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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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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
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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Thanks. Here is a list of uses I have for a device that has 16MB of storage capacity:
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.
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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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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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?
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.
No antenna that you could fit into something the size of a cherry is likely to be decent.
There are plenty of wifi dongles that are smaller than a cherry, and most of them work reasonably well. For many applications, smallness and cheapness are way more important than extreme range.
I'd be surprised if a kernel with a full driver stack would even fit by itself into 16 MB of flash....
You can easily boot basic Linux from 16MB. You just need to skinny it down by deleting all the modules and drivers that you don't need.
You're not looking very hard, then. Lots of places have them in stock:
http://whereismypizero.com/
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.
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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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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