Odroid-U3: A quad-core 1.7GHz ARM single-board computer for $59 | Hacker News Reader

Odroid-U3: A quad-core 1.7GHz ARM single-board computer for $59

hardkernel.com

88 pointsdamian200096 comments

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.

> It has a terribly annoying blinking blue light that can't be turned off

Did you check /sys/class/leds/ ?

Whoa, that's great. Thanks!

For some reason I could only find forum posts saying it couldn't be turned off, but searching for that specific path says it works: http://forum.odroid.com/viewtopic.php?f=77&t=3377

> Android on it was just about useless, but it's neat to have it as an option.

Useless how? Performance was poor, or without a touch screen you weren't able to use it?

No, the performance was great. The UI is not unusuable, but pretty frustrating, and as far as I know there's no CEC support in Android (or, at least, their Android build). So as a set top box I don't think it works.

Worse still, you can't really run background services without a lot of hassle, so you also throw away a lot of what makes it compelling as a mini-server.

So by useless I suppose I mean it doesn't do anything very well.

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).

Yes it does and uses standard linux v4l2 interface via the Samsung MFC.

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.

A Bucnh of blobs = 1 Single blob for Mali. The other files are symlinks ok?

They put a newer XBMC image lately that fixed all the slow issues.

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.

Lots more on my blog: http://rwmj.wordpress.com/?s=ARM

You'll need a lot of other stuff to make ARM usable...Everyone who's serious about ARM is waiting for 64 bit to become available

Huh? What does the processor core have to do with any of these details? There are plenty of usable ARM SoCs out there in real products doing real work. Running a media center shouldn't be the criteria for a 'usable' system.

I'd be more scared about the amount of developer documentation available for the Exynos, or what Samsung's roadmap is for the chip. If you want to play with one, cool. But would you design a 10-year product with it?

Go with a Freescale iMX board if you want a usable 32-bit ARM Cortex-A8/A9 with decent documentation, available Linux drivers, and people that can help online. You will never get mainline kernel for devices like these, so don't bother asking. But Freescale at least has a git repository available and it's well maintained.

My personal favorites are the SABRE Lite boards from Boundary Devices and the Wandboard:

http://boundarydevices.com/products/sabre-lite-imx6-sbc/

http://www.wandboard.org/

Is designing 10-year products really a thing any more? I can't think of any device that I use practically that is that old. I think the only places that you will want 10-year products anymore are space, implant, and undersea/underground/tracking applications. I'm not saying it is a good thing, as it leads to this "disposable tech" mindset, but it seems like that may be the reality of it. OTOH +1 wandboard and iMX in general. I wish the Novena were a little less expensive, but I can't blame bunnie for wanting to err on the side of making quality hackable goods.

Yes. Not everything is a consumer appliance. Even some consumer appliances need to last ten years (lawn sprinkler controller, home automation, factory automation, etc). While those products may not actually be produced for ten years without an update, they will have to be supported in a lot of cases.

Everything that isn't consumer electronics has longer lifecycles. B2B customers aren't as flexible: it's not a question of throwing out your smartphone every 2 years and buying a new one, as soon as your action is multiplied across 1000+ devices everything takes much longer. You might spend an entire year doing the national rollout, and once you've done that you don't want to do it again if at all possible.

If there's any kind of qualification, tracking, auditing, or compliance issue everything will take much longer again.

I'm not sure this is true. I see plenty of products that have 1k+ rollouts more frequently. Maybe some businesses aren't sophisticated enough to do that, but those are the large, slow businesses of the herd that will get picked off by faster movers. That's why healthcare, defense & education are popular industries to enter right now, because many of the entrenched players can't keep up with the game. There is _no_ intrinsic reason that b2b should be different from b2c. I bet the old guard's lobbyists and capital can only last for so long.

It's better than the opposite, which is designing to some random processor with completely opaque information about it. No datasheets or TRMs, no idea of production schedules, no idea of lifespan.

And I'd classify Samsung Exynos and the Broadcom BCM2835 in Raspberry Pi in that group.

Well, I hate the opaque bits of both those, but that doesn't mean an upgradable board can't be designed around the specs they implement, and those chips are just the commodities that populate them. Write your code for ARM, make a good pin-compatible interface that can allow for replacement with other components if necessary.

It is absolutely a thing, but it's a very quiet thing. There's an awful lot out there that could use the boost in CPU, I/O and RAM in this form factor but the fruit-fly lifespan of these things scares people. I'm fighting that battle right now.

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.

The HummingBoard will have Gigabit ethernet; no word on price yet, though: http://hackaday.com/2014/04/22/hummingboard-the-vastly-more-...

> The HummingBoard uses a Freescale i.MX6 quad core...

Current i.MX 6 silicon aren't able squeeze out more than 470 Mbps from their Ethernet MAC.

http://cache.freescale.com/files/32bit/doc/errata/IMX6DQCE.p...

ERR004512

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.

There are quite a few with SATA but you have to hunt around. Eg the Cubox does.

You should check Olinuxino Lime[1] if you're looking for SATA connectivity. It costs 30 EUR and is open source hardware.

[1] https://www.olimex.com/Products/OLinuXino/A10/A10-OLinuXino-...

For me, as long as the IOPS as mentioned in my parent post aren't available, I can just as well connect the Disks through USB. shrugs

Cubietruck -- dual core, quite fast, fairly open, supports hardware virtualization. It has a true SATA port (note that many ARM systems have faked SATA via USB which can be slow).

Have a look at i.MX6 based machines. Namely CuBox-i, HummingBoard, SABRE Lite and Wandboard. The Utilite is fine, too.

Rather with a PCIe connector.

Well if you're running something that requires any sort of crypto, i.e. a bitcoin node, then the RPi's slow CPU is very detrimental.

But the same limitation applies to the contenders, doesn't it? As they're not _that_ much more powerful to make a real difference in this case, or am I wrong?

Actually the difference between the RPi's CPU and the CPUs on beefier ARM boards is quite staggering.

Err, no. The differences are pretty massive. The Samsung and Qualcomm processor cores are not only much, much faster but more sophisticated too. The Pi is very basic.

The Pi was also not the first of these boards, merely one that had great marketing and an appealing price point. My sheevaplug predates it by a couple of years (and is still faster)

The problem is not that RPi doesn't have the horsepower. It does - but you've got to use Videocore IV. Hopefully there'll be some good compiler with at least intrinsic support for it.

My desktop (really a netbook) has gigabit ethernet but it's not connected when the slower wireless works just fine. My ADSL is slower still so it just doesn't matter.

So should I swap it for an RPi? For what use is all the processing power I have.

I run a Lisp web server at home on an ODROID-XU.

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.

> ten times faster

With single-threaded tests or when using all cores?

single

I own one. I prefer the Raspberry Pi.

- 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.

Is yours running headless though? The HDMI issue was my biggest problem.

It is headless yeah, I have other devices to play media files from it through the network.

There is a capacitive multitouch display accessory listed on the site: http://hardkernel.com/main/products/prdt_info.php?g_code=G13...

But no information about software support.

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.

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.

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.

Maybe these boards should have no ports on PCB and have headers for everything?

We could even define a standard and... oh no, it's ATX all over again :-/

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.

Bitrig is working on support though. The devs have a few Exynos based devices, including that particular one.

Yep, you are right. Because all ARM boards supports OpenBSD.

And the PVR GPU on BBB is of course the most friendly GPU.

Dedicated account to astroturf Odroid?

Nope.. Just didn't knew the site until someone linked it to me.

The hardkernel team hit it out of the park with the U3.

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.

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.

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.

At the moment, maybe, but look at the recent post about a plugin that does automatic background OCR for every image in a browser.

That kind of "processing the ambient environment all the time, just in case you might need some part of it" is going to thrive when computing power allows it.

Permanent background face recognition, just in case there's a face in any picture. Permanent background face identity checking just in case you know them. Permanent audio speech recognition. Permanent searching of all sorts of things to find contextually relevant information. Permanent local analysis trying to work out "what's going on" and "what mood are you in" and "what are you working on" and "is now a bad time to interrupt?".

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.

> 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.

Raspberry Pi on steroids? Looks like a better host for my home media server. Main site is down - some info here http://liliputing.com/2013/12/odroid-u3-59-dev-board-with-th...

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.

I'd like to try out building my own router on a hobbyist budget. Are there any cheap SoC type devices like that come with dual rj45 ethernet ports?

It seems to be a common trait that all the sub-$100 USD SoC devices have one rj45 port.

These might end up costing somewhat over $100, but they make nice little routers.

http://www.pcengines.ch/apu.htm

http://www.pcengines.ch/alix.htm

My god, that website looks horrible. A stylesheet, a stylesheet, my kingdom for a stylesheet!

It is pretty crazy that nobody is will to give you two ethernet on anything sub-$100. You literally have to pay an extra $50+ just for a second NIC.

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.

[1] http://www.alfa.com.tw/products_show.php?pc=99&ps=50

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.

And yet Raspberry Pi has had hardware-accelerated video decoding since the beginning, while Mali 400 (introduced with A9) still doesn't have it.

The Exynos has a hardware video codec, it's separate from the GPU.

It is the same SoC, they have said so.

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?

To answer my own question - this board (the ODROID) has a USB 2.0 OTG port.

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.

If they cared about best practices for PHP they wouldn't be using mysql_real_escape_string().

Still waiting for the A15 based boards to drop in price so I can attempt to get an openstack/ARM cloud up and running. Just for the hell of it.

The site is not working anymore. I can't finish my purchase :/

And .. is it really showing username and password of their mysql?

Google tells me 아니오 translates to "not" so they're probably not using a password.

That's... that page makes me sad.

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

This board will be the next part to my home fanless network. It will be running RabbitMQ and pgSQL

I am using one of these right now. Pretty fun.

It says traffic limit reached

board = $59 shipping = ANOTHER $50

$59 is just the board. Add the eMMC card, shipping, tax, customs, ...

Well, I paid for it. Was worth it for me.

Plus $25 shipping. Ugh. Also no gigabit ethernet is a massive fail.

Just wait for a cheap board with a CPU in the AMD A1100 series, it seriously rocks.

I need something like this for a test server. It has similar resources to what I allocate for my VMs. 25$ shipping is a deal-breaker though and I'm also not sure if it would get past the EU customs problem-free.

Get them to mark it as a gift and a value of €1. I've had tonnes of stuff get through doing that without any import duty added :)

Mmm, felony charges. Knowingly misrepresenting goods and parcels is illegal.

That's the sender's problem and they're not in EU jurisdiction so are more than willing to do this.

There are too many barriers in this world.

Doesn't seem worth it just to save $25.

Heck I can't think of an amount of money worth felony charges personally.

You can generally get away with that if a friend mails it to you, or if it's a small-time seller on eBay, but most larger companies won't agree to mislabel purchases as gifts on the custom form, since that's illegal. A company doing it at any kind of volume also has a higher risk of being caught.

Large companies outside the EU and US have done this for years. It's an old cat and mouse game.

Not many people work within such strict legal frameworks like that.

They won't do it, people have asked on their forums. They're completely above the board and they want to keep it that way.

> get past the EU customs problem-free.

Stop being a free-loader. All this social welfare has to be paid by someone. You have money to spend on toys - pay your taxes.

All the money goes to the banks anyway, fuck the system

at least in Germany everything below a value of 150€ is except from custom fees, VAT still applies.

Well, this is frustrating.

I didn't mean that I want to be a freeloader. "Problem-free" doesn't mean "free". I just had too many problems making them believe that the my stuff aren't newly purchased from the country I'm returning from[0]. Also when I do purchase something, it's very hard to convince them that I actually did purchase it for the price I declared. I believe I'm also entitled to purchase stuff below X euros without import tax (IANAL, though), but so many people around me had so much problems with the customs that I don't even try.

Customs processes aren't as simple as "pay the duties and be happy". From what I see and go through, they can be extremely annoying and complicated.

So, you see, it is actually only you, talking about not paying taxes. I see that some also suggested illegal workarounds to my problem. Honestly, no, thanks and I'm also not responsible for what they say.

I hope you don't accuse people with theft so easily when you're talking straight to their faces.

[0]: In one case, they didn't allow me to go through with the camera I purchased from Germany when I was returning from the US. I had to open Canon's web site to prove them that Canon uses a different model name in the US therefore it wouldn't be possible to purchase it from the US. They were still complaining while letting me go. Now I keep the receipt in my bag if I'm carrying a shiny new gear.

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