>> ONION OMEGA - PUNCH OF POWER IN SMALL FORM FACTOR

I saw this launched a while ago - but, decided it was worthy of a mention and coverage.

Almost six months ago; the Onion Omega was launched via a kickstarter.com campaign which well exceeded the target funding amount with almost four and a half thousand backers. It is advertised as a tiny development board with Linux and WiFi built in; but more importantly the simplicity of developing software for it using JavaScript, Python and PHP and other script languages.

The device packs quite a punch, with the following specifications:

• CPU: Atheros AR9331 400MHZ MIPS 24K
• RAM: 64MB DDR2 400MHz
• Flash: 16MB
• WiFi: 802.11b/g/n 150Mbps
• I/O: 18, I²C, SPI, I²S, USB
• Antenna: PCB Antenna w/ uFL Connector
• Power: 3.3V (0.6W consumption)

There are always a lot of bells and whistles in most crowd funding campaigns - but the good thing is that these units are now shipping and available; to make things better they have done an extra-ordinary amount of effort to make it as expandable and simple as possible to work with.

Under the hood it uses OpenWRT Linux - in fact, the CPU and Linux variant is the same used by the Arduino Yún which I covered a while back. They also provide access to their Onion Cloud which is hardware agnostic (they provide libraries for a number of platforms) - with at least AES 128bit or SSL security for low end and high end devices respectively.

They also offer via their cloud service an Omega application store where developers can share their applications and get them distributed to devices over the air - regardless where they are in the world. It is interesting to see a hardware manufacturer taking on an Apple style role - it is unclear if there is any pricing for using their cloud services and if they will charge for distribution.

Of course; while high level scripting languages are nice - no device is worth its weight in silicon without support for programming in C/C++ - in fact, I am confident that I could use my existing Arduino Yún to cross compile applications for deployment on the Omega.

I ordered a few units and when they arrive I will be write up about my experience with them.