brainwagon

One of my recent posts highlighted the big pile of development boards that I have lying around. This week, I actually added to that pile in a couple of ways: I found a pair of Beagle Bone Blacks that I had misplaced, a couple of Propeller boards, and most significantly, I ordered an ODROID-C1 from ameriDroid. Stupidly, I didn’t read their website carefully enough, so I ended up making TWO orders from ameriDroid, the second to get the somewhat odd power supply needed (5V, 2A, with 2.5mm barrel) and to which I added the clear case you see, and also a micro HDMI cable (I know I have one some where, but I couldn’t find it). The prices for the additional goodies swell the price a bit, but are quite reasonably priced: $4.95 for the case, $5.95 for the HDMI cable, and $6.95 for the power adapter. Consider carefully before ordering and you’ll save a round of shipping.

ameriDroid did an excellent job of shipping: I had BOTH orders delivered just two days after ordering. They even included this nice hand written thank you, which makes more sense when you realize I had this delivered to my work address.

In the following discussion, when I mention the Raspberry Pi, I am speaking of the older variation model B and the B+. I do not yet have a Raspberry Pi 2, which upgrades to a 900Mhz quad core with 1GB of DRAM.

Given that I have four Raspberry Pis and three Beagle Bone Blacks of various generations, what compelled me to look at the ODROID-C1? You can read the specifications yourself, but here are the things that were most intriguing to me:

• Quad core 1.5Ghz ARM processor. Compared to the 700Mhz single core ARM in the Raspberry Pi and the 1Ghz CPU in the Beagle Bone Black, one might expect that this little board could handle a lot more stuff.
• 1GB of Dram, double most of my other boards. Nice!
• Supports some little eMMC4.5 flash boards, which are supposed to be faster than existing microSD cards (more on this below).
• 4 USB ports + 1 USB OTG port. Lots of expansion capabilities.
• Includes an infrared receiver built onto the board. Might be cool for remote/home theater applications.
• Supports both Ubuntu and Android. I’m mostly a Linux guy, but the possibility of using recent Android builds is interesting too.

Okay, so on to my experience…

I didn’t order any of the memory cards from ameriDroid with the operating systems pre installed. Why? I’m kind of a cheapskate, and I have a couple of spare 16GB microSD cards lying around. I started with a class 10 Lexar card. From my Ubuntu laptop, I downloaded their version of Ubuntu (1.1GB compressed, around 4gb uncompressed) and did the usual dance using the Linux “dd” program to copy it to the flash card. I also got an Edimax Wifi dongle from one of my other Raspberry Pis, and the wireless keyboard dongle. Plugged all this stuff together, plugged the microHDMI cable into my old Samsung TV, and powered it on. And…

Nothing. Screen went black on the TV, and the two LEDs on the board (red and blue) were steady and mixing to purple color. Hmmph.

A little googling revealed that if Linux had booted, it would be flashing the blue led as a heart beat indication. I decided to go ahead and try reburning Linux onto my other flash card (which it turns out is a slower class 6 Lexar card). After all, earlier this week I discovered that one of my unbootable Raspberry Pis was in fact an issue with SD card compatibility.

And, of course… that worked! Up until a point. My TV is rather old, and just supports 720P. When it booted, I ended up with my tv saying “Video Mode Not Supported”. Grrr. It turns out that you can change that by modifying the boot.ini file on the card (easy to edit if you have another Linux box, mount the card, edit the file to select 720p, save, eject, and reboot).

And that worked. Again, up until a point. On my TV, overscan is a bit of an issue: a significant amount of the screen (including all of the all-important task bar) was actually off screen on my TV. Grr… I drug out a monitor which didn’t have the overscan issues. And rebooted.

Into a nice X-windows desktop. It wasn’t the Unity layout that I was familiar with from my desktop, it’s more old school. On the desktop is a README and an icon labelled “ODROID Utility”. You click on it, and it allows you to do some features similar to those performed by the “raspi-config” program on the Raspberry Pi: most notably, to upgrade the kernel/firmware and expand the root partition to take full advantage of the entire microSD card. If you select the “upgrade kernel”, it actually doesn’t do that, it tells you that you can use the normal “sudo apt-get update; sudo apt-get upgrade; sudo apt-get dist-upgrade” commands to update. But I did try to expand the drive, rebooted, setup the wireless network using the desktop utility, and then started the apt-get stuff…

But something along here went wrong. Even after rebooting, it didn’t appear that the card was expanded, but I didn’t notice until the upgrade was underway. There were a couple of other oddities: ssh didn’t appear to be working right, I couldn’t login remotely. And the Edimax Wifi was really, really slow: just a few kb per second. That upgrade was going to take forever. And while that was happening, I noticed the odd “unexpanded” root partition, which appeared to be out of space. Argh!

So, I redid the entire process again: reflashed the OS, and redid everything again. I also decided to ditch the Edimax connector, and instead plugged the board into my wireless router via Ethernet.

And somehow, things worked better. I’m not sure what I did wrong, but when I tried to expand the root FS, it told me to check to make sure that the root device was on /dev/mmcblk0p2. I exited first, and ran df to check, and it told me that it couldn’t access the mount table. “What the heck?” I decided to reboot again, and it showed up properly, not sure why. In any case, I expanded the root fs and rebooted. This time, I saw 11GB free, and decided to proceed with the apt-get upgrades.

Now that I was hooked up via Ethernet, things seemed to work much better. It still took a couple of hours to update all this stuff, but it did, and now it’s running pretty well.

If you “cat /proc/cpuinfo”, you get:

odroid@r2d2:~$ cat /proc/cpuinfo
Processor       : ARMv7 Processor rev 1 (v7l)
processor       : 0
BogoMIPS        : 3.27

processor       : 1
BogoMIPS        : 3.27

processor       : 2
BogoMIPS        : 3.27

processor       : 3
BogoMIPS        : 3.27

Features        : swp half thumb fastmult vfp edsp neon vfpv3 tls vfpv4 
CPU implementer : 0x41
CPU architecture: 7
CPU variant     : 0x0
CPU part        : 0xc05
CPU revision    : 1

Hardware        : ODROIDC
Revision        : 000a
Serial          : 1b00000000000000

Nice! Quad core. It still doesn’t seem super fast, no doubt because of the slow flash cards. You can ssh in using the login odroid password odroid. You can run sudo or su with the same password.

It was a bit of a hassle, but it appears to work.

Overall, the biggest problem I have with the ODROID thusfar is the Ubuntu distribution is just too bloated. It loads a whole bunch of software that might be reasonable on a desktop, but seems out of place (at least by default) on a small system. The Raspbian distribution of Debian actually walks this line pretty carefully: it feels fleshed out, but by default doesn’t include absolutely everything you might want, because after all, you might not want all this stuff, and resources on these small boards are fairly scarce. I don’t think I need the jdk, cups, kido (I had to look it up too), samba, chrome and firefox (runnable, but not all that pleasant in low memory systems) and god knows what else. This also means that getting your system up to date is slow too, because there is just so much software to update. Bleh.

It’s also pretty clear that the ODROID distribution is just less polished. The Raspberry Pi might annoy me with its (understandable) insistence on setting your keyboard up for UK English, but it’s easy enough to change, and raspi-config handles most of it. Ubuntu on the ODROID seems curiously to come with the default time zone set to Australia/Adelaide, and I had to google for the dpkg-reconfigure magic to fix it. Your expectations and experiences might be different.

One of my twitter followers asked whether I had bought the eMMC card with Ubuntu pre-installed. I did not, and the reason is simple: I’m a cheapshake. I think I paid ~$10 for my last 16gb microSD card, whereas the 16gb eMMC cards sold by ameriDroid cost $40 (more than the entire rest of the computer). Whether they are speedy or not, it didn’t seem like economy to me.

A few last thoughts after my first day as an ODROID-C1:

If you are a relative beginner to Linux, I don’t think I’d allow myself to be seduced by the ODROID’s higher speed. Get yourself a Raspberry Pi 2: definitely setup better for newbies, and has a much larger community to draw from. I found the learning curve for the ODROID to be a bit steeper than I think newbs could handle.

The ODROID-C1 could use a more disciplined Ubuntu distribution. The existing one includes everything and then some. A smaller but more reasoned distribution would be nicer.

I have not figured out what the deal is with the microSD card that wouldn’t boot. I am told that Samsung cards are in general better, but more investigation is clearly needed. I’ve no doubt that the class 6 card I’m using is slow, but the class 10 card I tried didn’t work. More experimentation is clearly (but sadly) still needed.

I should experiment with wireless again. I’ve had good luck with the Edimax dongles on the Pi, not sure what the issue might be.

Buy the AC adapter when you order one. And the HDMI cable if you don’t have one.

A lot of the documentation is obviously kind of bad translations. Even their videos can be a little bit mumbly and hard to understand:

Are any of my other readers using the ODROID-C1? I’d love to hear your comments and experiences.