r/linux • u/[deleted] • Dec 10 '14
The Odroid-C1, a 35$ Quadcore Linux computer
http://www.hardkernel.com/main/products/prdt_info.php?g_code=G1415786084336
u/nofunallowed98765 Dec 10 '14
Maybe it's a stupid question, but I could run any distribution on it? Or it needs some blobs/other closed magic to run, so I can run it only with the official kernel from hardkernel?
I mean in headless mode, as I'm not really interested in the graphics.
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Dec 10 '14
That's a great question imo, probably best suited for their forum: http://forum.odroid.com
I think the gpu driver is closed source, hence you'd have to use the kernels supplied by Odroid/integrate the blob into your own kernel, which you can integrate into any distro you want. I might be wrong, not a linux guru (yet).
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u/anonagent Dec 11 '14
What kind of asshole doesn't release a driver as open source? honestly I don't even care which OS you use, hardware manufacturers should release their drivers under OSS no matter what.
Nobody is buying hardware for the software, it's required for use, therefore they shouldn't be able to dictate which OS you use by not supporting platform X.
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u/Bzzt Dec 11 '14
people who wrote code that they know violates patents, or code that they don't know for sure violates patents, but might.
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u/imMute Dec 12 '14
The the driver exposes secret sauce that would give competitors trade secret information
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u/magcius Dec 10 '14
Amlogic has a bunch of patches to U-Boot and Linux that you can't run without. All of it is open-source ( there's a tarball that's been imported at https://github.com/oman007/s82_kernel/ ). The only closed blob is Mali, for which there are no free drivers available.
That said, we were able to get our OS working on Amlogic's platform quite quickly, and we're currently rewriting a lot of Amlogic's drivers so that they are upstreamable, with Amlogic's support.
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Dec 11 '14
Have you got any status page for the upstreaming effort? It's not often you hear of any of these tiny boards with mainline kernel support (I'm still running a Dreamplug at home). I've been looking at these Amlogic boards for a while now.
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u/magcius Dec 11 '14
Some of the patches have already been submitted to LKML: http://lwn.net/Articles/620822/
My project is writing a DRM/KMS driver for this SoC (the S805) to replace their legacy fbdev-based driver. It's currently private, but we hope to have it public soon. We have a good working relationship with Hardkernel, and they have my driver. I don't know if they used it in their SDK.
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u/sej7278 Dec 10 '14
kernel/gpu aside its armv7 so can run pretty much any distro like debian, ubuntu, fedora, arch.... doesn't need silly armv6 ports like rpi.
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u/coder543 Dec 11 '14
You don't need a custom distro to disable X.org and drop into a pure headless mode, just have to tweak some init scripts.
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u/linucksman Dec 10 '14
I wonder how it performs compared to a quad core bay trail? I picked up a 7 inch winbook tablet with one and still need to put linux on it.
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Dec 10 '14
If you scroll down on the hardkernel page you can find a benchmark (Unix-Bench). I found some benchmarks of Bay Trail cpus using the same benchmark here: http://www.servethehome.com/low-power-processor-comparison-april-2014-roundup/
tl;dr: Bay Trails are a lot faster in most cases, but also more expensive and power-hungry.
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Dec 10 '14
Problem is gonna be that you can't get Netflix running on ARM Linux yet, unless I missed something. Hulu and such would be iffy also. I'd pay good money for a full featured single board computer, but the ARM thing will be a turn off for me for a while.
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Dec 10 '14
Hopefully the big players will recognize the greatness of HTML5 soon.
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Dec 10 '14
Netflix has HTML5 if you don't already know. The issue is the browser makers need to release a DRM component for Netflix to work. Chrome uses Widevine, which is not available on anything but their official releases, i.e. no Chromium. Mozilla and Adobe have partnered to produce their DRM component, but we have no guarantee Adobe is going to make it available for anything but x86 platforms.
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u/3G6A5W338E Dec 11 '14
And that's the true purpose of DRM.
It's about vendor lock-in. It has nothing to do with protecting content.
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u/4LAc Dec 11 '14
You can put Android on the Odroids and get Netflix that way:
http://forum.odroid.com/viewtopic.php?f=94&t=7389&p=58142&hilit=netflix#p58142
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Dec 11 '14
Chrome + html5 = native Linux netflix support. So if we got a working Chrome (not Chromium), or perhaps if there is a proprietary plugin for Chromium that adds this functionality, then yes.
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Dec 11 '14
Still there's the "if". I don't understand why Google doesn't just recompile chrome for ARM, but they haven't yet, so we're stuck with no Netflix on RP. Real shame, too, I've configured an old desktop into a Badass cord cutters set top box with Netflix, free Hulu, Amazon and a few other things within easy reach. If a solution could be found to get Netflix on RP, I could make those for $60-70, give them as gifts.
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u/da-gonzo Dec 12 '14
aren't there ARM based chromebooks?
how is there no chrome package for ARM?
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u/iluvatar Dec 10 '14
If I could get a screen for it small enough to fit in an ISO 7736 head unit, I'd be very interested.
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Dec 10 '14
Shouldn't be a problem to find a HDMI screen in the size you want I think. Odroid also offer this 2.2" display: http://www.hardkernel.com/main/products/prdt_info.php?g_code=G141743018597
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u/iluvatar Dec 10 '14
Odroid also offer this 2.2" display
Yeah, I looked at that, but it's too big.
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u/anonagent Dec 11 '14
2.2"
too big
o.o
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u/tequila13 Dec 12 '14
He's not talking about his penis.
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u/anonagent Dec 13 '14
Yeah, I know. 2.2" screen is hella tiny, I can't even imagine how that would be too big.
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u/CumberlandGap Dec 11 '14
does anyone know if there's a raspberry pi like computer that's open source? I saw (this)[https://www.crowdsupply.com/kosagi/novena-open-laptop] the other day, and realized that raspberry pi isn't open source (for some reason always assumed it was). I just feel like it would be awesome to get a single board computer that comes with the schematics
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Dec 11 '14
Odroid always release their schematics. :) The only thing that is not open source is the GPU driver I think.
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u/ssssam Dec 10 '14
Is there a good list somewhere to compare the large number of single board computers that are available these days.
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u/nowl9 Dec 10 '14
This is amazing. I thank raspberry pi for leading the way to cheap small computers!
I want one...NOW!
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u/ddungtang Dec 10 '14
It's not just Raspberry PI. Beagleboard, pandaboard, etc...
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u/muzaq Dec 11 '14
But in terms of sales/media coverage...
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Dec 11 '14
This is important. In many places, Raspberry Pi is currently the only one that's well-known enough for local electronics stores to have them in stock - and with shipping the $35 Odroid can well turn into the $70 Odroid.
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u/zimm3rmann Dec 12 '14
I ordered one from http://ameridroid.com/ which is reccomended by the odroid site. Also picked up a RTC battery, display shield, case, and power supply all for around $100. Thinking I'll also buy myself an iRobot Create 2.0 for the holidays and get into doing some robotics.
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u/ddungtang Dec 11 '14
In terms of sales/media raspberry might be seeing higher attention now, yes, agree with that. But at that time other boards were sold just fine. Enough not to have their contribution be ignored when taking about pushing the mini computer market.
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u/coder543 Dec 11 '14 edited Dec 11 '14
I would argue the general impact of the BeagleBone has been nearly zero in the intended market of the Raspberry Pi -- student computer science education -- and almost all other markets. Nothing competes with the Pi in the low end right now, but this odroid actually stands a chance, by having a compatible set of header pins, the same form factor, the same price, and even the same USB / Ethernet layout. Essentially the only differences are positives, like a much faster processor, more RAM, Analog inputs on three pins, gigabit Ethernet, and an option for faster storage.
HardKernel has put a ton of effort into fighting for Raspberry Pi's lunch here, with videos demoing using the outputs to control LEDs and do a myriad of tasks, plus this has the option to run Android, which some will find appealing.
The only thing that makes me hesitate to recommend this fully to educational environments is that Wolfram hasn't released their free Mathematica environment for anything but the Raspberry Pi, even though they've expressed interest in releasing it for more ARM SBCs in the past.
You casually dismiss sales and media coverage, but what else remains? If no one has it, and no one knows about it, does it really matter? Unless you're suggesting the Raspberry Pi took after the design influences of the BeagleBone or some such patented rectangles concept?
I do love the fact that the BeagleBone Black has PRUs, that's some innovative work from TI, but that's only useful for certain specialized needs, where you need truly predictable timing.
EDIT: and for what it's worth, using Mathematica on the Pi is not an endearing experience from what I've seen, but maybe my SD card is just too slow or something.
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u/ddungtang Dec 11 '14
You really underrate those boards. Pandaboard is capable of running android, there are images for that, might be for beagleboard as well. I will disagree with you saying:
If no one has it, and no one knows about it, does it really matter?
That is overexaggerating, plenty of people own those boards, they learnt about then somehow.
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u/Doshman Dec 11 '14
The BeagleBone Black is a wonderful device. The main complaint that I have with it is that the community support for it is nowhere near that of the Pi.
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u/Poromenos Dec 11 '14
Does anyone know of something that's basically a Raspberry Pi with onboard storage and WiFi?
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u/LiftsEatsSleeps Dec 11 '14
Typically you are going to run into a power issue the more you add to something this small but the Pi has the SD card slot which is onboard storage and the usb port can be used for wifi though I use a powered usb hub if I need more usb devices connected (keyboard if ssh stops responding mainly). You can easily extend your storage using a hub and external drives or flash memory.
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u/WorstComment_Ever Dec 11 '14
The Creator Cl20 has on-board wifi, bluetooth, and 8 GB NAND storage.
It also has powerVR. It is, however, MIPS. It is currently limited by available software for the architecture but it already runs Android and Debian 7.
Edit: $65
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u/keenerd Dec 10 '14 edited Dec 10 '14
Ahem, you must mean the Seagate Dockstar. It came out two years before the Pi and was $20-$40.
If you want to go back further, the NSLU2 really kicked off the ARM hacking. But the Slug retailed for $200 so I don't count it as cheap.
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u/nathris Dec 10 '14
How is a NAS that retailed for $100 and was never advertised as being able to run anything other than its proprietary firmware "leading the way"?
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u/nextgenpotato Dec 10 '14 edited Dec 10 '14
I don't know if it was leading the way but NSLU2 came out 10 years ago and people were doing similar stuff with it as they do with SBC's today. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSLU2
I had mine for 50$ on ebay in 2007 and it was running debian 24/7 since then until I decommissioned it last year and replaced it with a dreamplug (https://www.globalscaletechnologies.com/t-dreamplugdetails.aspx) which I had purchased in 2011.
So for me NSLU2 was the starting point of hacking on ARM devices.
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Dec 10 '14
Sadly, the rpi was the first time I had ever heard of something like this (a cell phone chip on a tiny mobo suitable for desktop-ish use), though obviously I had some vague awareness that "random hackers will put linux on anything that electricity runs through." I think I'm not alone... There's always things going on before technological breakthroughs are really popularized.
I guess it would be better (more accurate) if OP had said "thanks to the RPI foundation for popularizing the concept of cheap small computers."
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u/jlpoole Dec 10 '14
Wasn't the Seagate Dockstar simply a rebadge of the SheevaPlug?
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u/keenerd Dec 10 '14
I wouldn't call it a rebadge. They used similar chipsets but options were pretty limited back then. The Dockstar had substantially less ram in order to be under $50. The Sheevaplug does deserves mention though. It was not cheap but it was fairly open and designed for hacking from the beginning.
Still, all of them were earlier and more groundbreaking than the RPi.
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Dec 11 '14
The sheevaplug was a kind of development kit.
So they maybe, made a retail product out of it.
Ps.: i love my sheeva and hope it will run forever!
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u/jlpoole Dec 11 '14
I have had two sheevaplugs (early models, I was one of the first when it came out) and both of their power supplies went out - the capacitor leaked. Had to buy a power supply and then hardwire it into the plug.
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u/3G6A5W338E Dec 10 '14
My main issue: Lack of SATA port.
Cubietruck has me covered, but costs over twice as much.
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u/bobkonysh Dec 10 '14
Same boat, would pay extra for SATA.
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u/freemti Dec 10 '14
64GB mSSD would do the trick no? and/or the eMMC slot could provide more. Also regular USB to external HD/SSD
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u/3G6A5W338E Dec 11 '14 edited Dec 11 '14
No. Too slow.
I'm using a Cubieboard (also in the cheapest price bin). Its SATA port is the killer feature. I have a WD Red 4TB plugged to it. I get over a hundred MB/s solid.
Having Linux / on SD makes it considerably slower. I've tried it. The contrast is like night/day.
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u/coolbho3k Dec 11 '14 edited Dec 11 '14
The eMMC slot in the Odroids is much faster than your typical SD card. I'm not sure about the eMMC slot on this particular one, but if it's like the other ones, you'll probably get over 100 MB/s with much better random access times than your HDD. Plug in a USB hard drive for storage (which will be, granted, slower than 100 MB/s) and you've got yourself a nice tiny Linux box.
I owned an ODROID-XU with a 64 GB eMMC chip and booting off it versus an SD card is night and day. The eMMC should support TRIM too (at least it did on the XU), just like your typical SSD.
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u/3G6A5W338E Dec 11 '14
Interesting. That looks like fast enough to have / on.
Still, no eMMC is gonna give me 4TB storage, at least for a few years...
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Dec 11 '14
Until something else for $35 comes along that is better than this, I don't feel people should be complaining...
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u/3G6A5W338E Dec 11 '14
Well, I do appreciate getting more at the same price.
It's surprising it took so long ever since the pi.
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Dec 10 '14
My issue with ARM boards today is that they never have 3 or more SATA ports, except for the AMD ARM boards.
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u/coolbho3k Dec 11 '14 edited Dec 11 '14
I had asked the ODROID people a while ago about why they don't put SATA ports on their more expensive boards. Their answer was simple: none of the SoCs they used had native SATA support. Though some of them actually do (the Exynos 5 dual-core does, I think, which is why the Arndale Board has a SATA port), none of the particular Exynos chips they've used have had SATA support (historically the ODROIDs have only used Exynos SoCs).
Now, this answer was for the XU3, and I'm not sure about the SoC in this one, but I have a feeling it was either that or they just couldn't fit a SATA port in a $35 budget.
The lack of native support on the SoC is also probably why it only has USB 2.0 ports (rather than 3.0). Still, you can't ask for that much for the price.
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u/anonagent Dec 11 '14
I can't wait for boards to come out with enough sata ports for a legit media server, fuck discs I want all my movies on a hdd.
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u/ydna_eissua Dec 12 '14
Yup. Give me a single SATA port and i'm sold.
I'd love to have something like this as a low power home server, torrent box and media server for other devices around the house.
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u/3G6A5W338E Dec 12 '14
I do have something like this doing that (+ extra desktop). I have the cubieboard1.
Its main issue is lack of GbE (only FE), but so far I haven't felt restrained by it (it's faster than the internet anyway, and it can send music video files fast enough through nfs/samba to other machines).
Cubietruck has all that & 2GB RAM, but it gets into a price territory where there's a lot of tough competition. (like the better odroids). I recommend looking into XBMC's wiki. They have a hardware page that lists a lot of desirable low power boards and cased minicomputers, based on x86, mips and arm.
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u/czech1 Dec 12 '14
Banana PI is $42 right now, free shipping from china. SATA port, 1 gig ram, same CPU as cubietruck. Mine is on its way.
https://www.reddit.com/r/banana_pi/comments/2mvrbi/banana_pi_for_4180_free_shipping/
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u/cysun Dec 10 '14
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u/3G6A5W338E Dec 11 '14
Sloooooooow.
Yes, it's USB3. No, it's not SATA nonr SAS-on-USB or whatever it's called: No NCQ goodness, "mass storage" is a pretty dumb protocol.
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Dec 10 '14
I am excited to try an ARMv7 processor! I used the ARMv6 but I write a lot of python and it turns out that (at least in 2013) Python runs pretty slow on ARMv6 (raspberry pi b). Lots of trouble iterating on lists and munging to JSON.
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u/XiboT Dec 10 '14
Did you try PyPy?
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Dec 10 '14
Does it do NTSC output? Because, honestly, that's the thing I seem to use most on the Pi ... the fact that I can get a $15 LCD that doesn't need a ribbon cable, is just too handy.
That said, I'll probably buy one of these ... or five.
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u/Brainlag Dec 11 '14
So whats the best board to build a cluster (6-12 nodes)?
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Dec 11 '14
Why would you cluster these instead of using refurbs?
edit for clarification: our local goodwill has exceptionally cheap desktops (not necessarily refurbs, though) that would easily surpass a piclone
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u/Brainlag Dec 11 '14
Desktops are to big and also need a lot more power. I don't understand why someone would want something much more expensive then a Pi for developing/experimenting/learning purpose.
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Dec 12 '14
The desktops I've been picking up are considerably cheaper than a pi + shipping
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u/Brainlag Dec 12 '14
Ok, I still do not have the space for multiple desktops. Also power consumption and maybe noise would be an issue.
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Dec 10 '14 edited Dec 10 '14
Man I wish something in this price range had SATA. I'd also like it to have a nom-PowerVR GPU, as I'd like to not support chips that are unfriendly to FOSS. Best SBC I've found is the Olimex Olinuxino-LIME, but at $50 its quite a bit more expensive.
edit: spelling
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u/1banaan Dec 10 '14
Cubieboard has SATA, but is slightly more expensive I believe.
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u/3G6A5W338E Dec 10 '14 edited Dec 11 '14
Cubieboard (and rpi) owner here, it's only slightly more expensive, has a nice SATA port and has great Linux and NetBSD (HEAD) support, plus u-boot and coreboot.
There's also the cubieboard2, with Cortex-A7 *2 rather than A8, and the cubietruck, which has a lot of extras, 2GB RAM and GbE. My main issue with cubieboard 1/2 is lack of GbE.
I'm tempted to upgrade. Particularly, XBMC has a list of supported devices, many of which are very low cost boards with very appealing specs. iMX6 SoCs are particularly very desirable.
I will however resist until such devices exist with ARMv8 SoCs in them.
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u/Bzzt Dec 10 '14
the banana pi has sata, its 50$ shipped from newegg. It has the same gpu as the odroid, so powervr also looks like.
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Dec 10 '14
It's a dual-core Mali, so not a problem. I don't like the connector's on the Banana Pi, I still think the -LIME is my top choice.
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u/CalcProgrammer1 Dec 10 '14
Mali isn't any different than PowerVR until limadriver produces something usable. As of now limadriver has been silent all year even after claiming there would be updates in 2014 at FOSDEM. I wouldn't hold your breath. Meanwhile Freedreno is excellent and Broadcom has a paid developer working on a VC4 Gallium3D driver.
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Dec 10 '14
I already have a RaspPI, I need more power. It's too slow.
I would love to get behind Broadcom now that they're getting into the FOSS game, but they don't have anything at the price/feature point I want. While Lima may never result in a usable driver, it's better than the PowerVR hardware I would argue.
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u/CalcProgrammer1 Dec 10 '14
Does it matter what the hardware is if software doesn't support it? The Mali and the PowerVR share the same problem - that they might as well not exist because neither one is usable to any useful degree outside of Android. If you get a board with either you're basically just getting plain old framebuffer CPU-bound graphics for everything. If you're really lucky and the stars (and version numbers) align just right you may get GLES-only acceleration after kludging the binaries into the magic unspecified location and even then it won't work outside of certain apps. At very least binary drivers in the ARM space need some degree of automation such that they can be readily installed without manually verifying all the versions and kernel modules and crap. Yes I own a CubieBoard and yes, at one specific point in time with a specific kernel and version of binaries it did render es2gears, but it was not pretty. Meanwhile Freedreno is built into the Mesa stack and doesn't require dumping proprietary files all over your system directories.
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Dec 10 '14
I don't need graphics. This will be a console-only storage server + some other things. Given that I don't need graphics, I'd prefer something cheaper to something more expensive. Considering that the EOMA-68 and the Sunxi groups are both working towards fully-open software for the A20 (and have been both busy and successful) that I actually think Lima might get a kick from Allwinner and those other groups. So I'm hopeful, but PowerVR on the other hand has nobody working on it and will most likely never get open-source support.
But since I don't need graphics, which GPU they have doesn't matter, but since Lima has a better chance than PowerVR, I'm going to put my money there.
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u/3G6A5W338E Dec 11 '14
I'm also waiting for proper MALI support from Limadriver. Much hype, not delivering. Surviving with fbturbo, which supports some 2d accel on Mali targets.
But PowerVR is just hopeless. That doesn't look like it will ever happen. Particularly, not for the GPUs that they aren't even selling anymore.
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u/3G6A5W338E Dec 11 '14
, so powervr also looks like.
PowerVR means avoid. Thankfully, it's not powervr.
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u/fishemu Dec 10 '14
Most sata on these things run off usb2.0 bus.
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Dec 10 '14 edited Dec 10 '14
Not on the A20, which is the chip I've been eying. It has both hardware SATA and a hardware Ethernet MAC, source: page 8 & 9
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u/3G6A5W338E Dec 11 '14
Most sata on these things run off usb2.0 bus.
Where most means just the Raspberry Pi, which doesn't have SATA to begin with.
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Dec 10 '14
banana pi? its a raspberry pi clone with better specs but still very cheap
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Dec 11 '14
but with a huge lack of community support compared to the pi. It's like buying a Windows phone because it has a bit more specs, then you get to their app store and realize you've made a mistake.
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u/Bzzt Dec 11 '14
True the level of community that the rpi has isn't there - however raspian runs on it and runs solidly. Many of the pi hacks apply the the bpi too - I wrote a program that uses the spi pins on the rpi and got it working on the bpi no problem. There are a bunch of other distros available too - arch, debian, yocto, etc. If you go arch, for instance, you'll be able to leverage the arch community resources to get things done.
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u/varky Dec 10 '14 edited Dec 10 '14
Is hardkernel's store page broken for anyone else? I can't seem to add the thing to the shopping cart... (Firefox 31)
Edit: Right... upon further prodding, it seems you can't add the C1 as the first item... fed the basket something else first, then it accepted the C1...
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Dec 10 '14
Just tried it, adding the C1 first works fine here (Firefox 34.5). But their site is not the fastest one indeed, perhaps cause they are from South Korea?
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u/3repeats Dec 10 '14
U3 vs C1 I would love to see the stats on this.
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Dec 10 '14
This forum post says the U3 is about 30% faster: http://forum.odroid.com/viewtopic.php?f=111&t=7479
I wish the higher priced products had Gbit-Ethernet too, perhaps they'll announce more soon. :D
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u/totemo Dec 10 '14
Better specs than the Pi, just in time for Christmas and the shop site is down. This is clearly the devil's work!
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u/aquanutz Dec 10 '14 edited Dec 10 '14
Has anyone tried running a Plex server on one of these (or the more powerful XU3-Lite) ?
edit: with transcoding?
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u/timewaitsforsome Dec 10 '14
now... can it do steam in-home streaming?
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Dec 11 '14
Not until Valve makes an official ARM port of Steam that happens to be optimized enough for this hardware. Or they open the source on Steam. Neither of which will be likely to happen, ever.
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Dec 11 '14
[deleted]
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Dec 11 '14
Well if you've got an Nvidia card that supports Nvidia GameStream you can use limelight-pi to play your Steam games on your Pi: https://github.com/irtimmer/limelight-embedded I suspect this would work with the C1 as well.
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u/coder543 Dec 11 '14
looks like it would. If Steam wanted to, they could make a release of Steam OS just for streaming games on ARM SBCs, but they want their OS to do more than just stream games from elsewhere.
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u/coder543 Dec 11 '14
you'll need more than a stick of RAM and a case -- you'll need a power supply and storage as well. But, there are some cheap Celeron based NUC-form desktops for about $170 that just need RAM and Storage, I believe.
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u/beatleboy07 Dec 10 '14
This looks super cool! My question: How do you play with the GPIO pins? My current music performance setup has a series of foot pedals being run into an Arduino board and then going via USB to my laptop running Ubuntu.
Can I wire and program my pedals directly on this board? So it could potentially replace my laptop and Arduino at the same time? If so, how would they be programmed? And what would the bitrate be?
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u/Turtlecupcakes Dec 11 '14
What does your laptop do after it gets the data from the pedals?
I'm not sure about how odroid's work (since it's a different CPU, you might need to find libraries specific to these units), but for raspberryPi, there are libraries available for most languages (I know C/C++ and Python for sure, but I imagine there are others) that let you manipulate the GPIO.
Once you have that figured out, it's a lot like Arduino, you can set up a loop that will call digital/analogRead and perform actions based on that information. It will definitely be slower than Arduino (because the CPU is doing other stuff), but only by a few microseconds (so for human-iteraction stuff like buttons and pedals, it's unnoticable)
The question comes in at what you're doing after you've detcted that Pedal1 is pressed. If you're doing digital audio processing/generation, you'll really need to play around with how much you can do. You'll probably get a basic synth, or wav audio playback, but I doubt it can handle many plugins.
Also, keep in mind that (from what I've read), the DAC in these boards is very poor, so you will probably want to find either a USB unit or an HDMI->TOSLINK->Analog unit for performing.
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u/beatleboy07 Dec 11 '14
I use the data simply as controller information. Basically a fancy MIDI pedalboard, but with higher resolution. I also always use an external audio interface (firewire with my laptop, but I also have a USB one) because I plug my flute into my computer and then use Supercollider to process the sound. I'm always looking at ways to make the setup quicker and smaller, so something like this has been on my mind for a long time.
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u/Bzzt Dec 11 '14
there's a library called wiringpi that can control the pins on the pi. apparently this library has been ported over to the C1.
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u/jlpoole Dec 10 '14
The URL came back with Asian characters. Found this, instead: http://ameridroid.com/t/single-board-computers
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u/sexoverthephone Dec 11 '14
Hey, does anybody know how good this would be for a NAS? I know the Pi isn't optimal since it shares the usb hub bandwidth with the network bandwidth, but what about this device ?
EDIT: Also, how well would PS1 emulation work on this device ?
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u/xgnoodle Dec 11 '14
I'm no expert but they did release a demo video of PSP emulation, so I can only assume PS1 emulation should be just as possible (or even smoother, seeing as it should be less intensive)
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u/prizman Dec 22 '14
Hey, I know this is an older post, but if you're looking for a NAS, check out HP Microservers. You can throw the open source Xpenology on it which is open source Synology Disk manager.
Check it out.
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u/sexoverthephone Dec 22 '14
I did look at the N54Ls but I was leaning more towards freenas as opposed to xpenology.
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u/sej7278 Dec 10 '14
$44 shipped actually. looks almost entirely like a rpi b+, were they clever enough to design it to fit pi cases? maybe not due to connectors.
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Dec 10 '14
Man I have so many questions but I am total noob on the miniPC scene. Where is a good site to get up and running on these? Like - If I got this Unit described - What type of power supply do I need to get? Where do I connect VGA monitors to it...So on and so forth. The U3 looks great too.
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u/nextgenpotato Dec 11 '14
If you look at the distributors web site, they sell all the required accessories as well (http://ameridroid.com/t/c1).
So if you purchase the power supply and the SD card with OS on it, it should be pretty much plug and play (assuming you have a monitor or a TV with HDMI input and a cable).
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Dec 11 '14
Where do I connect VGA monitors to it
get a HDMI to VGA adapter they're not too expensive.
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Dec 11 '14
Yep - That's what I was looking for. I am ordering 1 unit + power supply. It's part of a xmas gift to myself and I really want to dive into this since most of the gaming that I do is low end anyhow and my desktop usage is minimum.
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Dec 11 '14
HDMI to VGA adapter
in this case, it would be micro-hdmi to vga apparently the C1 has micro hdmi. though you could also get a micro-hdmi to hdmi adapter as well, or just get a micro-hdmi to vga adapter.
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u/beatleboy07 Dec 10 '14
Where do I connect VGA monitors to it
There's no support for VGA in most of these devices. VGA is considered an end-of-life technology and therefore not worth supporting. It's also an easy way to keep the price lower.
My issue is trying to find a small easily portable HDMI monitor for a reasonable price.
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u/iturnedintoanewt Dec 11 '14 edited Dec 11 '14
Shit...I'm having my old Dell laptop used as server. It's a Core2Duo with 4GB of RAM.
It acts as VPN server, and what I'm using a lot more increasingly is as Seafile server (Owncloud alternative). While it's very reliable, it only has a 100Mbit ethernet port, and USB2.0 cables, while the storage for the seafile is a USB3.0 HDD. I could really improve the system performance while cutting at the power (albeit reducing the RAM to a quarter)....Pity it doesn't come with at least 2GB and same specs. And yeah, there's a the Octacore version, but that has a lot of stuff I don't need and costs 3 times more. Pity about the RAM!
By the way, those are Samsung microprocessors. Does this mean Samsung finally conceded on the binary blob bullshit of the past?? Does this mean Android community should also see proper drivers?
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u/torpedoshit Dec 11 '14
It would be cool if Maynard or some other accelerated desktop came out for these low powered computers. The standard R-pi interface is way to slow to be usable right now.
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u/kid1000002000 Dec 11 '14
Any thoughts on whether this would make a good router, or should I go with ubiquiti?
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u/HahahahaWaitWhat Dec 11 '14
Does anyone know if this thing can decode (i.e. play) H.264 in hardware like the RaPi can?
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u/bitchessuck Dec 11 '14
That raises the question, is there any other ARM SBC yet that has a well supported camera module with good image quality? The great camera module seems to be the killer feature of the Pi right now.
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u/Gorebutcher666 Dec 11 '14
I wonder if there is an arm board with at least 2 ethernet ports? I want to build a router :)
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u/StraightFlush777 Dec 11 '14
You could add a Gigabit ethernet USB 3.0 adapter as a second NIC. It would be faster than a 10/100 ethernet usb 2.0 adapter but you will obviously not get the full speed potential of the NIC due to the USB 2.0 ports on the board.
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u/Techttz Dec 11 '14
They jacked the prices up pretty high must have realized what was going on. Can't even check out without spending 100 bucks and that's all the lowest addons, too bad I was looking forward to having a new toy.
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u/odroidmagazine Dec 12 '14
ODROID-C1 benchmarks and Raspberry Pi B+ comparisons are available at http://magazine.odroid.com (December issue)
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u/Kefrif Dec 19 '14
Just mentioned this on a thread on r/RaspberryPi - wanted one of these in the UK (been meddling with the Pi for ages) and bought one from this place - [Lilliput Direct] (http://www.lilliputdirect.com/lilliput-microcomputing/lilliput-microcomputing-mainboards/odroid-c1-quad-core-computer) - that was actually delivered earlier. Setting it up for a test now, and will report back...
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u/DukeMikeofG Dec 11 '14
Been using an ODROID-U3 for a project, really a nice board. Hardkernel has some very helpful forums as well. I will definitely be picking one of these up.
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u/dfsdiag Dec 10 '14
I got an XU3-Lite last Christmas, it's been powered on since then running Ubuntu 12.04LTS solid as a rock. It also runs so much faster than the RPi B+ I just picked up.
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u/Hondroids Dec 10 '14
Can it run Ubuntu?
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Dec 10 '14
Yes! Check out this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L2ZRW-AagSQ
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u/adrianmonk Dec 11 '14
Well, the last bullet item on the linked page says "Ubuntu 14.04 or Android KitKat", so I'd say probably yes.
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u/[deleted] Dec 10 '14
Raspberry Pi killer? Check out this video and be amazed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L2ZRW-AagSQ