The Advent of the Raspberry Pi has seen an explosion in the market for ARM dev boards, sometimes even with pinouts for Arduino shields. The UDOO, though, takes those boards and ramps up the processing power for some very, very interesting builds.
The UDOO comes equipped with a dual or quad-core ARM CPU running at 1GHz with 1 GB of RAM. Also on board is the Atmel SAM3X8E – the same chip in the new Arduino DUE – and has pinouts for all those Arduino shields you have lying around.
In addition to serving your next project as a souped-up Raspberry Pi, UDOO also includes 78 (!) GPIO pins, Gigabit Ethernet, a camera connector, one SATA port (on the quad-core version), and an LVDS header for attaching LCD monitors. Basically, the UDOO is the motherboard of an ARM-powered laptop with the pinouts to handle Arduino shields. It’s just like [Bunnie]’s laptop, only this time you can actually buy it.
The UDOO doesn’t come cheap, though: on the UDOO Kickstarter, the dual-core version is going for $150 while the quad-core is priced at $170. Still, if you need the power to run a pair of Kinects or want to build an awesome torrent box, you’d be hard pressed to find a more powerful board.
Its official, people have run out of decent names for arduino clones/spinoffs.
Agreed
Bunnie’s laptop (is supposed to) have something no other ARM board have – a SO-DIMM slot. And that’s a killer feature.
or you could buy http://www.wandboard.org/ for $130 and optionally (but why would you want to?) add Arduino
you can even buy one from Mouser without waiting >one year for kickstarter project to start shipping
This board intrigues me.
As per their measurements it has an extremely low power consumption, way lower than e.g. the RPi. Compared to the RPi it also has more RAM in the bigger versions and the quad core comes with a SATA port and onboard wifi and bluetooth. The USB host port looks to be 3.0 also.
It’s not as much of a bargain, but it has all the bits and pieces that I personally miss on the Pi and that are just not there or need to be bought separate.
Thanks for that link.
UDOO people did comparision between many boards here http://www.udoo.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/UDOO_comparison_table.pdf
Wandaboard is one of them. What is most important for me is that UDOO is a quad core and Wanda only a dual core. In addition UDOO has SATA port what makes it a real computer to me.
Fix: Wandoboard comes from 27th May also in quad core version and it has 2 GB RAM and SATA. So if you do not care about Arduino then this is definitely interesting option.
The Wandboard is going quad.
This board is very weird… I’m surprised there are so many backers ever since I saw it on kickstarter a few days ago.
Here are my reasons:
1. Most of what they use it for can be done just with a 10x cheaper arduino.
1.1 Nothing they show doing with it cannot be done with other cheaper boards.
2. The arduino is connected to it through serial port.
3. Why would you need to run the OS to program the arduino from the same board? It’s a waste of resources if you don’t need it afterwards. It’s not like people are short of computers. It’s much harder to find an unused monitor+keyboard then a full computer.
4. Its too expensive. It touches the price range of an atom or i3 mainboards + RAM which have much better specs. I appreciate the PI and the Cubie board and all the android because they cost much less then the cheapest computer components I could get, but this thing costs too much.
I’m not saying it’s a bad idea, just that it sits in a weird position in the market.
Wow, I’m surprised they’re using the serial port as the main interface.
Arduino Due has not yet implemented buffered serial transmit, so Serial.print(“anything_more_than_2_characters”) will block until the last 2 bytes are in the UART shift register and 1-byte buffer. The old Arduinos were like this for a long time. I implemented buffered transmit for Teensy in the days of Arduino 0016 and it maybe a huge improvement for MIDI and other applications (even though most “Serial” usage on Teensy is the USB virtual serial). It’s one of the big improvements Arduino 1.0 made that really breathed new life into Arduino Uno.
Then again, Arduino Due’s native USB virtual serial isn’t so great either. Despite incredibly capable hardware, the software support (based on code from Atmel) leaves a lot to be desired. I’ve been working on some benchmarks recently, which I’m planning to publish next week, showing the actual USB speeds achievable with Due’s native USB port, Leonardo, ChipKit (the new Fubarino Mini with native USB), and of course Teensy 2.0 & 3.0. With a bit of luck, maybe HaD will carry a story about it?
There are muxes to connect the Atmel USB device to the imx6 host or an external micro B socket. A serial port from each device gets similar treatment. I think they understand your concern and are giving some decent options for interconnection. There’s a graphic on the Kickstarter page that shows this but it’s not very clear.
UDOO is a good deal if you need that kind of processing horsepower along with the io and real-time of an Arduino on a single board. There are much cheaper alternatives if you need anything less.