UDOO Looks To Combine Best of Raspberry Pi, Arduino

An anonymous reader writes "The Kickstarter campaign for the UDOO board is 7 days out from closing and they currently sit just under $4,000 short of their stretch goal of $500,000. The UDOO is an attempt to produce a single board which would combine the best parts of both Raspberry Pi and Arduino. UDOO will have a 1GHz ARM i.MX6 CPU in either a Dual Core or Quad Core flavor, 1 GB DDR3 RAM, HDMI and LVDS + Touch, and both an RJ45 port and an on board Wifi Module. Along with those specs, it will be compatible with Arduino DUE R3. The UDOO will utilize Micro SD as a boot device and run both Linux and Android. Currently on Kickstarter, the Dual Core starts at a pledge of $109."

Comments

Best of?

[ArcadeMan]

Udoo dual core: 110$
Arduino DUE: 50$
Raspberry Pi (model B): 40$
Arduino Uno: 30$
Arduino Pro mini: 10$
ATmega328P: 3.50$

Re:Best of?

[KiloByte]

Odroid-U2 $89, four cores at twice the clock, twice the memory.

Most of us don't need GPIO/etc so it's not in the standard, you can get that on an $15 expansion board.

Re:Best of?

[greg1104]

The cool part about the Raspberry Pi is that it runs Linux. Its ability to interface with non computing hardware could be better.

The cool part about the Arduino is its analog and digital I/O interfaces. It has standard connectors for that purpose, beaten into useful form via a lot of people over the years, and there's even a good sized industry providing parts that plug into them. I can wander to my local Microcenter and get all sorts of Arduino parts nowadays.

The combination of the two, running Linux but with the Arduino interfaces, can cost more than both chips combined and still be worthwhile. That's what the UDOO is trying to do. If your goal is to have a generic system that can do all sorts of hacking, this is a possibility for such a device. Maybe the price will even come down over time to have less of a premium.

Re:Best of?

[spire3661]

You can wire an arduino and raspberry together and get the best of both worlds. Also, MicroCenter carries Raspberry Pis at retail now.Not sure why you dont like the busses available on the Pi's GPIO. Its I2c, serial, most of the stuff on the Arduino. I take sensors from my arduino and use them on my pi all the time.

Re:Best of?

[greg1104]

Most of my computer interfacing work crosses over into analog signals, and I'm not always in the mood to wire up circuitry to make a Pi talk to them. And some days I don't want two boards talking to one another via some interface I maintain; I'd like to just have one board to deal with and move on. That's the mindset the UDOO is targeting.

Re:Best of?

[geoskd]

The cool part about the Raspberry Pi is that it runs Linux. Its ability to interface with non computing hardware could be better.

The cool part about the Arduino is its analog and digital I/O interfaces. It has standard connectors for that purpose, beaten into useful form via a lot of people over the years, and there's even a good sized industry providing parts that plug into them. I can wander to my local Microcenter and get all sorts of Arduino parts nowadays.

The combination of the two, running Linux but with the Arduino interfaces, can cost more than both chips combined and still be worthwhile. That's what the UDOO is trying to do. If your goal is to have a generic system that can do all sorts of hacking, this is a possibility for such a device. Maybe the price will even come down over time to have less of a premium.

Or you could skip all of that and get a Beaglebone Black. If you want the GPIOs and a powerful processor, get a Beaglebone. The only downside I have found so far is that it only does 720P, not 1080P, but I'm using it for embedded stuff which means a headless system anyways. With 50+ digital IO, and 7 analog inputs, you'll be hard pressed to get anything even remotely close for the price.

-=Geoskd

Re:Best of?

[melstav]

The $110 UDOO Dual core is most comparable to : RPi x 2 + Arduino DUE = $130 (using your numbers)

The $130 UDOO Quad core is most comparable to : RPi x 4 + Arduino DUE = $210

So yes, if you're just going to compare one embedded board to another, without taking into account their relative capabilities, the UDOO is more expensive. If instead, you compared the boards based on BOTH cost AND capabilities, things look very different.

Sure, for some things an Arduino mini is going to be plenty. But some projects make more sense with a multicore system processor and an I/O subprocessor.

Two ARM processors?

[ArcadeMan]

From the Kickstarter page, it seems this has two ARM processors. Call me crazy but it would make for an incredible platform for a MAME machine. Make the quad-core CPU emulate the hardware and the single-core emulate the CPU(s) of the original machine.

The development of FPGA Arcade seems too slow for my taste.

What... like a pcDuino?

[hamster_nz]

I've got a US$60 pcDuino, which is close to this. Sort of like a Raspberry Pi with Arduino(ish) I/O headers - they just lack the same spacing so an interposer is required. Runs Andriod, Linux and XBMC just fine...

The devil is in the detail. I wonder how good their Arduino work-a-like API library will be... with the ADCs have the same resolution? Will timing sensitive bit-banged I/O still work OK? Will PWM be the same?

at $109 they miss the point

[Anonymous Coward]

it's more expensive than buying an arduino, an Pi, and a board to connect the two.

It's more powerful than the Pi, but there never was any shortage of boards that were more powerful than the Pi and also more expensive. Those boards used to be in the $200 range, so at $109 Udoo is a bit better, but it's nowhere close to the pricepoint of the Pi or BeagleBone Black

At $35 the Pi is something that you can give to kids without having to really think about it. It's also something that you can just install in a project and leave it.

At $109 the Uboo becomes something that you think much harder about giving to someone, and you don't just leave it in a project, you remove it from one project to build the next

David Lang

Re:I hate to break it to them

[idlake]

No, it doesn't have the same specs: it's missing the Arduino. People buy don't by these boards to run Android, they buy them to develop embedded applications.

Yawn, been done, got one...

[CaptainOfSpray]

...it's called a Gertboard http://uk.farnell.com/gertboard/gertboard/board-gertboard-assembled/dp/2250034, plugs directly onto the Pi, has an Arduino, a motor controller chip, an A/D and D/A chip on it, breaks out all the GPIO pins, buffered, completely jumperable. Price equiv 46 USD.

$500000 for a $100 device?

[thegarbz]

Why on earth does someone need a $500000 Kickstarter to build a device with a $100 BOM? The R&D in this case is not expensive. Even if they have 10 goes at it the BOM will be maybe a tad over $1k. What did they have 10 people working full time for a year trying to build this? What ever happened to getting a loan and investing a bit of time into creating a product?

Is $4000 going to be the difference between pass and fail for this project? Are the people going to get to $496000 and say, "Oh well we tried, sorry guys it won't happen." and then head off to the Bahamas?

Hey! It's almost a computer!

[Jimhotep]

This trend should lead to a full computer! Maybe like the one I had 10 years ago!