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$35 Quad-core Hacker SBC Offers Raspberry Pi-like Size and I/O 140

Posted by Soulskill from the more-competition-more-innovation dept.
DeviceGuru writes: Hardkernel has again set its sights on the Raspberry Pi with a new $35 Odroid-C1 hacker board that matches the RPI's board size and offers a mostly similar 40-pin expansion connector. Unlike the previous $30 Odroid-W that used the same Broadcom BCM2835 SoC as the Pi and was soon cancelled due to lack of BCM2835 SoC availability, the Odroid-C1 is based on a quad-core 1.5GHz Cortex-A5 based Amlogic S805 SoC, which integrates the Mali-400 GPU found on Allwinner's popular SoCs. Touted advantages over the similarly priced Raspberry Pi Model B+ include a substantially more powerful processor, double the RAM, an extra USB2.0 port that adds Device/OTG, and GbE rather than 10/100 Ethernet.
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$35 Quad-core Hacker SBC Offers Raspberry Pi-like Size and I/O More

$35 Quad-core Hacker SBC Offers Raspberry Pi-like Size and I/O

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  • set its sites (Score:5, Informative)

    by amalcolm ( 1838434 ) on Wednesday December 10, 2014 @09:42AM (#48564145)
    Arggh ... set its sights FFS

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by Halifax Samuels ( 1124719 )

      Maybe they finalized their webpages about it.

  • Can it run Flash? (Score:3)

    by CastrTroy ( 595695 ) on Wednesday December 10, 2014 @09:43AM (#48564149)
    Can this device run Flash in the browser? If it can, I'd be very likely to get one for each of my kids for doing their homework and general computing on. I'm not a big fan of flash, but it's necessary for some of the homework/game sites the school uses. Combine it with a monitor, keyboard and mouse, and something like this seems to be good enough to be a fully functional computer.

    • An old laptop running XP would work..... Might be cheaper too.. I find them in the trash all the time.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by thaylin ( 555395 )

        And you would connect one of them to a network?

        • Yes, but not my network. Probably one of the neighbors' unsecured WiFi.
          • Hey, get off my unsecured wifi already! And my lawn!

            • Re: (Score:3)

              by tom17 ( 659054 )

              It's the only place I can get decent reception. Relocate your router and I'll gladly get off your lawn.

              In the meantime, can you please give it a quick mow? It's getting long and tickly.

        • And you would connect one of them to a network?

          Sure... Just be ready to re-image the thing... In fact that's what I do for my homeschooled kid (well what I used to do until the laptop died about a month ago). Whenever something strange starts happening, I pop in the media and restore the image. Problem solved...

          I've actually considered just running Linux, putting the XP part in a VM and keeping a snapshot that gets restored every time the machine boots. It's just too much trouble to set up right now and my kid doesn't have that many years of school

          • Reboot Restore Rx [horizondatasys.com] is a free solution. It puts Windows back to the "frozen" state at each boot. I move the user directories over to another partition so that those are persistent. When you want to add a new program or make some other change, you simply log in as an Admin and disable the tool from the notification icon, make your changes, and then re-enable the tool after a reboot. It works with any version of Windows back to 2000.

        • Why not? My kids don't have tax returns or anything like that on there and it's behind a NAT.

        • Sure I would, after installing Linux on it. If I wanted to stay with Windows I would try installing the Windows 10 Technical Preview on it, but that might or might not work depending on the hardware in the old system.

          I haven't yet found laptops in the trash that were worth having, but I may be looking in the wrong trash bins. I have found desktop systems that would be fine for occasional use. (Mostly they are from the Pentium 4 era, which means they are power hogs that I wouldn't recommend for server duty.)

      • Might be cheaper in the short run, but in the long run, you have to keep on replacing them. Get a decent monitor, keyboard and mouse, and they will last for many years. Then you can replace the computer as it stops working, or as newer computers come along at really low prices.

        • Might be cheaper in the short run, but in the long run, you have to keep on replacing them. Get a decent monitor, keyboard and mouse, and they will last for many years. Then you can replace the computer as it stops working, or as newer computers come along at really low prices.

          We do laptops for my kid because we homeschool and having a portable platform for him to do "homework" while away from home is a definite advantage for us. But, I usually get free laptops that my friends are throwing away when I promise to securely wipe their drives and destroy any personal data. My cost is just my time, or on the rare occasion they want to keep the drive, another drive.

          It's been pretty cheep so far... But, that's not to say my time is worthless either. I can see why people who don't hav

    • I don't know about this one, but I own an Odroid U3 (Cortex A9, quad 1.7ghz) and it does very well. It costs abit more (I think it was around usd 50 or 60).

      Their Linux distro is not the best, based on ubuntu and their documentation is really crap. Fine hardware tho.

      Cheers
      -S

      • You might want to try another distro, this one has images for odroids
        http://www.voidlinux.eu/#downl... [voidlinux.eu]
        It has a very fast package manager, But I only tried it out on intel

        • Thanks! I'd prefer debian but I didn't bother checking how to install it. After all, at the moment it is only an xbmc box. in the long run i'd like to build a groundstation for my autonomous vehicles on it, then a reliable distor matters more.

    • I found some information that implies that the Android version will be 4.4, and I think you can sideload Flash on Android devices, even though it's not supported by Adobe any more. (In fact, I just tried it, and it'll run on my Android 5.0 phone just fine)

      For desktop Linux, I don't think that Adobe has ever released an ARM port of the plugin, so you'd be out-of-luck if you wanted to run a "real" OS, rather than a mobile one. Well, unless Gnash [gnashdev.org] has gotten good enough to be usable for your purposes. It's bee

  • Better value than RPi, but no composite video out (Score:4, Interesting)

    by calagan800xl ( 1001055 ) on Wednesday December 10, 2014 @10:00AM (#48564243)
    Those ODroid all offer big bang for the bucks, but the Pi is one of the rare single board computers which still offers composite video output, so you can hook it up to your old fat CRT TV, which is great for old-school emulation (eg with the awesome RetroPie distro).

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by jcdr ( 178250 )

      I think that the last time I used a composite video signal was about 10 years ago to playback the video from a camera recorder with a magnetic tape.

      • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

        by Anonymous Coward

        What is the url for this compo site, and what is so good about the video signals from it?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by fnj ( 64210 )

        25 years for me, and it was lame then.

  • SBCs are nice, but this one isn't really new.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by fnj ( 64210 )

      Do you have any skills at all comparing specs?

      The Banana Pi and Odroid-C1 are in quite separate domains. The Banana Pi has SATA, which sets it apart from just about ALL the others. The Odroid-C1 has FOUR USB, which completely set it apart from the Banana Pi. For example, connect a keyboard and mouse to the Pi and you're all done. You've got no USB left. With the C1, you've still got 2 USB left. There's also a significant price difference. The Pi is at least 2/3 more expensive. And half the core count.

      Both o

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by redelm ( 54142 )
        And that is the key -- enough CPU to run a "modern" browser. Of course the specs are different -- so are the various unamed RPi model "B" (no fuse, 256MB, with holes, ...). The key with hardware is what it will run.

      • The Pi is at least 2/3 more expensive.

        The final cost will depend on both where you live and what if any distributor arrangements odriod set up. I would be very wary of considering a board cheaper based on headline price alone as the difference between headline price and final cost varies massively.

    • Banana Pi is only dual core 1GHz, This is quad core 1.5GHz (Though A5 is slower than A7 clock for clock but at least if we go by arm's DMIPs figures a 1.5GHz A5 core should outperform a 1GHz A7 core), Also note that while the banana Pi looks sorta like a Pi model B it is actually a bit larger, so it won't fit in Pi cases.

  • Does this one have enough horsepower to act as a decently performing media center? I'd like to stream Blue Ray mk4s. I love Raspberry Pis in projects such as my animatronic project, Jose' The Tiki Bird [youtube.com]. But, it just doesn't have the guts as a media center.

    -

    Is this the one I've been waiting for?

    • Re:XBMC Finally? (Score:4, Informative)

      by CastrTroy ( 595695 ) on Wednesday December 10, 2014 @10:10AM (#48564321)
      The Raspberry Pi is kind of in a weird situation, and I can't understand why it really caught on. On one hand, it's overkill for little electronics projects where something like an Arduino would be much better suited. On the other hand, it's not quite powerful enough to act as a respectable desktop or media center. The disk I/O is very lacking because it doesn't support an interace with DMA. Various disk intensive applications like torrents will bring the thing to its knees. If the video doesn't happen to be in a codec that is supported in hardware, then there's no chance of it having the horsepower to decode it.

      As far as media centers go, It makes way more sense to get a low power Intel board that you know will have enough power to do everything, and will be able to run just about any application and run Windows or Linux as you prefer.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        I like to think Rasp Pi got things rolling on ultra-cheap SBCs train. Now there's a whole slew of much better options, but Rasp Pi started it, and I think they deserve some cred for that at least.

        As to actual uses for cheap SBCs in general, I still think there are plenty of places where you could probably use an arduino but it's really convenient to have a kinda-computer.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by Enry ( 630 )

        XBMC was the killer app for this device. I've got two of them in my house for less than I paid for a single x86 XBMC system I was using. Other than that, they're effectively throwaway systems you can use in place of using virtual machines. Want to test out SAMBA as a domain controller? Slap it on, fire it up, and take it for a spin. Don't like it? Your other systems haven't been touched and you can just wipe the Pi and start over.

        • you can just wipe the Pi and start over.

          That's what I said, but she was having none of it.

        • I have a pi and found the XBMC UI to be awfully sluggish on it. The bigger problem is it can't play the mpeg-ts dumps of broadcast TV I make from mplayer, although there must be some way to make TV broadcasts playable?

          The pi is also too slow to be a thin client for X if you use a WiFi usb dongle, or if you tunnel over ssh. But if you use the ethernet, open the X server on the pi to un-encrypted remote connections (DISPLAY=pi:0 firefox on the client), it is passable for web use, other than flash and vide

          • MPEG-2 on RPi (Score:4, Interesting)

            by SIGBUS ( 8236 ) on Wednesday December 10, 2014 @11:37AM (#48564897) Homepage

            Note that you have to buy a codec license [raspberrypi.org] to activate the Raspberry Pi's MPEG-2 support. Once you've added the license key to your config.txt, XBMC will handle MPEG-2 just fine; I can stream shows from my MythTV backend without any problem. But, the sluggish interface is a bit of a problem, especially when using an IR remote.

            • I don't think it's just the licensing. I am using mplayer -dumpstream dvb://xx and the .ts files it generates don't seem compatible with most players except mplayer itself, and don't seem to work on XBMC. What would be a better option for grabbing DVB from the command-line? One requirement is for the player to be able to start replay and skip around inside the file while before it is done recording.
          • ON windows i use MCEbuddy to automatically convert .wtv to .mp4.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by jedidiah ( 1196 )

          XBMC is really only a killer app for the PI if you are willing to make serious compromises just to get a bargain. There are any number of cheap (but not dirt cheap) low profile PCs that run circles around a PI both as a media center and a general purpose machine.

          The PI really not powerful enough for XBMC.

          An Asus chromebox is a much better choice. Makes a decent general purpose box too.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Enry ( 630 )

            I don't care if a low profile PC is faster. I can do BluRay 1080P playback without a problem on the Pi for a $35 investment. It doesn't download torrents or play live TV, but I either don't want it to do that or have other ways of doing it. I don't see XBMC as the sole entertainment source, just to play back movies and TV shows.

      • I work on both arduino and the pi.

        the arduino is IP-less. its not good at ipstack things. its great at fast looping for device control.

        pi can do the looping on devices AND has a good ip stack with webserver, ipchains, etc.

        neither have much cpu but both have their place. when I want to play with IoT stuff and web-serve sensor data, the pi is the best thing for that.

        I also have a pi being a stratum-1 gps/pps timeserver. cost very little and yet I have a very highly accurate ntpserver at home, just for fun

      • On one hand, it's overkill for little electronics projects where something like an Arduino would be much better suited.

        That's a pretty subjective statement. It's very dependent on your project. Yea, it's bad as a media player, but that's about as far removed from the purpose of the device as you could possibly get. I think if you complained to the designers about that, they'd laugh in your face. "I bought your weather balloon testbed and as soon as I let the kids use it as a bounce house it popped!"

        • If being a media player wasn't one of it's purposes then why do they have this in their FAQ?

          1. WHAT IS A RASPBERRY PI?

          The Raspberry Pi is a credit-card sized computer that plugs into your TV and a keyboard. It is a capable little computer which can be used in electronics projects, and for many of the things that your desktop PC does, like spreadsheets, word-processing and games. It also plays high-definition video. We want to see it being used by kids all over the world to learn programming.

          Emphasis added. Why point out playing HD video if being a media player wasn't the points of the device?

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by jedidiah ( 1196 )

          I don't think the skeptics ever thought that the PI would make a good XBMC machine. I certainly had my own doubts before I tried it out for myself and confirmed my own suspicions.

          We naysayers are more of a counter to those in the community that gush over the PI as a media center.

          Although the WHOLE POINT of general purpose machines is that they get used for things that the manufacturer never would have imagined.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Xolotl ( 675282 )

          I've been running RaspBMC since I got my first Pi (first-gen Model B) and it is a great media center, at least if your media is encoded with the codec(s) it has hardware support for and you spend the $3 or whatever for the licence code. I now have a B+doing the job for the extra USB ports (wifi dongle, Logitech K400 dongle, 2 USB disks) and beefier power. It has no problems with full HD video at all.

          The one thing I have noticed is that you really need to get a good, fast (micro)SD for the system, something

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Nexzus ( 673421 )

            I've also found if you offload pretty much everything to other devices (thumbnail storage, media database) and run it from USB storage, it can be fairly snappy.

            If you're playing high bitrate videos, it's also recommended to use NFS mounts with udp

            • Likewise, I love mine, and it works great even on raw blu ray files. No passthrough on TrueHD is the only stumbling block, but hardly a big deal as those discs usually have AC3 or similar as well.

              That said, how successful have you been with high bitrate (read: raw blu ray files) over NFS shares? I'm using mine (NFS with UDP), and dd claims I'm getting north of 9MB/s, which should be plenty for the ~50Mb/s of blu ray. However, it often stumbles over NFS. Local (USB disk) is generally fine, though. Any tho

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by Nexzus ( 673421 )

                If you're still reading this:

                I think that rsize is way too high. Someone on the XBMC forums scripted copying a large amount of data from mounts with various options. He found the best rsize was 32768.

                • Great, thanks for responding. I believe I tested various settings and found that this worked well for my setup, but perhaps my test environment was a little contrived (I think I just dd'd a few hundred megs). Will give 32768 a shot though!

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by jandrese ( 485 )
          The Pi is actually surprisingly good at streaming video, but with a big list of caveats. The biggest is that it is only good at streaming 2 (3 if you pay a little extra money) formats. Luckily one of them is mp4 so it's not a complete disaster, but anything it can't do on the GPU is too slow to be useable. XBMC's interface is also a poor choice for the Pi, as it is not GPU accelerated on the Pi and quite slow as a result.

          The Broadcom chip on the Pi is really designed to stream video. The CPU is almo
      • I found that it occupies a spot that wasn't well served. You correctly identified it as packing too much for small electronics projects where things like Arduinos sit but not being powerful enough to be a full flegged desktop/laptop. For embedded thing where and Arduino is too underpowered and a large desktop or laptop is way too much(bulk, power, weight) it fits nicely. This was the space that had been occupied by the Beagle Board and Beagle Bone but those were substantially more expensive when the RPi fir

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by psm321 ( 450181 )
          Sorry for going off-topic, but would you mind sharing details of your RTK setup? (i.e. what GPS/antenna?) Thanks!
          • The GPS modules are U-blox LEA-6t and you can find the info necessary for getting one here [diydrones.com]. The company that makes the module is synergy systems and the antennas I got from them is this one [synergy-gps.com]. From what I remember the first module was $35 and the second one was $70, I forget what the antennas were but there was a 10% discount they give to the home tinkerer market on the regular priced module and antennas. Instructions on getting the modules can be found in the diydrones link as you couldn't just order it onl

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by psm321 ( 450181 )
              Thanks! :)
              • No problem. It took me months of digging until I just happened upon a source that had some info. I would love it if manufactures realized that there was a market for better devices that people can tinker with that aren't crippled. If more people ask and purchase from a company that is willing to serve them then it becomes clear that there is a market that isn't being well served elsewhere. Also those LEA-6t modules are really nice if you want to do other stuff with them like have a proper stratum 1 time ser

                • Re: (Score:2)

                  by psm321 ( 450181 )
                  I've actually been using a NEO-6M hacked to do timing output (because I hadn't found any affortable 6t's yet), but the procedure to get it to do that is annoying, and the antenna that came with it is a piece of crap. I'm going to go ahead and inquire with synergy to see if they still have these (don't see them on the website) and probably order. So thanks again :)

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Qzukk ( 229616 )

        At the price it was at the time it was released, it really was something special. It wasn't a supercomputer but for people that wanted something cheap that was effectively a throwaway computer, there wasn't anything like it.. People have fought it all the way, complaining that they can get this soekris board for $400, or that Intel board for $200, or an arudino that can't run Linux.

        Now, years later, the Raspberry Pi "killers" have finally caught up in the price field, Like the Banana Pi [bananapi.org] if you can get one

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by jandrese ( 485 )
          It doesn't help that the Raspberry Pi foundation finally released an update after 2 years...and left the specs almost completely unchanged. Not even a badly needed speed bump on the CPU or an ARM architecture update that makes it less of a pain in the butt to support. Not even a RAM bump, even though many many apps (XBMC included) bump into the RAM limit on the Pi constantly, severely degrading its performance.

          The situation is so ridiculous that overclocking is officially supported on their default di

      • On one hand, it's overkill for little electronics projects where something like an Arduino would be much better suited.

        Kind of. But if you want network connectivity for an Arduino, the cost starts to add up very fast. In contrast, you can get a Pi with a built-in ethernet port, or stick in a cheap WiFi dongle.

        They recently released the A+, which is $20. You can get USB Wifi dongles for under $10, add $5 for an SD card, so for about $35 you've got a dev board with WiFi. Compare that to the Arduino ethernet shield, which by itself is over $45. The WiFi shield is even more.

        The only thing comparable I can think of is the Electr

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Hadlock ( 143607 )

        The Raspberry Pi A+ is a good Arduino competitor; I2C, SPI, PWM, the PCB is actually smaller than the Arduino Uno R3 (standard Arduino footprint), and uses 100mA at idle (compare to 35mA at idle for the Arduino idling in non-sleep mode).

        I haven't measured the A+ with the HDMI port turned off but at 100mA it's very competitive powerwise and runs a full linux stack, but has enough horsepower to do computing like OpenCV, encrypted wifi, and has full access to mathmatica and it's API now for highly opti

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by fnj ( 64210 )

          The Arduino Pro Mini blows away both the normal size Arduino and the Raspberry Pi in terms of power drain and size, since you mention those attributes specifically. As well as cost. Heck, even the Teensy 3.x blows them away. And with either the Pro Mini or the Teensy 3.x you don't have to resort to addon crap for PWM.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Hadlock ( 143607 )

            The onboard PWM for the arduino is fantastic, but there's not enough dedicated PWM for robotics unless you're just doing a 4DOF robot arm or something, which is why I mentioned the 16 channel PWM, which allows you do do 4DOF per limb. I have the PWM shield from adafruit, just picked up their non-denominational daughterboard (same chip, more generic mounting format) for the A+ this week.

            And yeah those CH340G based Arduino Nano clones you can pick up off of ebay for $4 shipped are pretty amazing, they

      • The Raspberry Pi is kind of in a weird situation, and I can't understand why it really caught on. On one hand, it's overkill for little electronics projects where something like an Arduino would be much better suited. On the other hand, it's not quite powerful enough...

        This bed is too hard, this bed is too soft, this bed is just right. Yes, it's overkill for trivial tasks, it's underkill for high-powered computational tasks. It's just right for lots of things in between. I've got one running a Winlink RMS gateway using a Pi-TNC for radio to internet communications, and another as the gateway computer (just inside the router) for a data collection network to provide ntp, smtp, snmp, logging, etc services on the network. I had a second one on the same network to control tw

    • With a compatible A/V receiver, I am able to play raw blu-ray videos on my Raspberry Pi. With an audio format that's unsupported for passthrough (e.g., TrueHD), then it's unusable (luckily, there's usually another 5.1 channel in addition to TrueHD, albeit at lower quality). Streaming over the network can be problematic for certain high-bandwidth films, but a local disk works well for almost everything I've thrown at it. (Unsure why network is an issue -- with an NFS share I can get north of 9MB/s, which sho

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by anagama ( 611277 )

      I don't personally know the answer to this, but I was interested too. There is a video on one of the articles linked in the the summary showing it doing various things, including video, and based on that, it looks promising. I can say that I've wasted far more than $35 on finding out a thing is crap, so this seems a pretty low risk proposition to try this thing out.

      Anyway, here's the video link:
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

      I probably wouldn't do the video thing, but if there was a way to make to the a

  • I'm torn over forcing audio out of HDMI. Though to keep the cost down, you have cut some things to add others. This is definitely a neat little board and would be great for a mini test cluster. But I feel like Pi still has that prototyping advantage. But I definitely am glad to see some similar priced alternatives in the market.
    • You could get one of those $8 USB sound cards for it, although $8 is kind of a big upgrade for a $35 computer.

      • http://www.amazon.com/gp/produ... [amazon.com]

        $15 or less, plays audio at up to 96k (does not support 88k, though, but does support 44/48/96 and full 24bit). what's cool is that its driverless (UAC1 mode) and has opto digi out!

        screw hdmi audio. full of drm. go with spdif and free your audio stream! ;)

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by fnj ( 64210 )

      But I feel like Pi still has that prototyping advantage.

      All right, since the C1 has exactly the same GPIO pinout and functionality except for 3 pins used by the ADC which the Pi doesn't have, why do you believe that the Pi has the prototyping advantage?

      • Most of what I've done with the Pi tends to have at least some sort of basic audio output. It's rather nice to just push it out of the 1/8" rather than convert from the HDMI. I guess I should have put a disclaimer in there -> [for my needs]

  • Powersupply (Score:3)

    by Cigamit ( 200871 ) on Wednesday December 10, 2014 @10:20AM (#48564423) Homepage

    Don't forget to add in the cost a 5V 2A power supply if you don't have one laying around. Unlike the Pi, this can't be powered through the micro USB port.

    • It's still a 5V, 2A device though, isn't it? An old USB cable with one end cut off and a jack soldered on will still mean you can power it from a hub. That said, using USB as your power source can start all sorts of fun. Maybe you try to plug it into a device that only supplies 1A, or maybe it's one of those "smart" devices that doesn't power up until it detects a device, but that means your board doesn't get powered, which means that the hub doesn't power up, so the board never powers up...

  • Our company had looked at putting together the Pi and a few pieces to build a device we could sell to our customers but we had the issue of configuring each device individually, which at the point we abandoned it meant hooking up a keyboard and tv and editing configuration files. If we could have mounted the device over USB it would have simplified configuration, we could have written a program that could be run on a PC by an end user to set up networking in cases where dhcp isn't possible.

    • I can think have 5 ways you could have accomplished the goal of network configuration without a keyboard and mouse off the top of my head.

      1. The Pi A's USB port can be configured for slave mode. The B doesn't support this but not sure if you needed a B.
      2. You can fake a USB device over the GPIO ports on both the A and B through various bitbang techniques.
      3. You can use the UART pins and a USB to UART chip which wouldn't be a very expensive add on.
      4. Add a DHCP server to the Pi, so when connected directly to

      • I can think have 5 ways you could have accomplished the goal of network configuration without a keyboard and mouse off the top of my head.

        6. Pull the "hard disk" off the Pi and stick it in a card reader on any other computer, edit the files you need to and put the disk back.

        7. Use the native DHCP client on the Pi to let it get an address from your existing DHCP server and ssh into it.

        • 9. Program it to be configured over keyboard only, using the lock-lights for feedback (Connect keyboard, press enter until lights flash three times, type in IP address/netmask/dns/etc, lights will flash to confirm each in turn).

          10. IPv6 link-local address + Avahi.

          11. Default IP address somewhere out the way, like 192.168.99.99 - configured PC accordingly, connect to IP, use web browser to configure. Just like almost every home router and access point I've ever encountered.

      • 2. You can fake a USB device over the GPIO ports on both the A and B through various bitbang techniques.

        Do you know anyone who has actually achived this on a Pi or are you just speculating.

  • More power, speed, etc. is nice. But what I'd really like is something even smaller than an rPi (and cheaper) that is still capable of running a reasonable linux distro. So far, I've come up empty. Don't need hdmi or sound, just USB. Anybody know of anything like this?

  • What the hell is wrong with the RPI community ? (Score:3)

    by SilenceBE ( 1439827 ) on Wednesday December 10, 2014 @12:29PM (#48565249)
    When I heard about the RPI I was very enthusiastic. The premise of cheap computers, give kids a possibility to tinker, maybe spark a whole industry of these kind of things. Maybe even ending in cheaper and more faster RPI'like systems kicking the boundaries away.

    But every f*cking time somebody comes up with a cheaper, faster, ... board they take a very aggressive stance and everyone that comes up with an ARM board is trying to steal their customers away. It is as ridiculous of complaining about holes and a 40 pin connector, you can bet this board will be branded as a rippoff.

    I thought the whole idea was of giving children a cheap way to tinker with hardware, so what is the problem with cheaper / faster boards that come on the market ? The whole premise seems to be a lie and I have the feeling the whole RPI thing has more to do with personal ego's than al the fluffy spin... .

  • The big question with this is what will the actual cost be? last time I bought an odriod product I had to pay the price of a fairly steep delivery charge to odriod and the dreaded courier VAT collection fee and of course the VAT itself. I don't remember exactly what it was in my case but according to http://forum.odroid.com/viewto... [odroid.com] the final cost of of an "$89" U2 plus a "$9" HDMI cable shipped to the UK was £108.83.

    If we assume the same delivery charge for the new board as for the U2* and that it

    • If we assume the same delivery charge for the new board as for the U2* and that it still ships from outside the EU on a regular courier service**, and that they tell the truth on the customs form then the final price will be about $35 (board) + $30 (shipping) + ~£10.5 (brokerage) + ~£9.5 VAT = ~£68.

      Maybe you should canvas the UK and EU to see what the potential market is.

      If it's large enough, you could go into business as an online shop, have a big crate of them brought in on a barge, reducing that shipping and brokerage charge, but you're on your own for the VAT. Then you sell at a price between your cost and what it would cost to buy from the states(or wherever).

      Opportunity is limited though, I'd expect chinese versions to be available for much less fairly quickly.

    • Update: now i've managed to get on odriod's site and get some answers to the question. It seems they now offer a $9 shipping option for low value orders and they are using the postal service which tends to have marginally lower brokerage charges than couriurs. That makes the updated estimate.

      $35 (board) + $9 (shipping) + ~£10 (brokerage) + ~£5.60 VAT = ~£43.6.

      They also link to a store in germany that sells their products but said store doesn't have the C1 listed yet.

  • Will this boot over ethernet?

  • Not only is it GigE, it's off of an on-chip MAC, unlike the Raspberry Pi which uses a USB Ethernet interface.

  • Hardkernel used to be one of the #1 purveyors of Samsung Exynos development boards (The other being Insignal). Unfortunately, both Insignal and Hardkernel's BSPs for Exynos boards tended to be vastly outdated. (Hardkernel was even violating the GPL with some of their Android 4.2 releases for some of the Exynos 4412 boards for a while - putting up binary images with no source code in sight.)

    Now even Hardkernel is putting effort into non-Haxxinos boards...

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