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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
Thanks. Here is a list of uses I have for a device that has 16MB of storage capacity:
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).
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
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.
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.
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.