I have one of these, and there are a couple of notable things I found out while setting it up.
* It has CEC support, which is rare among similar devices. (The only other one I know is RPi. Thanks for nothing Ouya.)
* The extra CPU and RAM is fantastic. The little guy flies along. I was happily compiling things on it at quite reasonable speeds.
* The eMMC option is pretty cool, but be careful because their MicroSD adapter is pretty finicky (it wouldn't work on my Macbook, did work on my Mac Mini running Linux)
* It has a terribly annoying blinking blue light that can't be turned off and is brighter than the sun. I put some tape over it and felt briefly like macgyver.
* Nothing except for XBMC supports hardware video decoding. That means if you want to use VLC or something, too bad (for now anyway).
* Android on it was just about useless, but it's neat to have it as an option.
* There are a bunch of proprietary blobs and versions of things that need to be installed on the device for it to work. In practice, this isn't really a problem because this is all done for you in the stock image.
* XBMC was still pretty laggy on Ubuntu, and couldn't play video without skipping. Apparently it's better on Debian. Nobody seems to understand why this is. Apparently it's blazing fast on Android.
* The devs are insanely active, both in pushing code and on the forums. I say devs, I think it's one guy who never sleeps.
All told, I'm currently not using it for XBMC (holding out for the Ubuntu situation being fixed), but I am running other stuff on it that was taxing the memory and CPU of my Pi, so I'm pretty happy with that. It doesn't have anything like the plug-it-in-now-it-works experience of Raspbmc.
I found myself going down a dark and terrible road of alternate mali drivers, Xorg munging and running es2gears over and over again. If you're considering doing that, don't do it. You will achieve only regret.
Does anything support video encoding at reasonable speed?
I need an h264 "genlock" device that could do reasonable resolutions & frame rates (720p@30fps, 1920p@15fps). It should be stupid simple if devices let you put some code between sensor and the encoder, but basically nothing does. Apparently, you can do it on the rPi, but it doesn't have enough power to decode a stream, "genlock" and encode it in real time. (Though, I'm going to try - maybe it can be done).
I have been looking for a single board setup that can run flash in the browser. Have you tried running flash in a browser (e.g., youtube)? Would love to know. It sounds like a great little board.
I have an ODROID-XU which is a 8 core (in theory) 32 bit ARM chip. A few things I've learned along the way:
* You need to get a serial cable. The XU required a strange serial cable (ie. NOT the usual 3.3V CP2102).
* You'll need a lot of other stuff to make ARM usable: at a minimum: a high quality SD-card, SSD or eMMC; and a monitor which can handle all of DisplayPort, DVI, HDMI (since you never know which one will work, if any).
* ODROID kernel support is terrible. You'll get a kernel which works, but nothing is upstreamed or developed in the open so forget about ongoing support or updates.
* Everyone who's serious about ARM is waiting for 64 bit to become available. 32 bit hardware just isn't that interesting.
All these tiny board SoC's are fine and dandy, but as long as they do not have a better I/O (i.e. more bandwidth, read gigabit ethernet speeds) than the RPi; there's no real advantage IMO.
* You can already output HD with the RPi
* You can use (some) codecs at an useful speed (no need for more GHz)
* It's cheap
* It uses almost no power
* You have useful (physical) IO
* (fill in what you like about the RPi)
So what does that leave with the alternatives? More RAM and more processing power. But of what use is it, when you're still limited how fast you can bring data you want to crunch on in and out of the system only at a slow pace?
And if you need a lot of processing power but have only little data; I'm tempted to say that such a small system is the wrong choice anyway.
What baffles me is there is a simple to understand addition to these RPi competitors that would make them very useful for a number of key applications, that nearly always seems to be missing, namely... a SATA connector. It would be really handy for both NAS boxes and media centres.
- Running Android seems .. useless without a touch device. Tried it, was basically useless for me.
- Running various Linux distributions was not nice either:
* (Fixable) The community projects feel a lot less polished than anything the Pi has
* (Unfixable) The HDMI port sucks. On all TVs I connected it to I have under-/overscan issues. There are no boot options similar to the Pi that allow me to fix that. The IRC channel suggested to 'Fix the TV'...
Looks nice, cheap, interesting specs, but collects dust over here.
I found it to be pretty much the same. Initial set up was very convoluted compared to the Pi. Community resources were scarce and I basically had to fudge an Arch install without much guidance.
However it has superseded my Pi (HTTP/Torrent/SMB/DLNA Media server) which was running Raspbian and it's a lot faster at doing it.
I'm using the predecessor ODROID-U2 as a small home server. It runs Linux (Ubuntu via Linaro IIRC) and I've never had a problem with software I need not being available because it's ARM instead of x86. Basically, it rocks. Do get the MMC adapter and USB cable for setup, and have fun.
Why do so many devices favour mini and micro HDMI ports like some kind of miniaturization fetish? Yet they determined they had enough room on their PCB for three full size USB ports.
It just forces everyone to add a mandatory adapter or adapter-cable into their shopping carts.
Because it is somewhat likely to be used in a headless mode. For an application I chose the U2 for size was an absolute priority (even considered removing the USB and ethernet ports and soldering wires to the boards), and HDMI was completely pointless.
On small boards, the leverage created by a full-size USB cablehead often jostles the board around and makes it unstable, which is obnoxious. Smaller cables don't have the same problem.
No OpenBSD support, closed source graphics, blob ridden.
The performance/price is awesome and I guess it's cool if you can get it to work for whatever you have in mind. But I prefer supporting a platform that contributes upstream and promotes a proper open work ethic.
Beaglebone Black for me although the performance is nowhere near this.
Every once in a while I really consider how much, say, my parents and grandparents paid for computer processing power (grandfather's C64 at ~ $500, our first PC running a 386 at $1100) and compare it to the torrent of amount of memory, processing speed, etc. that's shooting out of the Earth now.
It's astonishing, Moore's Law (and variants) not withstanding.
We know there is some limit to Moore's Law, but I have a hard time really wrapping my head around what kind of nano computing we'll have available for pennies in a decade.
> Every once in a while I really consider how much, say, my parents and grandparents paid for computer processing power (grandfather's C64 at ~ $500, our first PC running a 386 at $1100) and compare it to the torrent of amount of memory, processing speed, etc. that's shooting out of the Earth now.
It's such a simple way of looking at it but I've always found this amazing:
There was as much progress between 1965 and 2012 as between 2012 and now.
Video and games are the only consumer tasks (that I can think of) that drive the consumer technology further. Pretty much everything else already runs fast on the previous gen hardware.
When it comes to video, even my wife's slow netbook can play 1080p MKVs without stuttering. 4K can be played and recorded by current gen hardware.
So it looks like games will drive the hardware improvements.
Back in the late '60s, I worked at a place that had an IBM mainframe, with a big refrigerator-sized expansion that contained some add-on memory: an entire megabyte. They got it on sale for less than a million dollars (not much less, but less). What's that, about a factor of 100 million in cost, and probably a thousandfold increase in bandwidth? It's mindblowing to contemplate.
more like a miniaturized PC. The nice thing about the Pi is that it has the header with all those nice peripherals, i2c, GPIO, serial, etc... It doesn't look like this has those out of the box.
You may be able to pick up a board based on the Atheros AR9331, Alfa made one called the Hornet-UB [1], although I can only find them second hand (look for wifi pineapple mk4 for on ebay).
If you're looking to design your own hardware, there are plenty of ICs with dual NICs. For example the TI chip on the BeagleBone Black has dual ethernet NICs, but only one is used on the board.
Consider a ubiquity networks edge router lite. It is $99 and has 3 gigabit Ethernet ports and dual core MIPS CPU and hardware packet forwarding. Runs Debian Linux. Active community.
As its name somewhat hints at, this looks like the SoC from a Galaxy S3 in a RPi-like form factor. A quick Google brought up a pretty detailed 900+ page datasheet for the SoC, so they're ahead of the RPi in openness already.
I love seeing all of these cheap ARM boards coming on to the market. I am a big fan of the BeagleBone Black but the supply problems recently have had me looking around for an alternative. Unfortunately my project uses the USB device port and there don't seem to be alternatives that offer USB device or OTG support.
Am I the only one who wants OTG support? Or are there boards with USB OTG ports that I have missed?
If you're running a PHP site, please, please turn off display_errors. It's really bad practice to have your PHP code dumping your query strings to the web when you have a failure.
doing armlinux for a living, these sub-100 devices pop up daily nowadays, I was thinking yesterday probably it's a good idea to set up a small site to list all of them.
the primary ones are :
TI AM335x(beaglebone), Freescale iMX6, Allwinner A20. all the three have SATA, HDMI, Android,etc
[+] [-] sgentle|12 years ago|reply
* It has CEC support, which is rare among similar devices. (The only other one I know is RPi. Thanks for nothing Ouya.)
* The extra CPU and RAM is fantastic. The little guy flies along. I was happily compiling things on it at quite reasonable speeds.
* The eMMC option is pretty cool, but be careful because their MicroSD adapter is pretty finicky (it wouldn't work on my Macbook, did work on my Mac Mini running Linux)
* It has a terribly annoying blinking blue light that can't be turned off and is brighter than the sun. I put some tape over it and felt briefly like macgyver.
* Nothing except for XBMC supports hardware video decoding. That means if you want to use VLC or something, too bad (for now anyway).
* Android on it was just about useless, but it's neat to have it as an option.
* There are a bunch of proprietary blobs and versions of things that need to be installed on the device for it to work. In practice, this isn't really a problem because this is all done for you in the stock image.
* XBMC was still pretty laggy on Ubuntu, and couldn't play video without skipping. Apparently it's better on Debian. Nobody seems to understand why this is. Apparently it's blazing fast on Android.
* The devs are insanely active, both in pushing code and on the forums. I say devs, I think it's one guy who never sleeps.
All told, I'm currently not using it for XBMC (holding out for the Ubuntu situation being fixed), but I am running other stuff on it that was taxing the memory and CPU of my Pi, so I'm pretty happy with that. It doesn't have anything like the plug-it-in-now-it-works experience of Raspbmc.
I found myself going down a dark and terrible road of alternate mali drivers, Xorg munging and running es2gears over and over again. If you're considering doing that, don't do it. You will achieve only regret.
[+] [-] pantalaimon|12 years ago|reply
Did you check /sys/class/leds/ ?
[+] [-] beagle3|12 years ago|reply
I need an h264 "genlock" device that could do reasonable resolutions & frame rates (720p@30fps, 1920p@15fps). It should be stupid simple if devices let you put some code between sensor and the encoder, but basically nothing does. Apparently, you can do it on the rPi, but it doesn't have enough power to decode a stream, "genlock" and encode it in real time. (Though, I'm going to try - maybe it can be done).
[+] [-] brechmos|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jayd16|12 years ago|reply
Useless how? Performance was poor, or without a touch screen you weren't able to use it?
[+] [-] abn|12 years ago|reply
They put a newer XBMC image lately that fixed all the slow issues.
[+] [-] rwmj|12 years ago|reply
* You need to get a serial cable. The XU required a strange serial cable (ie. NOT the usual 3.3V CP2102).
* You'll need a lot of other stuff to make ARM usable: at a minimum: a high quality SD-card, SSD or eMMC; and a monitor which can handle all of DisplayPort, DVI, HDMI (since you never know which one will work, if any).
* ODROID kernel support is terrible. You'll get a kernel which works, but nothing is upstreamed or developed in the open so forget about ongoing support or updates.
* Everyone who's serious about ARM is waiting for 64 bit to become available. 32 bit hardware just isn't that interesting.
Lots more on my blog: http://rwmj.wordpress.com/?s=ARM
[+] [-] roeme|12 years ago|reply
And if you need a lot of processing power but have only little data; I'm tempted to say that such a small system is the wrong choice anyway.
[+] [-] jolan|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ZenoArrow|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] icebraining|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lispm|12 years ago|reply
http://lispm.de/ccl
The ODROID is much faster than a Raspberry Pi. Basically an U3 runs native Common Lisp ten times faster than the RPi.
I now have an XU, an X2 and the U3. The U3 is the best: small, no fan, silent, fast - and a bit cheaper.
[+] [-] pflanze|12 years ago|reply
With single-threaded tests or when using all cores?
[+] [-] darklajid|12 years ago|reply
- Running Android seems .. useless without a touch device. Tried it, was basically useless for me.
- Running various Linux distributions was not nice either:
* (Fixable) The community projects feel a lot less polished than anything the Pi has
* (Unfixable) The HDMI port sucks. On all TVs I connected it to I have under-/overscan issues. There are no boot options similar to the Pi that allow me to fix that. The IRC channel suggested to 'Fix the TV'...
Looks nice, cheap, interesting specs, but collects dust over here.
[+] [-] bbrks|12 years ago|reply
However it has superseded my Pi (HTTP/Torrent/SMB/DLNA Media server) which was running Raspbian and it's a lot faster at doing it.
[+] [-] Zigurd|12 years ago|reply
But no information about software support.
[+] [-] notacoward|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sjwright|12 years ago|reply
It just forces everyone to add a mandatory adapter or adapter-cable into their shopping carts.
[+] [-] rcxdude|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jxf|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] muyuu|12 years ago|reply
The performance/price is awesome and I guess it's cool if you can get it to work for whatever you have in mind. But I prefer supporting a platform that contributes upstream and promotes a proper open work ethic.
Beaglebone Black for me although the performance is nowhere near this.
[+] [-] abn|12 years ago|reply
And the PVR GPU on BBB is of course the most friendly GPU.
[+] [-] Bluerise|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hardwaresofton|12 years ago|reply
Better specs than the U2, better form factor, and CHEAPER than the U2. You don't see that much nowadays.
The processing power alone is significant, compared to the other options on the market, and they've added support for GPIO to the U3.
[+] [-] nkozyra|12 years ago|reply
It's astonishing, Moore's Law (and variants) not withstanding.
We know there is some limit to Moore's Law, but I have a hard time really wrapping my head around what kind of nano computing we'll have available for pennies in a decade.
[+] [-] IanCal|12 years ago|reply
It's such a simple way of looking at it but I've always found this amazing:
There was as much progress between 1965 and 2012 as between 2012 and now.
[+] [-] olegkikin|12 years ago|reply
When it comes to video, even my wife's slow netbook can play 1080p MKVs without stuttering. 4K can be played and recorded by current gen hardware.
So it looks like games will drive the hardware improvements.
[+] [-] MaysonL|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] spacec0wb0y|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pmorici|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alyandon|12 years ago|reply
It seems to be a common trait that all the sub-$100 USD SoC devices have one rj45 port.
[+] [-] dominicgs|12 years ago|reply
If you're looking to design your own hardware, there are plenty of ICs with dual NICs. For example the TI chip on the BeagleBone Black has dual ethernet NICs, but only one is used on the board.
[1] http://www.alfa.com.tw/products_show.php?pc=99&ps=50
[+] [-] clarry|12 years ago|reply
http://www.pcengines.ch/apu.htm
http://www.pcengines.ch/alix.htm
[+] [-] drivebyubnt|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] copergi|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] userbinator|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] maratc|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Torgo|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dominicgs|12 years ago|reply
Am I the only one who wants OTG support? Or are there boards with USB OTG ports that I have missed?
[+] [-] dominicgs|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Osiris|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] krapp|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _superposition_|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tyrion|12 years ago|reply
And .. is it really showing username and password of their mysql?
[+] [-] krapp|12 years ago|reply
That's... that page makes me sad.
[+] [-] ausjke|12 years ago|reply
the primary ones are : TI AM335x(beaglebone), Freescale iMX6, Allwinner A20. all the three have SATA, HDMI, Android,etc
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] pnathan|12 years ago|reply