

Odroid-U3: A quad-core 1.7GHz ARM single-board computer for $59 - damian2000
http://hardkernel.com/main/products/prdt_info.php?g_code=G138733896281

======
sgentle
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.

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

Did you check /sys/class/leds/ ?

~~~
sgentle
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](http://forum.odroid.com/viewtopic.php?f=77&t=3377)

------
rwmj
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](http://rwmj.wordpress.com/?s=ARM)

~~~
joezydeco
_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://boundarydevices.com/products/sabre-lite-imx6-sbc/)

[http://www.wandboard.org/](http://www.wandboard.org/)

~~~
eldondev
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.

~~~
pjc50
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.

~~~
eldondev
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.

------
roeme
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.

~~~
ZenoArrow
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.

~~~
zepolud
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-...](https://www.olimex.com/Products/OLinuXino/A10/A10-OLinuXino-
LIME/open-source-hardware)

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

[http://lispm.de/ccl](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.

~~~
pflanze
> ten times faster

With single-threaded tests or when using all cores?

~~~
lispm
single

------
darklajid
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.

~~~
bbrks
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.

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

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

------
notacoward
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.

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sjwright
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.

~~~
rcxdude
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.

~~~
sjwright
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 :-/

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muyuu
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.

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

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

~~~
muyuu
Dedicated account to astroturf Odroid?

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

------
hardwaresofton
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.

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nkozyra
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.

~~~
olegkikin
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.

~~~
jodrellblank
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?".

------
spacec0wb0y
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...](http://liliputing.com/2013/12/odroid-u3-59-dev-board-with-the-power-of-
a-galaxy-s3.html)

~~~
pmorici
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.

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alyandon
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.

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

[http://www.pcengines.ch/apu.htm](http://www.pcengines.ch/apu.htm)

[http://www.pcengines.ch/alix.htm](http://www.pcengines.ch/alix.htm)

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

------
userbinator
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.

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

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

------
dominicgs
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?

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

------
Osiris
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.

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

------
_superposition_
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.

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

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

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

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

------
ausjke
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

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

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

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memming
It says traffic limit reached

------
rasz_pl
board = $59 shipping = ANOTHER $50

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

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

------
nutjob2
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.

------
egeozcan
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.

~~~
draugadrotten
> 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.

~~~
egeozcan
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.

