Since its first appearance in 2012 the Raspberry Pi has always enjoyed great popularity. It is now positioned as one of the reference development boards. Within the makers world of the miniPC there are many other options other than the Raspberry Pi. But RPi has managed to stand out impressively thanks to its versatility that makes millions of people to discover a new utility every day. Thereby it has a strong user base always on the hunt to expand their capabilities and find new applications.
This has led to the emergence of new and cheap boards seeking to offer stiff competition to the Raspberry Pi. In this article we present to you a new bet on the market, which looks good, and is here to compete directly with the Raspberry Pi Zero both in terms of price (only $5) and size, called the Omega 2.
A year ago the first version of Omega hit the market like a miniPC seeking to break into the world of makers and programmers. The Onion Omega 2 is based on MIPS and Wi-Fi enabled Qualcomm Atheros AR9331 SoC and is a leap forward from its predecessor.
Onion Omega 2 vs Raspberry Pi Zero
Its size is just a quarter of a Raspberry Pi and is fully configurable and expandable through a variety of modules. While some of these are OLED displays and battery modules, this miniPC can be connected to Arduino boards, thereby expanding its power and other capabilities.
No doubt the attractive part is the price of $ 5, which gives us access to a Omega2 in its entry-level version with a 580 MHz CPU with 64 MB of memory and 16 MB of storage.
The price of the ‘Plus’ version of the Omega2 goes up to $ 9, but with this we get twice the memory, storage and support for microSD. When compared to Raspberry Pi Zero, with only 1GHz CPU and 512 MB of RAM it falls short. However, it has an integrated WiFi module which isn’t the case with the Raspberry Pi Zero.
The Raspberry Pi Zero uses the HDMI output to connect to any screen, while the Omega2 uses its cloud, the Onion Cloud. This enables control of this miniPC from any browser and computer or platform, and adds extensive support hardware and software through APIs.
The base price is $ 5 for the Omega 2 version, the Omega 2 Plus version is priced at 9 dollars, and the expandable modules start at $ 15. You can pre-order this miniPC from the Omega 2 Indiegogo crowdsourcing campaign.
More Information at: Onion