Anybody know or dare to guess how warm this thing gets? All I could find is that it needs a 5V@2A power supply, but it doesn't tell how much of that is overprovisioned for e.g. powering USB devices. If most of that is converted to heat inside that box, I guess it gets hot (that's 10W in a package slightly larger than an eighth of the volume and a quarter of the area of a light bulb)
The original one does not get noticeably hot. I think there is some thermal dissipation in the case, like a chunk of heatsink.
The downside is that the ethernet controller is run over USB. This is what kills performance drastically on the raspberry pi as well. USB is simply not a good protocol to run high speed network traffic over with low latency. The protocol is extremely chatty!
So it's USB 2.0? That's half duplex anyway, so no way are you going to get 470mb/sec out of it. Max is probably around 423.
It is actually not, I was wrong. It is an internal limitation on the bus that limits it to about 400 Mbps by default, some people have been able to squeeze a little more out of it. After that point though all kinds of issues start appearing. See the links provided in the discussion below.
I am keen to set up an emulation box to play MAME - Gamecube or greater. I am not very knowledgeable on hardware... do you think this or the ODROID-XU would be better suited to the job? My understanding is that most emulators rely predominately on the CPU rather then the GPU, unlike most PC games.
The downside is that the ethernet controller is run over USB. This is what kills performance drastically on the raspberry pi as well. USB is simply not a good protocol to run high speed network traffic over with low latency. The protocol is extremely chatty!
That is the biggest killer for using the Pi for any real file serving needs. If you have it reading from a USB HD and transferring a lot over the network it's pretty slow. You can tweak it a bit to improve the speeds, but it's really not designed for it.
The market of these kinds of devices is booming... I'm constantly surprised that no major Android company (or Google itself) has invested in this kind of device.
>> The market of these kinds of devices is booming It certainly seems to be... I'm curious about who the typical buyer is. Is it primarily hobbyists or are real product applications being served with them?
I might build a NAS with one, or get one for my kid to play with. Looks like a decent platform for a MAME cabinet, too.
The downside is that the ethernet controller is run over USB. This is what kills performance drastically on the raspberry pi as well. USB is simply not a good protocol to run high speed network traffic over with low latency. The protocol is extremely chatty!
Hmm, I've noticed this on the Raspberry Pi, but I'm curious, do you know if this is a problem for desktop PCs as well? I recently built a mini-ITX PC sort of for fun as a change of pace and then realized that the apartment where I'm moving makes it somewhat annoying to run ethernet cables to my router, so now I'm looking at USB wifi dongles. The annoying thing is mini ITX boards generally only have one PCIe slot, and as it turns out my PC is barely smaller than my previous mATX PC (Bitfenix Prodigy is actually pretty big for mini ITX, which I didn't realize). The annoying thing is that there were mini ITX boards with built in wifi but I figured I wouldn't need it so I decided to save ~$50, but in hindsight I should have just gotten it.
Extremely off-topic, but did the missing advertisement on the right really catch your eye? More than an actual advertisement would? "Companies serving the Embedded Linux Market are invited to advertise here" It was the first thing I read on the page. Am I the only one?
Operating system — ships with optional Android 4.2.2 microSD card; supports Android and Linux Pedantic, I know, but title sounds like you get a device that dual-boots into Android and Linux. By "optional", I presume that means at added cost. By "supports", I think that means you're on your own as to distro (though I suspect a device-specific distro would come out in short order). The $45 version only ships with 512mb…
No, it would be pedantic to point out that Android uses a Linux kernel. So it really says "supports Linux and Linux", good to know it supports Linux besides supporting Linux. Don't even think of running anything other than Linux!
Lots of devices come with an Android distro that has a custom kernel for supporting the device. Those ones can not run a GNU/Linux distro, so manufacturers will tell you they don't support Linux.
No, it's not technically correct, but communicates the point quite well.
Anybody know or dare to guess how warm this thing gets? All I could find is that it needs a 5V@2A power supply, but it doesn't tell how much of that is overprovisioned for e.g. powering USB devices. If most of that is converted to heat inside that box, I guess it gets hot (that's 10W in a package slightly larger than an eighth of the volume and a quarter of the area of a light bulb)
The original one does not get noticeably hot. I think there is some thermal dissipation in the case, like a chunk of heatsink.
Happy to be wrong about this, but I wouldn't think that thermal dissipation in the case would make the case less hot. Where does the heat go?