Impish!!

Go figure, yet another piece of wifi genius.  Imp!

Impish!!

Gumstix Killer

GUMSTIX (the old way)

I had been holding off on buying a gumstix because they are quite expensive for the horsepower.

Cheapest entry level (with wireless) to get I/O for robotics would be:

Overo® Air COM at US$200 plus say RoboVero™ at US$100 (US$300 all up) or with Alcatraz™ US$59 (US$259 all up).  You can pop Linux onto the thing – good – and I understand you can sneak Android onto it – very very good.

Grunt is provided by Gumstix is:

• Architecture ARM Cortex-A8 Processor Texas Instruments OMAP 3503 Applications Processor 600 MHz RAM 512 MB NAND 512 MB

GUMSTIX KILLER (the new way)

Now, look what I put together for US$150 all up …

The red brick is:

• Dual Core Cortex-A9 1.2GHz UG802 Mini PC, Android4.0 Dongle, TV Box, HD IPTV Player, DDR3 1GB and that is a Freeduino USB Host for I/O.

Now the Android comes pre-installed (no stuffing around) and there is still a card slot.  Of course, it hasn’t got the camera and sensors of a phone but who cares if you are attaching a 9DOF board and pumping the video through a FPV system.   I can always use one of the cheaper phones with camera to pump a video stream using one of the video streaming apps.  But then again, Gumstix is sans all those things without additional add-ons.

Of course, if you paired an IOIO and a single core android mini pc you could get in at US$83 all up, but all you’d get is:

• MK802 mini pc Android 4.0 Allwinner A10 1.5GHz Cortex-A8 (twice the grunt of a gumstix) for US$33!!