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$35 Quad-core Hacker SBC Offers Raspberry Pi-like Size and I/O
DeviceGuru writes: Hardkernel has again set its sights on the Raspberry Pi with a new $35 Odroid-C1 hacker board that matches the RPI's board size and offers a mostly similar 40-pin expansion connector. Unlike the previous $30 Odroid-W that used the same Broadcom BCM2835 SoC as the Pi and was soon cancelled due to lack of BCM2835 SoC availability, the Odroid-C1 is based on a quad-core 1.5GHz Cortex-A5 based Amlogic S805 SoC, which integrates the Mali-400 GPU found on Allwinner's popular SoCs. Touted advantages over the similarly priced Raspberry Pi Model B+ include a substantially more powerful processor, double the RAM, an extra USB2.0 port that adds Device/OTG, and GbE rather than 10/100 Ethernet.
Arggh ...
set its sights FFS
Time for bed, said Zebedee - boing
Can this device run Flash in the browser? If it can, I'd be very likely to get one for each of my kids for doing their homework and general computing on. I'm not a big fan of flash, but it's necessary for some of the homework/game sites the school uses. Combine it with a monitor, keyboard and mouse, and something like this seems to be good enough to be a fully functional computer.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Those ODroid all offer big bang for the bucks, but the Pi is one of the rare single board computers which still offers composite video output, so you can hook it up to your old fat CRT TV, which is great for old-school emulation (eg with the awesome RetroPie distro).
SBCs are nice, but this one isn't really new.
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Is this the one I've been waiting for?
To Copy from One is Plagiarism; To Copy from Many is Research.
I'm torn over forcing audio out of HDMI. Though to keep the cost down, you have cut some things to add others. This is definitely a neat little board and would be great for a mini test cluster. But I feel like Pi still has that prototyping advantage. But I definitely am glad to see some similar priced alternatives in the market.
WTF does that mean?
I think that the last time I used a composite video signal was about 10 years ago to playback the video from a camera recorder with a magnetic tape.
Don't forget to add in the cost a 5V 2A power supply if you don't have one laying around. Unlike the Pi, this can't be powered through the micro USB port.
What is the url for this compo site, and what is so good about the video signals from it?
you would think someone on earth would come up with something like this but with a couple Ethernet ports, a gig of ram and a decent chip to make a open source VPN router. they seem to all be circling around the same gay thing, puttering with 'puters.
Why not go for the throat, cisco, d-link, TP etc. and acually make hardware that would best this junk?
Isn't the user base of the tens of vpn and firewall projects pretty big?
or you could buy fake chinese Android TV stick from Omozon for $40 (with all cables... memory.. power supply.. sound... hdmi... wifi... with access to android market.. yes it is "too simple", no geeky things..)
Note that you have to buy a codec license to activate the Raspberry Pi's MPEG-2 support. Once you've added the license key to your config.txt, XBMC will handle MPEG-2 just fine; I can stream shows from my MythTV backend without any problem. But, the sluggish interface is a bit of a problem, especially when using an IR remote.
Oh, no! You have walked into the slavering fangs of a lurking grue!
Our company had looked at putting together the Pi and a few pieces to build a device we could sell to our customers but we had the issue of configuring each device individually, which at the point we abandoned it meant hooking up a keyboard and tv and editing configuration files. If we could have mounted the device over USB it would have simplified configuration, we could have written a program that could be run on a PC by an end user to set up networking in cases where dhcp isn't possible.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
Only then will it be a worthwhile linux machine!
pi b+ doesn't have analog video anymore. got to use a Bannana Pi for that. The extra GPIO pins were handy though.
Does anyone know the theoretical maximum ethernet output for this? I know it would have to be limited by a bus speed of some sort.
It still has it, they just moved from two seperate connectors for analog video and audio to one 4-pole connector.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
More power, speed, etc. is nice. But what I'd really like is something even smaller than an rPi (and cheaper) that is still capable of running a reasonable linux distro. So far, I've come up empty. Don't need hdmi or sound, just USB. Anybody know of anything like this?
"He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1
When I heard about the RPI I was very enthusiastic. The premise of cheap computers, give kids a possibility to tinker, maybe spark a whole industry of these kind of things. Maybe even ending in cheaper and more faster RPI'like systems kicking the boundaries away.
... board they take a very aggressive stance and everyone that comes up with an ARM board is trying to steal their customers away. It is as ridiculous of complaining about holes and a 40 pin connector, you can bet this board will be branded as a rippoff.
But every f*cking time somebody comes up with a cheaper, faster,
I thought the whole idea was of giving children a cheap way to tinker with hardware, so what is the problem with cheaper / faster boards that come on the market ? The whole premise seems to be a lie and I have the feeling the whole RPI thing has more to do with personal ego's than al the fluffy spin... .
25 years for me, and it was lame then.
I can think have 5 ways you could have accomplished the goal of network configuration without a keyboard and mouse off the top of my head.
1. The Pi A's USB port can be configured for slave mode. The B doesn't support this but not sure if you needed a B.
2. You can fake a USB device over the GPIO ports on both the A and B through various bitbang techniques.
3. You can use the UART pins and a USB to UART chip which wouldn't be a very expensive add on.
4. Add a DHCP server to the Pi, so when connected directly to a PC with ethernet, the PC gets an IP from the Pi. Your PC program can then connect to the Pi for final network config.
5. Add a cheap two line LCD and some push buttons to your device. Create a simple text driven menu for configuring the network through that.
The big question with this is what will the actual cost be? last time I bought an odriod product I had to pay the price of a fairly steep delivery charge to odriod and the dreaded courier VAT collection fee and of course the VAT itself. I don't remember exactly what it was in my case but according to http://forum.odroid.com/viewto... the final cost of of an "$89" U2 plus a "$9" HDMI cable shipped to the UK was £108.83.
If we assume the same delivery charge for the new board as for the U2* and that it still ships from outside the EU on a regular courier service**, and that they tell the truth on the customs form then the final price will be about $35 (board) + $30 (shipping) + ~£10.5 (brokerage) + ~£9.5 VAT = ~£68.
Whereas with a rasperry pi I pay the distributors listed price for the Pi itself (which is marginally higher than the raspberry pi foundations nominal price) and the VAT (delivery is "free") final cost of a "$35" raspberry pi B+ is £27.44.
Of course i'm in the UK which skews things a bit in the Pi's favour, other places the calculation may work out different but still comparing nominal prices is only a very rough way to compare the cost of SBCs.
* I can't check easilly if odriod's delivery charges have changed or even if this board is actually available yet because odriod's main site seems to have been /.ed
** Some couriers are now offering all-inclusive services where the seller handles collecting the VAT and brokerage costs are consolidated across multiple shipments, but in my experiance only a handful of vendors use them.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
I can think have 5 ways you could have accomplished the goal of network configuration without a keyboard and mouse off the top of my head.
6. Pull the "hard disk" off the Pi and stick it in a card reader on any other computer, edit the files you need to and put the disk back.
7. Use the native DHCP client on the Pi to let it get an address from your existing DHCP server and ssh into it.
9. Program it to be configured over keyboard only, using the lock-lights for feedback (Connect keyboard, press enter until lights flash three times, type in IP address/netmask/dns/etc, lights will flash to confirm each in turn).
10. IPv6 link-local address + Avahi.
11. Default IP address somewhere out the way, like 192.168.99.99 - configured PC accordingly, connect to IP, use web browser to configure. Just like almost every home router and access point I've ever encountered.
Will this boot over ethernet?
It means its still ARM based and thus it sucks!
Slow? seriously? Really depends what you're doing with it, I have a BeagleBoard XM 1ghz single core, running Ubuntu 14.04 LTS. I use it as a server to run web apps written in Go, they absolutely fly on this little board. You just have to make sure you try not to hit the disk too much because it's just an SD card. This little quad core board will be the perfect upgrade to the Beagleboard XM for running my Go webapps as I gain more cores and it's running @ 1.5ghz, also it supports an eMMC card which is going to be an improvement over the SD card when it comes to disk speed. One of the things with the Raspberry Pi is that it was based on an older ARM chip that Ubuntu didn't support so you had to run Raspbian instead. I've held onto my BeagleBoard XM because it's a newer ARM v7 chip that can run Ubuntu 14.04 LTS unlike the Pi. I can cross compile my ARM binaries on my desktop for the ARM v7 target and run them straight on the BeagleBoard. Hoping this new little ARM board is ARM v7 also but it probably is.
2. You can fake a USB device over the GPIO ports on both the A and B through various bitbang techniques.
Do you know anyone who has actually achived this on a Pi or are you just speculating.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
Most of the competitors to the pi are junk. They're unsupported, not open source. Some only run an android. Their chip is located on the bottom of the board and risks overheating. Etc etc.
But the spec nerds go crazy for them. Imagine if some Chinese factory that produces cell phones suddenly came out with something with slightly better specs than an iphone 6 or a samsung note/nexus whatever. Now imagine hordes of kids from slashdot and Engadget jizzing over the press release and signing up for preorder only to find that after actually using the device that there was little to no quality testing or design phase. Their new phone is faster, brighter and sexier than yours. But the plastic case starts fading and cracking. A pixel dies. The USB connector becomes loose. A capacitor/resistor/transistor pops. ...in the end it's just a cheap Chinese clone with higher specs. They don't care about their reputation because that's not in their business model or their charter statement. They got their money, you got a new shiny. And then they go back to producing stuff for other companies.
My MythTV setup records in mpeg4. (Hauppauge HD-PVR) Files play back just fine on the RPi with RaspBMC without any special licenses. Even HD works, though SD works better (smaller files sizes, bandwidth throughput better supports seeking & skipping around). Supports USB-sticks. Power works well off car USB power adapters. DVD players from Walmart (automotive section) can take an external Composite input. Add in a wireless mouse, and it all just rocks for kids on long car trips.
Now if I can just get an external battery pack to act as a uninterruptable power supply....
Not only is it GigE, it's off of an on-chip MAC, unlike the Raspberry Pi which uses a USB Ethernet interface.
Hardkernel used to be one of the #1 purveyors of Samsung Exynos development boards (The other being Insignal). Unfortunately, both Insignal and Hardkernel's BSPs for Exynos boards tended to be vastly outdated. (Hardkernel was even violating the GPL with some of their Android 4.2 releases for some of the Exynos 4412 boards for a while - putting up binary images with no source code in sight.)
Now even Hardkernel is putting effort into non-Haxxinos boards...
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
The Raspberry Pi is not open source hardware, it never has been. You can't even get the gerbers nor full documentation on the Broadcom BCM2835 SoC, let alone the full design files.
In contrast, competing boards like Beaglebone Black and Olimex's OLinuXino range like the A10-OLinuXino-LIME, A20-OLinuXino-LIME and A20-OLinuXino-LIME2 are fully open source hardware with all the information being provided. In the best tradition of open source, everyone is welcome to make their own derivatives using these open materials. All four boards are also substantially more powerful and flexible than the RasPi, very well made and fully supported.
The Raspberry Pi Foundation has declined to make the RasPi open source hardware despite years of requests from the community.
To be honest the reason I originally chose to go with a Pi for one of my projects was specifically for the composite video out. Along with the plans of using sync stripper to inject an overlay into the video feed. Since then I have scrapped just about every aspect of my project that involved the composite video out, moving towards networked streaming alternatives.
Not unlike the way I moved in short order from trying to figure out how to manage everything on the limited IO of the Pi to cramming everything under the sun into an I2C bus. So to be honest I think I would personally prefer an alternative with more horses under the hood assuming that there is sufficient support for the new device.
Hoping this new little ARM board is ARM v7
TFS states that it's a Cortex-A5. That family of chips implements the ARMv7 instruction set. Cortex-A5 looks like it's a little less powerful per-MHz than a Cortex-A8, but the higher clock and core count should mean that it's much more powerful than the Beagleboard XM. I don't get the focus on Ubuntu, though. There's no real benefit to running that instead of Debian.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
Hardkernel provides Ubuntu, but only if you buy one of their overpriced memory units. The source to their modified Ubuntu will be released next year.
If you want the device, an OS on eMMC, power, a video cable, and a battery to keep your clock running, this thing costs $87.
Wow, that hardware blows RPi out of the water! I want!
Could be that he is familiar with Ubuntu and would prefer to just move the stuff over with zero worry instead of very little worry.
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
See, this is what the grandparent was talking about:
And here you are calling things junk on the basis of generality, one that isn't contrary to the claim that was made.
where is the link?
Did anyone tried this board with XBMC?
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