There’s a novel project currently raising money at Kickstarter. Called UDOO, it wants to “bridge the gap between Arduino micro-controllers and the Raspberry Pi single-board computer,” providing extra computational power and “more opportunity to your imagination.”
UDOO is a tiny single board computer that integrates two processors in a single solution: ARM i.MX6 Freescale (for Android and Linux) and ARM SAM3X (for Arduino DUE), both of which live in only 4.33 x 3.35 inch (11 x 8.5 cm) board. It’s a low-cost, low-power consumption, open hardware board that support the simple management of sensors and the flexibility of having a full-fledged computer.
The device (not sure how we can call it) has two mini USB ports for programming and debugging, two USB ports, HDMI video outputs for LVDS and touch screens, connectors compatible with the Arduino shield available on the market, Ethernet, Wi-Fi, connection for SATA disks and camera, as well as analog audio input/output and microSD card for the operating system. UDOO can run both Android and Linux, and switching between the two is as easy as swapping microSD cards and rebooting.
The UDOO sounds pretty cool even though I’m not sure what a non-expert like me could use it for. Then again, the project is getting some solid attention on Kickstarter and we decided to chip in, helping these guys get the funds they need to turn this into a real-life product, which has the potential to open a whole new wave of computing. Like merging multiple operating systems like Ubuntu for Android. Can’t wait to see what savvy hackers can do with this…