, scattering technologies that had taken years of painstaking work to develop.
Anger and disappointment spread across social media. Kickstarter backers who had supported the project since 2015 were left empty-handed, out of pocket with nothing to show for it. Some had ordered several boards or complete PocketC.H.I.P. kits, representing investments of several hundred dollars. Legal action looked futile against an insolvent company. The debacle left a bitter taste and reinforced scepticism towards crowdfunding campaigns in hardware.
How the C.H.I.P.'s open source legacy kept it partly alive
Paradoxically, the open source philosophy of Next Thing Co. allowed the C.H.I.P. to outlive its creator, at least in part. The hardware schematics and source code hosted on GitHub remained accessible after the bankruptcy. In theory, anyone with the skills and the means could reproduce the boards or build improved variants from them.
The community mobilised immediately to preserve resources that were about to disappear. Users downloaded the documentation, the system images and the development tools en masse before the Next Thing Co. servers were switched off for good. Those archives were rehosted on independent sites and on the Internet Archive, which guaranteed their long-term availability. An independent community wiki appeared, gathering the knowledge everyone had accumulated together.
Attempts at a commercial resurrection emerged as well. Source Parts, a company specialising in electronic components, acquired stocks of GR8 chips from Next Thing Co. and developed a compatible board called Original Popcorn. Launched on Kickstarter, the initiative promised full compatibility with the C.H.I.P. Pro, so existing users could find replacement or expansion hardware. The project also included more powerful variants, the Super Popcorn and Super 8 Popcorn, built around more modern multi-core processors.
Those continuation efforts ran into the reality of the market, however. The single-board computer sector had changed considerably since the C.H.I.P. first appeared in 2015. Prices had fallen, performance had risen and the range of alternatives had widened. A C.H.I.P. Pro clone sold at the same price as a modern Raspberry Pi struggled to find its place. Without the secret ingredient behind the original excitement โ the aggressively low price โ these successors were a harder sell.
What the C.H.I.P. adventure teaches us
The story of the C.H.I.P. offers valuable lessons to anyone interested in crowdfunded electronics. The first observation concerns the sheer difficulty of producing physical hardware cheaply. Unlike software, which duplicates for free, every physical unit carries real costs in components, assembly, testing and delivery. Compressing those costs to the absolute limit creates a structural fragility where the smallest disruption can push a whole project into the red.
The supply chain is a critical factor that often goes underestimated. Depending on one specific component from a single supplier creates a single point of failure. Price swings, stock shortages or specification changes can wipe out the profitability of a product overnight. Established companies have the volume and the relationships to negotiate stable contracts; startups like Next Thing Co. take the market as it comes, with no protection.
Transparent communication with backers and customers is an ethical requirement as much as a strategic one. Next Thing Co. kept an upbeat tone long after the situation had started to deteriorate. That posture created unrealistic expectations and amplified the eventual disappointment. More honest communication about the difficulties might have let some backers ask for a refund before it was too late, even if that would have accelerated the cash crisis.
The software and hardware ecosystem counts as much as the technical specifications. On paper the C.H.I.P. offered features comparable to or better than its rivals, but it lacked the mature ecosystem that makes adoption easy. The abundant tutorials, the varied accessories, the optimised Linux distributions and the active community that characterise the Raspberry Pi represent considerable value that raw specifications do not capture.
How the single-board computer market has evolved
The C.H.I.P. era coincided with a maturing phase in the single-board computer market. The Raspberry Pi already dominated the sector, but plenty of others were trying their luck with differentiated approaches. Some aimed at raw power, others at extreme compactness, others again at minimal consumption. The C.H.I.P. bet on an ultra-low price as its main point of difference.
That pricing strategy turned out to matter less than expected. Users were quite willing to pay a few dollars more for a product that was immediately available, well documented and backed by a company likely to still exist next year. The gap between nine and fifteen dollars looks significant in percentage terms, yet it stays modest in absolute value for most projects. The indirect costs โ hours spent solving compatibility problems, difficulty finding suitable accessories, the risk of support disappearing โ weighed far more heavily in the balance.
The market gradually consolidated around a few dominant players. Raspberry Pi strengthened its position with successive versions that improved performance while maintaining compatibility. Arduino stayed indispensable for projects needing precise real-time control. The Beaglebone boards targeted industrial applications where robustness and reliability matter most. The niches available to newcomers kept shrinking, unless they brought a genuinely disruptive innovation.
The arrival of the ESP32 and ESP8266 changed the picture for IoT applications. These ultra-compact, ultra-cheap microcontrollers, with WiFi and Bluetooth built in, ate into the bottom of the market where the C.H.I.P. had hoped to thrive. For a few dollars a developer got enough computing power for connected sensors or simple automation, without the complexity of a full Linux system.
Why some users remain attached to the C.H.I.P.
Despite the bankruptcy of Next Thing Co. and the arrival of faster modern alternatives, a community of die-hards still uses and enjoys its C.H.I.P. boards. These users point to specific features that competitors do not reproduce exactly. Integrated lithium-ion battery management, for example, makes portable projects considerably simpler. Plugging a LiPo battery straight in, with no external charging circuit, is a genuine practical advantage.
The compact format of the original C.H.I.P. also appealed for certain applications. Its small dimensions and the layout of its connectors made it easy to fit into cramped enclosures where a standard Raspberry Pi struggled. Projects that needed that compactness while keeping the power of a full Linux system found few equivalents on the market.
The PocketC.H.I.P. retains a charm that is hard to reproduce. Its retro-futuristic look, its physical keyboard and its built-in screen make it an endearing object that goes beyond mere function. Several users describe it with real affection, mentioning the tactile pleasure of using this small self-contained computer. Some turned it into a portable terminal for reaching remote servers, a nomadic retro-gaming console or a tool for teaching children to program.
Surviving C.H.I.P. units are gradually gaining value on the second-hand market. On eBay and other platforms, new or lightly used boards now sell well above their original price. PocketC.H.I.P. units in particular reach surprising figures, their growing rarity feeding demand from collectors and nostalgics. There is a cruel irony in that posthumous appreciation: the product is finding the commercial success it deserved, far too late to save its creator.
What the future holds for ultra-affordable computers
The ultra-affordable single-board segment keeps evolving, even though the C.H.I.P. approach failed. Established manufacturers understand how much this market matters and keep pushing out more accessible solutions. The Raspberry Pi Pico, launched at four dollars, targets simple embedded applications with minimal power draw. Other players, mostly Chinese, produce full Linux boards for around ten dollars, helped by finely tuned supply chains.
Artificial intelligence and machine learning are creating fresh demand for specialised single-board computers. Boards with neural accelerators can run image recognition or language processing models locally. That specialisation opens niches where performance and energy efficiency matter more than raw cost, which justifies prices well above the mythical nine dollars of the C.H.I.P.
The move towards edge computing favours compact, self-sufficient solutions. Industrial applications, advanced home automation and the Internet of Things all need computers that run reliably for years without maintenance. Those requirements steer the market towards robustness and longevity rather than towards the lowest possible price.
Training platforms, at Itamde and elsewhere, are adapting to this shifting landscape. Embedded programming courses now have to cover a variety of hardware instead of focusing on a single platform. That diversity enriches the learning but complicates standardisation. Students discover that every board has its own quirks, strengths and limits, which prepares them rather better for the reality of professional development.
The C.H.I.P. will be remembered as much for the warning it carries as for the boldness of its idea. Its story is a reminder that technological promises have to rest on solid economic and logistical foundations. Community enthusiasm, however sincere, cannot make up for fragile commercial ground. The backers who lost out keep a bitter memory of it, but the lesson benefits the whole maker ecosystem. Later projects now show more transparency about their difficulties, set more realistic timelines and pay closer attention to the traps that sank Next Thing Co.
The open source legacy of the C.H.I.P. does at least guarantee that the work is not entirely lost. The technical solutions imagined for the project still inspire new creations. Community archives preserve the accumulated knowledge, so the curious can learn from the experience years after the bankruptcy. Seen that way, the C.H.I.P. rises above its commercial failure to become a fascinating case study on the promise and the peril of crowdfunded hardware.
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