Gadgetory

the small board computer movement is going strong and with the recent release of the Raspberry Pi 2 it doesn't look at it's going to be losing any of its momentum now the key thing about the Raspberry Pi 2 of course was its price it's $35 and there are many many other SBC's out there but none of them have really hit that price point though to be fair some of them do offer more functionality that's with the exception of hard colonel hard colonel has a variety of different species for salem one of them the Odroid c1 also cost just $35 it comes with a quad-core cortex a5 CPU a Mali 450 GPU and one gig of memory well I've got hold of one so let's have a look at it so take a look at the Odroid c1 board as you can see it's small and compact like other single board computers are available on the market here in the middle we have the quad-core processor which is clocked at 1.5 gigahertz there's one gigabytes of RAM here at the back we have the 40 GPIO pins here are 4 USB ports Gigabit Ethernet port micro HDMI micro USB here's the power connector a serial connector here is the battery backup socket for the real-time clock and here is an infrared receiver now if we flip the board over on the other side here we can see that the board has its SD card reader at the very bottom also below that you'll see the connector for the emmc module and emmc modules are about 2 or 3 times faster than SD card and it's an option for the Odroid c1 now because this card is here in the middle it does seem that all of the weight is taken on that reader and as you can see the board does wobble slightly okay because it isn't flat along the bottom now that is a bit worrying for me but I suppose if I bought a case that would solve all the problems now just talking about the power connector here this is how the board is power it's not powered through the microUSB port it's powered through a more conventional socket you can buy an external power supply or the option I went with was this external cable which is a USB cable and then it has the right connector at this and for the board to here we can see with the connector plugged in and the USB port of the other end I would then connect into a phone charger to get the board running as you may guess from the Droid part of Odroid hard kernels range of s pcs were originally designed to run Android this means that the Odroid c1 support for Android is excellent the current officially supplied version of Android is Android 4.4 KitKat like other SBC's we support Android the device boots up to the standard home screen using HDMI TV or monitor use the mouse instead of your finger and click instead of tap you can also add a USB keyboard the default installation comes with a few hard kernel specific apps Odroid utility which is used to set the screen resolution clockworkmod Super User because the supplied build of Android is rooted by default a terminal emulator cody and dice player unfortunately you don't get Google Play or any of Google's services however the good news is that Google's apps can be unofficially side loaded using instructions which you'll find in Odroid community forums in terms of performance the quad-core cortex a5 isn't going to win any speed competitions when pitched against the latest generation of quad-core octa-core processors which we find in today's flagship smartphones however that doesn't mean that the processor is anyway slow or an underperformer especially when remember that these boards are designed primarily as embedded solutions quickly yet some benchmarks the Odroid see once called 15,000 887 on an - - and merit a frame rate of 27.2 frames per second on Epic Citadel both these scores are for full HD because the board can be configured to run in several different screen resolutions it means that the board scores will vary depending on the set resolution with a smaller screen resolution the GPU has less work to do and as a result and to to an epic Citadel will perform better at 720p the C one's called 17,000 682 + n - 2 and measure framerate a 51.5 on Epic Citadel clearly a big difference from the full HD scores unlike some builds of Android which I've seen on other SBC Android on Leo droid recognizes USB flash drives without any problem this means you can insert a flash disk and then watch videos or listen to music store on that flash drive I was able to play videos by the pre-installed dice player as well as via VLC oddly the build of Kodi which comes pre-installed wasn't able to access the USB Drive due to a permissions error in terms of video decoding performance I attested to see one with my ZTE star to review video which is rendered at Full HD at fourteen point seven megabits a second the c1 was able to show the video without any problems I also tested the Odroid c1 using YouTube and Netflix both again which ran without any problems overall the Android experience is excellent especially when you consider this is a $35 device now as you would expect the Odroid c1 supports more than just Android you can also run Linux on it now hard-code will provide an official build of ubuntu 14.04 running the LXDE lightweight desktop and it's been really quite impressive and great using Linux on this small board all the default apps are installed that you would need including Mozilla and chromium and GIMP and of course there are always the online repositories if you want to install other programs or other packages the Odroid c1 uses a quad core cortex a5 cpu clocked at 1.5 gigahertz the Raspberry Pi uses a quad core cortex a7 processor but clocked only 900 megahertz even from a megahertz point of view you can see that the Odroid C 1 is going to be faster than the Raspberry Pi tune I did some testing using open SSL and that tests just the CPU perform was not the CPU and GPU performance but just alone on CPU performance the benchmark showed me that the Odroid c1 is almost twice as fast as the Raspberry Pi to the Kodi and media player is installed by default and I don't like its Android counterpart this version had no problem accessing the flash drives that means if you wanted to use this board as a media player with Cody then it might be better to do it under Linux than under Android and there we have it the Odroid c1 now the question is does the Odroid c1 provide a real alternative to the Raspberry Pi 2 and I think it does of course the Raspberry Pi community is enormous there are so many videos and tutorials and books and projects out there you can do it's quite amazing but the Odroid community is also growing and hard Conal make sure all the tools are available that you need to fully use the board including all of the source code also the board does have a few advantages over the Raspberry Pi - for example it has Gigabit Ethernet it has the oral use of the emmc module and I reckon it offers about two times the performance all this at exactly the same price as the Raspberry Pi well my name is Garry sim friend or authority I hope you enjoyed this video if you did please give it a thumbs up don't forget to leave your comments below and tell me what you think about the Odroid c1 also don't forget to subscribe to and royal authority is YouTube channel and as for me I'll see you in my next video