Challenger to Rasberry Pi/Audino?

[NickK]

At the more powerful end of the market..

* Amlogic ARM® Cortex®-A5(ARMv7) 1.5Ghz quad core CPUs 

* Mali™-450 MP2 GPU (OpenGL ES 2.0/1.1 enabled for Linux and Android)
* 1Gbyte DDR3 SDRAM
* Gigabit Ethernet
* 40pin GPIOs
* eMMC4.5 HS200 Flash Storage slot / UHS-1 SDR50 MicroSD Card slot
* USB 2.0 Host x 4, USB OTG x 1,
* Infrared(IR) Receiver
* Ubuntu 14.04 or Android KitKat

http://www.hardkernel.com/main/products/prdt_info.php?g_code=G141578608433&tab_idx=1

You could actually capture and align on one of these, control the mount, focusing, have temp sensors, GPS etc and even drive a display..

[Gina]

Interesting

[NickK]

The original post board is $35 - with all the hardware on there you could run the USB, cameras etc all off the machine (using the local model for mount tracking/autoguiding) and then running everything over the gigabit ethernet to a bigger machine for ASCOM control.. it's that row of 40 GPIO pins that is interesting me.. you can then simulate I/O protocols for GPS etc

However I have just spotted this ... at $179.. it has the bigger Mali GPU that supports OpenCL  http://www.hardkernel.com/main/products/prdt_info.php?g_code=G140448267127

 Samsung Exynos5422 Cortex™-A15 2.0Ghz quad core and Cortex™-A7 quad core CPUs

* Mali-T628 MP6(OpenGL ES 3.0/2.0/1.1 and OpenCL 1.1 Full profile)
* 2Gbyte LPDDR3 RAM at 933MHz (14.9GB/s memory bandwidth) PoP stacked
* eMMC5.0 HS400 Flash Storage
* USB 3.0 Host x 1, USB 3.0 OTG x 1, USB 2.0 Host x 4
* HDMI 1.4a and DisplayPort1.1 for display
* Integrated power consumption monitoring tool

So that's two quad core CPUs and a OpenCL capable GPU with USB3 .. that runs Ubuntu 14.04!

Ok, the GPU OpenCL performance will be slow compared to a big laptop and it's not a GPIO monster of the smaller board but