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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.
The Rpi isn't the cheapest board out there. There are many cheaper ones, many offering faster processors, more cores, built-in WiFi, etc.
Bang per buck, you can do better than Rpi. Even the Zero.
But what the Rpi does have over everyone else? Community and long-term support. The other cheaper boards often only release an ancient kernel and that's it - nothing more. Yes they can run Android, but the only one they release code for is Android 4. And if the driver is buggy, you're SOL - no one's fixing it.
But the Rpi community is what makes the Rpi the better board - there's lot of support, lots of people are keeping a maintained kernel for it, and drivers are actively being developed and debugged.
How's this board compare? What are they doing to ensure long-term viability of their hardware? Or are they going to build them all, then go onto the next generation, forgetting about what's out there already?
PoE for a tiny device like this, with built-in wireless, doesn't really make any sense. What makes sense is to stop trying to cram Linux into these things, and design them for low-power usage from the ground up. These are so-called "Internet of Things" devices, and will be single-purpose embedded systems. You do not need Linux to do that, it just gets in the way. I wonder how much current it needs to run, and how long it'll last on batteries, and whether or not it has any low power modes.
My first machine had 16 kilobytes, so I feel your pain. :-)
With that said, there's a huge difference between the space requirements for hand-rolled assembly code running on an 8-bit CPU and software that sits atop a modern monolithic kernel and glibc on a 32-bit (or worse, 64-bit) CPU. :-) Just saying.
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It doesn't get in the way.
Well more specifically, it uses up a lot of space memory wise and a relatively large amount of power. However, general development is way, way easier on Linux than a smaller platform, unless you're doing real-time bit banging. As soon as you hit "oh and then I want to some data from a server", it's 1 line in Linux, compared to many on deeper embedded platforms.
Plus, you get familiarity of tools.
You won't ever hit the smallest, cheapest, lowest power systems running Linux, but then they're trying to appeal to a broader crowd than embedded devs who already own a copy of IAR.
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