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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.
They're wanting to do a lot for $5
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I hope they plan to put in a connector for an external Wi-Fi antenna. No antenna that you could fit into something the size of a cherry is likely to be decent. Not to mention that anything you put the device into is going to reduce your signal strength.
Beyond that, my main concern would be the lack of flash storage. I used to build ramdisks for MkLinux, and you couldn't even fit a kernel with the RedHat installer into 16 MB. And that was fifteen years ago. I'd be surprised if a kernel with a full driver stack would even fit by itself into 16 MB of flash.... And I didn't even know you could still get flash parts that small. Is that supposed to be 16 GB, by some chance?
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Reading the description, it sounds like this thing will do anything and everything I could ever possibly want it to do; all that's needed is to either pledge more money or buy an expansion piece.
This sounds like it's headed for disaster.
Make that DOOM III, err, nevermind.
I've watched enough long term KickStarters to know how this is going to go.
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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It's a computer made by an onion the size of a cherry that competes with a raspberry... only in this industry...
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It's in the FAQ at the end of the kickstarter page
What SoC is used in the Omega2?
The SoC is the MediaTek MT7688K, and the datasheet is available here: https://labs.mediatek.com/file....
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The original Omega was based on the Atheros AR9331 chip that is also used in many low end home routers. Solid choice. There's OpenWRT for lots of these devices, for example the Gl.iNet 6416A or its successor, the AR150, and these also come with GPIOs. These systems are in a different league from the Raspberry Pi, but at least they don't connect the LAN through the USB port.
Running a full linux distro on 64MB of RAM? That's gonna be one lean distro!
There seems to be a "Omega" board that is already released by those guys.
Supposedly available to buy at: https://onion.io/store
(slashdotted at the moment)
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Read the storage & RAM sizes again. :-)
Values are in MEGA not Giga
It's just a very cheap OpenWRT box.
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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.
Trolling is a art,
> I'd be surprised if a kernel with a full driver stack would even fit by itself into 16 MB of flash
The full Redhat kernel and initrd is about 16MB - and contains drivers for most of the hardware Linux supports - RAID cards from 20 years ago, fibre channel, tons of network cards, etc. I'm pretty sure you won't be plugging a PCI-X RAID card into this $5 board, so why would you include those drivers in the boot image?
As someone else said, OpenWRT is pretty popular, and it's about 6MB.
According to the Spec sheet listed for the MediaTek MT7688, the CPU is only 580Mhz and it uses DDR1 RAM. That sounds a fair bit slower than even the Pi Zero
It exista, u hace 6 of the Omega 1 boards and while they are not incredibly fast they do as promised. My home automÃtico system is running on Python in those boards.
The only Display Out available at the moment for this device is a tiny I2C LCD.
You will need to pay extra $15 for the expansion dock and $15 for the tiny LCD module.
No option for Composite / VGA / HDMI / LVDS / anything
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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.
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?
Not impressed - too little storage to do much of use easily. "Easily" being the active word here; sure I've programmed lots of things with less Flash than that but it's about ease of use in a linux environment. A few meg is no fun at all to work with when there's the _potential_ for installing a ton of nice packages but you'll run out of space instantly.
Get a C.H.I.P. ($9) which uses a much more capable CPU (Allwinner H3) also has wifi & BT but vastly more RAM and (especially) Flash, more i/o, it's streets ahead. Or an Orange Pi (good) or a Banana Pi (personal fave but a bit long in the tooth now; but has Gig-E, SATA, 3x USB host ports etc)...
Saving the price of a latte to get something vastly inferior to the above options isn't worth the sweat IMO.
[FrLz]
I ask, because these tiny, fully integrated and inexpensive devices look like very inexpensive, and easily concealed WPA password crackers, or network listening devices to me.
The one with the sdcard slot could be made to do quite a few things, if you don't mind wearing out the card using it for swap space. A combination of zram and sdcard spillover swap, some sensors, and an ext data partition on the card would let this thing do quite a lot, such as sticking it on the back of a USB printer to make the printer network enabled, to running an electronic door control, camera monitoring (using vfl capable cameras), making WiFi driven toy cars or drones, and quite a few others.
For many things, you don't need a whole lot of power. I have used an old router as a pvpgn server for some time, in fact. Works fine.
For a lot of possible projects, physical size of the package and power draw are the obstacles, not the memory size or the processor.
Ruby, C++, Python, PHP, Perl, JavaScript (Node.js), and Bash programming languages
And soon, PowerShell!!!
Do you have ESP?
because Chip Has Incredible Possibilities and C.H.I.P. is only slightly larger and only $9 and has Bluetooth onboard.
I lag
Because you cant FIND Pi-Zeros and so they effectively don't exist for most of the interested market?
These are not available yet either. The difference is that I have some degree of confidence that the Pi foundation will eventually produce zeros in enough quantity to satisfy demand...
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You're not looking very hard, then. Lots of places have them in stock:
http://whereismypizero.com/
If you recompile the linux kernel, eliminate the loadable kernel modules and only compile in the drivers for the hardware it will be running on, then you can get it down to below 2MB
I remember buying my first tower PC, a 4000$ Cyrix P200+ with 150Mhz Clock on a Tomato Board with astonishing 75Mhz clock and 32 MB of memory, including a Matrox Mystique GFX Card with 2 MB of memory back in 1996. At the time it was the most powerful standard PC available, and the first to sport a CPU that needed fan cooling.
Looking at this with that in mind and seeing how far we've come amazes me.
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I'm waiting for the Omega 13.
It runs code so fast, it can branch-predict 13 seconds into the future!
First they made America's finest news source. Then they invented the Gillete Fusion 5 blade razor. After that, they made a routing protocol. Now they are make a computer?
Interesting, but quite frankly I liked them better when they made news for nerds and stuff that matters.
With "only" 16MB of flash memory, how do you get Systemd on it?! ;)
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
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.
so, "...Lame?"
The Pi Zero is a limited edition part that exists because Broadcom wants to clear inventory of the crappy old SoC that the original Pi used. It's not really a fair comparison. Nevertheless, a MIPS 24k is something that really should be avoided like the plague. It's MIPS32r2 and all of the current ImagTec-funded development effort (compiler, OS support) is on MIPS{64,32}r6, which is not backwards compatible. The entire MIPS ecosystem is a clusterfuck at the moment.
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Exactly right for 2). There are lots of Pi-style clones out there, many of which are significantly higher spec than the Pi is. What the Pi enjoys is the community and support which means there are multiple dists, documentation, howtos, tutorials, magazines, books, peripherals, robot kits, cases etc. to use with it.
The best hardware in the world is useless if you have no software to run on it. - (can't recall who said that)
Also, software aside, which one is "the best" depends on what your project is. This thing would be completely worthless for a tiny gaming system.
That a pint of beer - Basically 500ml of water with a dash of alcohol and some bubbles - now costs the same as a beautiful, intricate and tiny computer.
Viking lander
2K ROM
2K RAM
Storage was stainless steel, not ferrite, tape, just like the first recorders that Hitler used for speeches. (really).
http://history.nasa.gov/comput...
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Oooh! Reading the kickstarter page, there's a whole section on how it runs Apps!
I bet the Appy Apps guy is just thrilled!
This is on a different playing field than the Pi Zero.
On the one hand, the Pi Zero can run a full desktop Linux distribution. On the other hand,the $5 price is just a starting point. At the very least you have to add a MicroSD card to be able to use it, bringing the bill closer to $10. And if you need any kind of networking that's also extra.
The Omega2 includes WiFi and flash onboard. But the tiny amounts of RAM and flash mean that you're limited to distros that are intended solely for embedded applicatoins. (The one provided with it is based on OpenWRT, a distro that is mostly used to replace the firmware in wireless routers.) But if your application can fit within those constraints, $5 is really all you have to spend on it. It's strictly an embedded systems play, unlike the Pi Zero which can be used in a wider variety of applications.