back to article Korean vendor launches wearable RPi clone

Korean outfit Hardkernel has snuck out a Raspberry Pi-compatible board it says targets developers with an interest in the wearables and Internet of Things space. Due to ship towards the end of August, the Odroid-W uses the same Broadcom SoC as the popular Raspberry Pi – Broadcom's BCM2835. It includes an RPi-compatible 15-pin …

  1. Old Used Programmer

    Conspiracy theory much?

    Getting a copy of the boot blob is trivially easy. Just download any OS from the RPi website, or copy it

    from any SD card that will run a Pi. No need to think there is some sort of skullduggery going on.

    1. Charles Manning

      Re: Conspiracy theory much?

      That evil hacking tool called dd

      dd if=/dev/mmcblk0 of=my-stolen-boot-blob bs=1k skip=$START_BLOCK count=$NBLOCKS

  2. Christian Berger

    What's great about it..

    ...is that there is finally some sort of standard for booting and running ARM systems. So now you can just boot whatever OS you want on any of those RPi clones. Sure it's not a great standard, but it sure beats UEFI.

    1. Salts

      Re: What's great about it..

      Well, yes. if you use the same SoC as the RPi otherwise you maybe up the creek.

      I think the best thing to say, is "The greatest form of flattery is imitation" pretty sure we have not arrived at the IBM PC clone market. Many of the "RPi like devices" have always been, the same but different, but this seems to be a clone. Though not that cheap, when compared to a RPi B+, as you need the docking board for the Odroid-W to get the USB and ethernet, but the eMMC is interesting, if you need it.

      Guess we will have to see if Odroid-W puts £1,000,000 into an education fund and more than that into open source development, with the profits they make.

      OK I am a staunch support of the Raspberry Pi and more so of the achievements and direction of the RPi Foundations :-)

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: What's great about it..

        "Guess we will have to see if Odroid-W puts £1,000,000 into an education fund and more than that into open source development, with the profits they make."

        It would be nice to know how much mark up there is on each Raspberry Pi sold. How much goes to manufacturers, retailers, to Raspberry Pi Trading and how much of that actually reaches the charitable foundation.

        It would also be nice to know exactly which open source development projects the foundation is supporting with their multi-million dollar income and how much it gives to those project.

      2. Eddy Ito

        Re: What's great about it..

        "Though not that cheap, when compared to a RPi B+, as you need the docking board for the Odroid-W to get the USB and ethernet"

        It appears the board itself does have USB but it's unpopulated. My guess is that the physical connector was too large for their envisioned purpose and left it so the user can install one if they feel so inclined. A nice consideration IMHO as I've seen too many Daytona Beach type boards where it's tiny and low profile with a coastline packed with highrises.

  3. Anon123212321

    Is it coincidence that an article related to the Pi was posted at 03:14?

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    All politics aside, the battery backup and exposing extra GPIO pins (41 for example, allowing a second UART or second hardware PWM) along with the size is exciting, although I still think the new B Plus is far better value (and of course there's the new Pi, the "MC" in development... shush).

    1. Steve Evans

      Ooooh... RTC...

      Interesting they include an RTC with optional battery backup, something which is lacking from the Pi (which relies on retrieving the current time at startup via the intarweb).

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Is the new Pi you mention the mythical "PI +2" with built in cassette player?

    3. markw:

      Any links for this "new Pi"?

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