Odroid C2 Bests Raspberry Pi 3 In Several Ways

March 2, 2016 by Jenny List 139 Comments

It’s been a big week in the world of inexpensive single board computers, and everyone’s talking about the new Raspberry Pi 3. It blows away the competition they say, nobody can touch it for the price.

Almost nobody, that is.

With a lot less fanfare on these shores, another cheap and speedy 64-bit quad-core ARM-based SBC slips onto the market this week, Hardkernel’s Odroid C2. And looking at the specification it seems as though the Pi 3 may be given a run for its money. Like the BCM2837 in the Pi 3 its Amlogic S905 SoC is a quad-core ARM Cortex-A53, but the C2’s 2GHz clock speed gives the raspberry to the 1.2GHz of the Pi 3. There is twice the RAM of the Pi 3 at 2Gbytes, and the onboard Mali-450 GPU can deliver 4K video.

Unlike the Pi 3 there is no wireless or Bluetooth on board, but the C2 has a Gigabit Ethernet port which is wired directly into the SoC. Compared to the Pi 3’s 100 megabit port which suffers through being on a USB interface, that’s likely to be very quick.

Storage can be a choice of either the usual micro SD card or eMMC. Given that the two boards share a very similar form factor it is no surprise that they have very similar GPIO capabilities, however it is worth noting that the C2 has a built-in analog-to-digital converter. As to operating systems, the C2 can run Ubuntu 16.04, or Android Lollipop.

Of course, we’ve seen so many boards touted as Pi-killers, and like all those also-ran tablets touted as iPad killers a few years ago we’ve never heard of most of them again after a brief moment of chatter. They look so good on paper but the price always lets them down.

The C2 could just escape that fate though, its $40 price point is very close to that of the Pi 3. Setting aside for a moment how much shipping and customs might cost for a package from Korea, that sounds interesting to us.

Why might you buy a C2 then, and why might you buy a Pi 3? That the C2 has a much faster processor is beyond doubt. This and its faster wired networking would make it a much more interesting prospect for anyone whose work involves network-attached data processing. But even though a USB wireless network adaptor can be had for only a few dollars the Pi 3’s onboard wi-fi and Bluetooth makes it much more attractive to a home user or someone using a computer on a platform unfettered by wires.

However impressive the C2 may be it is overwhelmingly likely that the Pi 3 will outsell it many times over. This will not just be due to the massive publicity advantage achieved by the Pi Foundation, but the huge ecosystem of hardware and software developers that have made the Pi boards perform to the limit of their abilities in all directions. If you don’t mind forgoing that support though, you could just find that the board from Korea gives you enough extra bang for your buck to make having it on your bench worthwhile.

We’ve followed the Odroid products from the start here at Hackaday. The C2 is just the latest of a procession of boards from Hardkernel, and we’ve featured a few projects that include them. Theirs is always the name at the top of the list when the subject turns to Raspberry Pi competitors, perhaps with the C2 they’ve got a winner.

Our thanks to [Derrick].

Floppy Drive Hides SD Card Reader

February 28, 2016 by Bob Baddeley 23 Comments

[gilmour509] posted a thorough gallery of a new custom-built computer and case made to look like a 1995 IBM Aptiva. While the whole build is impressive, the most clever part involves a 3 1/2″ floppy disk that hides an SD card and works like a regular USB flash drive when inserted into the floppy drive.

He makes use of the fact that floppy disk edge card connectors have the same spacing as SD cards. Add in a hacked USB card reader, some careful cutting and assembly, and [gilmour509] has a very convincing floppy drive with gigabytes of space.

The best part is that with everything put together, the floppy disks and floppy drive look completely unmodified. He even made the file explorer icon show a floppy drive.

The faux-Aptiva gallery includes the full build, but skip to about 2/3 down to see the floppy SD card section.

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8-bit Computer Made Solely From NAND Gates

February 24, 2016 by Jenny List 55 Comments

As an electronics rookie, one of the first things they tell you when they teach you about logic gates is, “You can make everything from a combination of NAND gates”. There usually follows a demonstration of simple AND, OR, and XOR gates made from NAND gates, and maybe a flip-flop or two. Then you move on, when you want a logic function you use the relevant device that contains it, and the nugget of information about NAND gates recedes to become just another part of your electronics general knowledge.

Not [Alexander Shabarshin] though. He’s set himself the task of creating an entire CPU solely from NAND gates, and he’s using 74F00 chips to give a hoped-for 1MIPS performance. His design has an 8-bit data bus but a 4-bit ALU, and an impressive 2-stage pipeline and RISC instruction set which sets it apart from the computers most of us had when 74-series logic was a much more recent innovation. So far he has completed PCBs for a D-type flip-flop and a one-bit ALU, four of which will work in parallel in the final machine

Unsurprisingly, we have maintained a keen interest in TTL computers here at Hackaday for a very long time. You might say that we have featured so many for the subject to deserve a review article of its own. There is the ASAP-3, the Magic-1, the Duo Basic, the Apollo181, the unnamed CPU made by [Donn Stewart], the BMOW, and a clone of the Apollo Guidance Computer. But what sets [Alexander’s] project aside from all these fine machines is his bare-metal NAND-only design. The other 74-series CPU designers have had the full range of devices such as the 74181 ALU at their disposal. By studying the building blocks at this most fundamental level a deeper understanding can be gained of the inner workings of parts normally represented just as black boxes.

One of the briefs for writing a Hackaday article is that if the subject makes the writer stop and read rather than skim over it then it is likely to do so for the reader too. This project may not yet have delivered a working CPU, but its progress so far is interesting enough for an in-depth read. Definitely one to watch.

Nixie Thermometer Destined For Custom PC Case

February 21, 2016 by Dan Maloney 18 Comments

There’s no denying the retro appeal of the warm glow of a set of Nixies, and when a friend was looking for a unique touch for the case of his new liquid-cooled PC, [Luca] pitched in with this sweet Nixie thermometer.

From the look of [Luca]’s detailed blog entries, he’s been at this build since the New Year. He starts with a list of requirements, including the oddly specific need for a round PC board. For the thermometer, three Nixies are enlisted for the display, two for the temperature and one for the units. Everything was prototyped on perf board before committing to a PCB design, but even with careful planning, the Nixie sockets on the final PCB came out a tiny bit too close together. Luckily the tubes still fit, even if they are snuggled together some. And yes, the tube bases all include the hated RGB LEDs – hey, it’s what the customer wanted. The specs are for the colors to change at the touch of a button; we’d like to see a color gradient linked to the temperature – blue for “nice and cool”, red for “leave the room.” You can see the finished thermometer in action below the break.

The recent run of Nixie projects continues unabated, and this one has a nice look that’s sure to complement the finished case. We’ve asked [Luca] to keep us up-to-date on the project, so hopefully we’ll get a look at why a round PCB is needed. While we wait for that, check out an earlier Nixie thermometer build with a bar graph twist.

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Barcodes That Hack Devices

February 17, 2016 by Elliot Williams 76 Comments

[virustracker] has been playing around with barcodes lately, and trying to use them as a vector to gain control of the system that’s reading them. It’s a promising attack — nobody expects a takeover via barcodes. The idea isn’t new, and in fact we’ve seen people trying to drop SQL attacks in barcodes long ago, but [virustracker] put a few different pieces together and came up with a viable attack.

The trick is that many POS terminals and barcode readers support command characters in their programming modes. Through use of these Advanced Data Formatting (ADF) modes, [virustracker] sends Windows-Key-r, and then cmd.exe, ftps a file down, and runs it. Whatever computer is on the other side of the barcode scanner has just been owned. ADF even supports a delay function to allow time for the command window to pop up before running the rest of the input.

The article details how they got their payload from requiring more than ten individual barcodes down to four. Still, it’s a suspicious-looking attack to try to pull off where other people (think cashiers) are looking. However, we have many automated machines in our everyday life that use barcodes. How many of these are vulnerable is an open question. [virustracker] suggests lottery machines, package-delivery automats, and even hospitals.

The defense is simple, and it’s the same as everywhere else: disable the debug and configuration modes in your production systems, and sanitize your input. Yes, even the barcodes.

Lego Gaming Computer Case

February 11, 2016 by Richard Baguley 37 Comments

Lego isn’t the first material that springs to mind when you think about building a new gaming computer case, but it does make sense when you think about it. It is easy to work with, can be easily reconfigured, and it’s pretty cheap. That’s the idea behind this very cool (no pun intended) gaming computer case build by [Mike Schropp]. Built around a Skylake i7 CPU and an NVidia 980 Ti graphics card, his build has an unusual X-shaped design that allows for plenty of airflow. The sides of the X hold the CPU cooler, the power supply, the hard drives and the graphics card cooler, so each of them has its own separate flow of cool air from the outside. That avoids the common problem of hot air from one component being passed over another, so it doesn’t get cooled properly. Critically for a gaming system, this design keeps all of the components much cooler than a more traditional case, which makes for more overclocking potential.

At the moment, [Mike] says he is struggling to keep up with the demand for people who want to buy custom versions of his build, but he is planning to release the details soon. “Initially that will probably be in the form of a DIY kit, where you can buy the plans with all the Lego bricks needed for the build, in a kit form” he told us. “Then you can add your own computer components to complete your build. At some point I’ll probably also just offer the plans themselves and allow the end-user to acquire the Lego bricks needed.”

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Calculator Built In Super Mario Level. Mamma Mia!

February 10, 2016 by Richard Baguley 19 Comments

Most people use the Super Mario Maker to, well, create Super Mario game levels. [Robin T] decided to try something a little different: building a working calculator. Several hundred hours later, he created the Cluttered Chaos Calculator, which definitely lives up to the name. What this Super Mario level contains is a 3-bit digital computer which can add two numbers between 0 and 7, all built from the various parts that the game offers. To use it, the player enters two numbers by jumping up in a grid, then they sit back and enjoy the ride as Mario is carried through the process, until it finally spits out the answer in a segment display.

It’s not going to be winning any supercomputer prizes, as it takes about two minutes to add the two digits. But it is still an incredibly impressive build, and shows what a dedicated hacker can do with a few simple tools and a spiny shell or two.

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