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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.
Good. The price of computing power falls by 50% every 18 months or so. We should see these devices settle in at a few bucks, and then keep increasing in capability. The last IoT project I did used a $20 OpenWRT router (glar150) and it was already impressive how much that little box could do.
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One thing I'd love to see in all these devices is Power-over-Ethernet (PoE) as their power source rather than needing a wall-wart to power them. Would be great to have one cable for the entire device.
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I stand corrected. People are finding ways to do things in ridiculously small amounts of disk space.
Still, the small one doesn't really give the Pi a run for its money, which was the reason for my initial comment. After all, most folks stick a large SD card in the Pi for development, and scale back for deployment. And even then, they don't typically scale back to megabytes of storage, if only because it is basically impossible to find new stock of flash cards under about 8 GB these days. So any Pi setup you could come up with would wipe the floor with either of these RAM-wise and CPU speed-wise, and would wipe the floor with the smaller one storage-wise, too.
It is slightly smaller and has Wi-Fi, of course, so for some purposes, it might be interesting. Still, unless space is really that critical, I'd much rather use a Pi with a cheap USB Wi-Fi nub (assuming the Pi Zero doesn't have broken USB power supply limits like the original Pi).
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No one is late to the IoT party yet. It's not clear there's even going to be one.
By the time these kinds of trends have a dopey name, the party has already started. If you didn't already have an IoT product well under development by now, its already too late because all the players that will be successful, in what people are calling the IoT, already have a product at or near market release.
These guys with the kickstarter want to start a business, otherwise they wouldn't be putting the energy into this. The problem they face is that they are trying to enter an already saturated market with a product that has no real differentiation from the market. In the low volumes they will likely be able to sell, and facing competition from the Raspberry Pi foundation who are a not for profit in a saturated market, They will be roadkill in 2 years. Even an established player like Intel is getting rogered good in this market. In two years they have gotten just a few thousand supporter. There is some reason to believe they are funding the production of promised units through future donations. Even if they are on the up and up so far, they do not have a clear path to profitability. Even if their unit cost is $0, they have so far sold just 10,000 units per year. That amounts to $50,000 per year in income. Thats barely enough to keep 1 person gainfully employed. In order to be remotely successful, with a profit margin of $1 per unit, they would need to sell hundreds of thousands of units. Even if by some miracle they do managed to sell 100k units per year for two years, in two years their product is completely obsolete, and if they haven't spent a huge percentage of that money developing the next generation, they sink like a rock.
The only way to avoid that fate is to manage to sell millions of units with at least a few dollar per unit of profit margin.
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