The first to arrive was the Arduino. It made prototyping easy and fast, but not interfacing with computers. Then came the RaspberryPi. It was totally different from the Arduino. It was more of a computer and for electrical prototyping it had GPIO pins in it, but it was still not as efficient as the Arduino for that particular task.
UDOO is a board which brings the best from both the worlds to one single board and more.
It can run Android Ice Cream Sandwich or full Linux OS. It can do this because it has either a dual core or quad core 1GHz ARM i.MX6 CPU and 1GB Memory. It is far more powerful as compared to the Raspberry Pi.
It comes with HDMI for output, dual USB ports, Ethernet, Wi-Fi, microSd card slot, SATA for hard drives, headphone and microphone jacks. This makes up to everything a desktop computer should have.
For the Arduino part of it, it sports a separate ARM Cortex-M3 CPU, the ones found on Arduino Due. It has 76 GPIO pin outs for your Shields and almost anything you need to connect.
UDOO is an extremely successful kickstarter project. There are three versions of it at $99, $109 and $129. These can be pre-ordered on their store and is expected to ship as soon as October this year.
With this kind of power, I’m looking forward for DIYs of smarter drones and home automation projects.
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