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The $5 Onion Omega2 Gives Raspberry Pi a Run For Its Money (dailydot.com)
An anonymous reader writes from a report via The Daily Dot: Onion's Omega2 computer may give the Raspberry Pi a run for its money if the success of the Kickstarter campaign is any indication. The Daily Dot reports: "With an initial goal of just $15,000, over 11,560 backers have pledged the company $446,792 in hopes of getting their hands on this little wonder board. So why are thousands of people losing their minds? Simple; the Omega2 packs a ton of power into a $5 package. Billed as the world's smallest Linux server, complete with built-in Wi-Fi, the Omega2 is perfect for building simple computers or the web connected project of your dreams. The tiny machine is roughly the size of a cherry, before expansions, and runs a full Linux operating system. For $5 you get a 580MHz CPU, 64MB memory, 16MB storage, built-in Wi-Fi and a USB 2.0 port. A $9 model is also available with 128MB of memory, 32MB of storage, and a MircoSD slot. The similarly priced Raspberry Pi Zero comes with a 1GHz Arm processor, 512MB of memory, a MicroSD slot, no onboard storage, and no built-in Wi-Fi. Omega2 supports the Ruby, C++, Python, PHP, Perl, JavaScript (Node.js), and Bash programming languages, so no matter your background in coding you should be able to figure something out." You can also add Bluetooth, GPS, and 2G/3G support via add-ons or expansions. It looks promising, though it is a Kickstarter campaign and the product may not come into fruition.
No, it really is 16 MB not GB. Here's a whole list of devices that run Linux on between 8 and 128 MB of RAM and between 4 and 32 MB of flash.
https://wiki.openwrt.org/toh/start
The Pi Zero costs the same and has a much faster CPU, 8x the RAM, support for external storage, HDMI video output, nearly three times as many GPIO pins, and its USB/HDMI/Power/Camera ports/sockets are already populated with connectors. How exactly does the Pi "look like daylight robbery"? The only advantage that the Omega2 seems to have is built-in networking support.
I'll be the first to admit that these devices are serving very different purposes (the Omega2 seems to want to be a network-enabled arduino), but it hardly makes the Zero seem like a poor value considering the Zero is so much more powerful/capable.
Taking 5 seconds to look at the kickstarter:
There is an antenna port on the top left.
It has a micro-SD slot on the $9 version.
Fun factoid: the Curiosity Mars rover has 256 Megabytes of RAM and 2 Gigabytes of FLASH.
I'm sure people will be able to come up with a lot of interesting uses for one of these units.