I found out about it a few weeks ago. It was announced in the Spring, supposed to come out in the summer, then nothing other than maybe it'll be less than $100 and available Q4 2015. Hearing Google say it'll be a few weeks is reassuring.
I just bought a Chromecast to play with for a digital signage solution, but this could be better.
I couldn't find any specs on how it is powered. From the very little research I've done, it seems like power over HDMI is possible, but maybe I'm wrong on that. Would be nice to get it down to just the stick.
>the Chromebit contains a quad-core ARM Cortex A17 Rockchip CPU and a quad-core ARM 760 Mali GPU, drawing as little as 3 watts of power, and the Chromebit contains 2GB RAM and 16GB flash storage. 802.11ac and Bluetooth are on board, with the latter meant for connecting a keyboard or mouse; an additional USB 2.0 port is for hooking up a drive or other peripherals. There’s no microSD slot on this one.
I am no expert on the HDMI spec, so I'm unsure exactly what features are required, but I have seen some TVs that can power the chromecast right from the HDMI port, but other ones that require USB power. My cheapish Vizio LCD TV can't power the chromecast over HDMI, at least.
If the TV has a USB port, the Chromecast can be likely powered from that. It works on both of the TVs that I have (neither of which are high-end by any means), even though one of the TVs only claims 500mA of output on that port.
The vast majority of HDMI ports provide the amount of power required by the base spec: 0.275W (55mA @ 5V). DisplayPort 1.2 provides 1.65W (500mA @ 3.3v).
Neither is sufficient to power the newest Chromecast dongle, but you can get far more juice out of a standard DP 1.2 port than you can from a standard HDMI port.
