

Ask HN: Which stick computers are the most hackable? - mwcampbell

I&#x27;ve recently grown interested in stick computers, those devices, usually based on ARM processors, that have roughly the dimensions of a USB stick and run a general-purpose OS. Which of these computers are most amenable to hacking, by either replacing the image in internal flash storage or booting an alternate image from a microSD card? Bonus points if one can rebuild the Android image from source. Extra bonus points for my current intended use if the stick has a headphone jack.
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MichaelCrawford
I haven't done a whole lot with it yet, but I am very intrigued with my
Gumstix Overo Fire: [http://www.gumstix.com/](http://www.gumstix.com/)

The OpenEmbedded Linux source can be had from
[http://www.gumstix.org/](http://www.gumstix.org/)

While some work was done towards an Android port, it's not really working yet;
I'd like to contribute to that but have not done so yet.

My aim in purchasing my Gumstix was to have a login shell and local
development tools for use in experimenting with ways to make mobile software
consume less electrical power through software refactoring. For the most part
I do that by reducing cache misses.

[http://www.warplife.com/tips/code/performance/kids-these-
day...](http://www.warplife.com/tips/code/performance/kids-these-days.html)

All the Gumstix boards have a selection of daughtercards for various kinds of
I/O. I don't recall the name of the card I have for my Overo Fire, but it has
quite a lot - more than the Raspberry PI.

While the design of the Gumstix CPU cards is proprietary, that of the
daughtercards is open source. The Gumstix company's aim is to encourage the
development of Gumstix-based gadgets, perhaps with custom-built daughtercards;
they make most of their money by selling Gumstix cards in bulk.

The Overo Fire and at least some of the other Gumstix cards use TI OMAP "Video
Processors". These are heterogeneous multicore CPUs. Mine has two cores, one
an ARM Cortex A8, the other some manner of TI c6000 DSP. Gumstix.org doesn't
provide source for the DSP but one can get SYSBIOS (formerly DSP/BIOS) free of
charge from TI.

TI's Code Composer Studio is somewhat costly, but one can get a fully-
functional eval version, whose evaluation is long enough to develop typical
DSP applications.

------
grizzles
I thought these Baytrail based ones would be cool:
[http://liliputing.com/2015/02/beelink-preps-three-intel-
mini...](http://liliputing.com/2015/02/beelink-preps-three-intel-mini-pcs-
including-one-based-compute-stick.html)

How great would those (USB3) be for bare metal hosting service. But it turns
out they are only going to be USB2 after all. I would love to find a really
low cost Intel based USB3 or SATA SBC if anyone has recommendations.

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mkeedlinger
I'm not totally certain if it's "hackable", but Intel's compute stick seems
pretty cool, not to mention that it's sold with the option of a Ubuntu
install.

[http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/compute-
stick/intel-c...](http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/compute-stick/intel-
compute-stick.html)

It may not be exactly what you're looking for, but then again you never said
your purpose.

