Today I’ve received a couple of things in the post. The first is an Odroid-C1+ SBC. This is very similar in appearance to a Raspberry Pi, the main differences being the board is blue, and a substantial heatsink over the processor and RAM. The board appears to be well made and sports a 1.5ghz quad core ARMv7 processor and a reasonably mature port of Lubuntu among other things.

 

I have to admit that I do not actually have any specific plans for this board, but the specifications intrigued me. A brief look at the board has so far shown that it boots reasonably quickly (I had to tweak the settings on the boot partition to get the video working correctly through a HDMI to DVI adapter – not too difficult as the boot partition is FAT32 (shows up on all popular operating systems) and they’ve kindly put a large number of options in comments so that you can just comment out the old settings and delete the “#” on the setting you need.

Kodi came pre-installed which was good for testing. No tearing during video playback which is better than my Linux Mint laptop’s default settings. Only issue is that it seems the GUI for the file manager is not hardware accelerated and is a little laggy. There is an eMMC connection on the underside of the board with is claimed to give a 4x disk speed improvement compared to an SD card. These eMMC modules are quite expensive (£20 for 8GB, £30 for 16GB), but it is nice to know that it is available if I ever need it!

Another package contained nine various gas/smoke/vapour sensors all the way from China. I’m planning to put something together to detect LPG for a neighbour who can’t smell properly and worries about gas leaking from the cooker. I got a full set of nine in a nice box with some dupont wires from banggood.com – terrible name, good prices.

I’m thinking that perhaps I should somehow attach the alcohol detector to my Paypal account to prevent drunken synth purchases…