It’s strange to find an electronics hobbyist or computer fan that doesn’t know Raspberry Pi. This small device it’s a complete computer, with a low power processor and designed for applications. The truth is that there are a lot of possibilities inside of electronics world. Each day, lots of projects incude this device as its main piece.
I’ve been working since long with electronics and, in more «pro» circles, the Olimex modules are well known. They’ve their own versión of RasPi, but with lots more pluses. The modules I’m talking about are Olinuxino series, compared with RPi, they bring lots of improvements.
- Power is greater: there’s even modules with quad core processor. The RAM can be upgraded if you are skilled with soldering iron (and compiling some things…)
- Modules are completely open source, both Software and Hardware.
- You can expand them until infinite.
- As they are ARM platform, almost anything developed for RPi would work in Olinuxino painless.
- Much mor hacker-friendly, so electronics can develop our ideas quicker.
- Compatibility with lots of standards: CAN, USB, RS232, I2C, Uniwire… And also the Olimex UEXT Open Source Bus.
- Even they have Serial ATA in some models.
- 100% mainline kernel support.
I’ve two modules working 24/7 as low energy servers. One of them (based in iMX233) is running ArchLinux ARM serving my weather station. The other module, an A10 Lime, is working with debian as web server (the one who serves this pages) and as Mail server for my domain.
They operate very stable and also have a decent support community. Also, you can ask Olimex for direct support and check the examples in Github to program your applications.