ODROID-C2 ARM SBC Offers Great Performance For $40

[kayosiii]

Keep in mind when considering these toys that arduino or mbed board might fine to your project embedded project and they are easier to program than linux. I have not seen any reasonable use of these devices, you can buy a second hand laptop or tablepc ( a real computer with display, power unit, keyboard everything) with 40 usd. I did sold old PIII 800mhz 10 inch tabletpc for 40 eur to a rasperry pi owner, who bought it for boating. You can buy also new cheap android tvboxes, they have case, power unit and a remote controller.

I best use case I can think of building a small machine that does one dedicated task, but needs to run one or more applications that require Operating System services / or would otherwise require large parts of an operating system to be reimplemented on top of an Arduino etc

Because the board is small, a single board and has exposed and documented io pins it relatively easy to design your own casing and io, which you get with arduino but not older repurposed hardware.
Another factor is power draw which can be a factor in deciding what to use.

[Evildead666]

Hi there Phoronix !
Long time lurker, first time poster.

VERY interested in getting another small ARM based linux board. I already have a Pi2, which I feel is lacking in RAM for a good desktop experience.
Was looking at the pine 64+ 2GB version, or the C2 2GB, or even a Pi3.

I'd also just like to point out the news about the 4.6 kernel from a few days ago, on Phoronix http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...features&num=1
Quote from the Article "
Among the ARM SoC/platform work is on Axis Artpec-6, TI Keystone-k2g, Mediatek MT7623, Allwinner A83T, NXP i.MX6QP, ST Microelectronics stm32f469, Annapurna Labs Alpine v2, Marvell Armada 3700, Marvell Armada 7000/8000, Amlogic S905, Qualcomm Snapdragon 820, Socionext UniPhier, ARM Juno Development Platform, Allwinner A64, and Broadcom Vulcan. Board/machine work includes Buffalo Linkstation LS-QVL/LS-GL, Cubietruck Plus, D-Link DIR-885L, Google Nexus 7, Homlet v2, Lamono R1, Itead Ibox, LG Optimus Black, and the Raspberry Pi Model A. - Continued architecture work on the ARM 64-bit / AArch64 code."

So the AmLogic S905 will have support pretty soon, as far as I understand, anyway.
Would that Linux support include HW video decoding ?

[AdrianBc]

oleid
> Also, those Cortex A53 devices provide hardware AES.
> I'm wondering if they'd be suitable for a NAS device when connecting the hard drives via USB3.


Actually most Cortex-A53 implementations, including those from ODROID C2 & Raspberry Pi 3, do not implement the optional AES & SHAx instructions.


Nevertheless, ODROID C2 has a crypto engine integrated into the DMA controller, which probably implements AES at all 3 standard key lengths, triple DES & SHAx. We will know for sure when the S905 datasheet will be published, supposedly next month. This crypto engine, which does encryption, decryption & hashing on the data sent or received from peripherals is more efficient than using the ARM instructions, if you are content with the standard algorithms and you do not want to use those instructions to implement non-standard variations.


So the encryption would be perfectly fine for a NAS. The Gb Ethernet works at full speed so it is also OK. The problem is that ODROID C2 has USB 2.0, not 3.0.


A decent NAS can be done with the more expensive ODROID XU4, which has both Gb Ethernet & USB 3.0. I have one ODROID XU4, which has worked fine continuously for the last 5 months, but I had to disassemble its heatsink, remove whatever was on the heatsink, put high quality thermal paste & assemble it back. After this all was OK, but before that the CPU temperatures at high utilization were excessive and the noise of the fan was annoying.

[Shimon]

Thanks for the suggestion re Mini M8s guys; I'm buying on the premise all the work that's currently going into Odroid C2 will be reusable on that device once it's hacked. (especially with S905 mainline kernel support)

Made it just in time to pay $36.99 - we'll see how it turns out.

[Piper]

As a inexpensive Linux desktop/media box a cheep intel box like Wintel Pro or Tronsmart Ara X5+ (both intel z8300) might be a better choice - considering a decent 32gb sd card and power adapter (and wifi in case of Ara) you end up at a similar price level but with better supported GPU. Raspberry works nice as a low traffic server (radius,LDAP) for home/small office but as a desktop.. it's not very comfortable. Arm systems that aim to be a desktop replacement like Compulab's Utilite and SolidRun's CuBox-i are more expensive and tend to be stuck on older kernels (and have poor GPU/VPU support).

[Shimon]

So yeah, I finally got what I wanted and much more! Thanks @balbes150 straight from my M8s Mini!

http://forum.armbian.com/index.php/topic/1143-armbian-for-amlogic-s905/#entry11493

[kayosiii]

Mbed boards do have an os:

https://www.mbed.com/en/development/software/mbed-os/

I have used a Nucleo board:
http://www.seeedstudio.com/depot/NUC...32-p-1933.html
I do not know if mbed os works with it.

Good to know that this is an option. Does mbed OS support jackd and X11 out of the box?

[Shimon]

A few Mini M8S benchmark results here and here.

[Anyasz]

I have a embedded single board Computer running Ubuntu Mate and I can't get YouTube to playback smoothly. Anyone have any suggestions without me having to load Raspbian?

[ThoM]

Mainline HDMI-output is on it's way...