Electronics 2012

Gadgets I'm interested in at the moment
Going into 2012 there are a couple of electrical gadgets that I've got my eye on, for one reason or another. Here they are:

Raspberry Pi
These are little boards from the Raspberry Pi Foundation - a UK based non-profit. There are going to be two boards. The simple one will cost about $25 and the more expensive one will be $35. That will probably actually be in Euros by the time these things get into production. The simple board is missing e.g. network. The more expensive $35 board is quite interesting. It has HDMI, 10/100 network (it's a real pity that it doesn't have Gigabit Ethernet) and USB. There's an ARM (6 I think) running on the platform. It also has plenty of GPIO pins. At $35 it's definitely worth having.

CuBox

Now here's a box worth having, if it ever materialises. According to the website it has:

• Linux based distributions like Ubuntu, Debian and others
• Android
• 800 MHz dual issue ARM PJ4 processor, VFPv3, wmmx SIMD and 512KB L2 cache.
• 1080p Video Decode Engine
• OpenGL|ES 2.0 graphic engine
• HDMI 1080p Output (with CEC function)
• 1GByte DDR3 at 800MHz
• Gigabit Ethernet, SPDIF (optical audio), eSata 3Gbps, 2xUSB 2.0, micro-SD, micro-USB (console)
• Standard Infra-red receiver for 38KHz based IR controllers.
• No JTAG required. Unbrickable for Developers (**)

That's quite an impressive list. The fact that it can do hardware decoding, has Gigabit Ethernet, eSATA and HDMI means that this little guy looks like the ultimate mediabox. It can run XBMC but IMHO that could be a bit of a waste. At a bit under €100 I'd expect more than just XBMC from it. The good news is that it looks like the openSUSE ARM effort is now advanced enough that it might be possible to run openSUSE on the CuBox. Time will tell. The thing has to actually ship first.