Onion Omega 2
During a Python meetup one of my tutors Mark showed me a new device he had purchased from kickstarter called the onion omega 2. All that I knew at the time was that it was a smaller version of a raspberry pi. When I first got my hands on one I found out it was so much more under the hood. The first things to note is the unit itself needs another component (a dock). The biggest positive about this particular single-board computer, is that every product involving onion is from $5-250 (USD). The setup that I have was less than $30 (USD), which was for an onion omega 2 and a power dock.
tl;dr ~ the onion omega 2 connects to wifi and bridges the wifi to devices that connect to the omega 2 (similar to a wireless access point). The dock has a USB port which I use for a USB hub with multiple connected USBs. This allows me to store and serve files with a fileserver I wrote in Go and cross-compiled to the MIPS architecture. Any device that connects to the omega 2 can access the fileserver. With firefox, pdfs and mp4 content can be viewed in the browser and files can be downloaded via the browser.
One of the things I used my omega 2 for was internet connection. This was because I moved into a new flat which didn’t have the internet hooked up yet, I piggy-backed off the internet connection from the upstairs flat (yes I asked and got permission). The issue with connecting directly to the router from say my laptop was a slab of concrete. To solve this issue I placed the omega 2 upstairs with an antenna.
With the omega 2 and an antenna, the wifi connection between the router located upstairs, was able to extend the range through concrete. My brother lent me a car antenna that he uses for a car pc, which in order to get working with the omega 2, a tiny resistor has to be unsoldered. The connection speed (tested via speedtest.net) resulted in 30 ms, 4.51 Mbps down, 6.23 Mbps up. On my desktop (connected via ethernet to my laptop) resulted in 30 ms, 5.09 Mbps down, 4.26 Mbps up. Not bad for a $5 device!
Internet connection is just one of the things enabled by the omega 2. Since it runs OpenWrt I can run programs on the device. Golang fits right into this environment as it is capable of cross-compiling to the mipsle architecture. I made a small fileserver with the ability to upload files and deployed it on the omega 2.
These are just 2 examples of what you can do with the omega 2. It is such an awesome little device to play with and in my opinion is much more fun to play with than a raspberry pi. I encourage you to get your own and have a go!