ODroid as raplacement for Raspberry Pi

Due to the chip shortage getting a Raspberry Pi for a reasonable (not marked up) price is difficult. At the moment the price point for a Raspberry Pi 4 with 4Gb memory is 75 Euro's (reputable shop), if you can wait until May. Other retailers have much higher prices. A colleague of mine pointed me towards ODroid as an alternative.

There are several different version which are equally powerful or even more powerful then a Rapsberry. Does anybody has experience on installing the real-time kernels on an ODroid device. I'm particularly thinking on ODroid N2L or a C4, both with 4GB of RAM. 

Many thanks in advance for your advice!

I have a couple of Odroid H2 running machine. One is Linuxcnc/Ethercat and its fine

I am keen to try the N2 as there is a Debian Bullseye image on their forum.

The N2L does not have a network port so not useful for me.

I'm looking at using an Odroid board too because Raspberry Pi's are basically unobtanium at any price at this point. They're not planning to have serious quantities available for consumers until H2 2023, which probably means H1 2024.

I see Odroid as prefereable to other SBCs because they have at some point gotten Preempt-RT working on N2 and C4: forum.odroid.com/viewtopic.php?t=41129

Funny you say that. I ordered an Odroid N2+
I think its also possible to apply a real time patch when building an armbian image for it.

Nice. I'm about to order one today.

The N2+ has some appealing features that make it look better than the Raspberry Pi 4. According to the benchmarks from Odroid, it's roughly 2x the CPU performance. It also has a real time clock, so no need to run an NTP service. And it doesn't run Ethernet over the USB bus. But of course the biggest advantage over the RPi is that you can actually buy one.

You can also apparently order the boards directly from hardkernel.com in South Korea for less than half the retail price (in Europe at least).

I want to run LinuxCNC in kiosk mode with no desktop environment. So I'm considering using Buildroot to create a stripped-down OS from scratch. That might be a little foolhardy even for me thought.

For others looking at the N2+, here's some good links to check out:

- wiki.odroid.com/odroid-n2/odroid-n2
- www.hardkernel.com/shop/odroid-n2-with-2gbyte-ram-2/
- www.hardkernel.com/shop/odroid-n2-with-4gbyte-ram-2/
- carlosedp.medium.com/hardkernel-odroid-n...chmarks-b6996b002582
- forum.odroid.com/viewtopic.php?t=41129

If you have an N2 or N2+, you could try this image I built today.
drive.google.com/file/d/1i9U9i7a_Y655RgJ.../view?usp=share_link
In theory it is Debian Bookworm with PREEMPT_RT 6.2 kernel with XFCE
If it is, you should be able to install linuxcnc with
It will be a week or so before mine arrives...

I ordered a N2+ 4gb as well.

If I can get that working for a plasma build it will be really convenient.

Side not, after shipping from HardKernel it doesn't appear to much cheaper if any than just buying from Amazon.
Price + Shipping = $111.98

I've been on the armbian forum. A user there has helped me today with steps to build preempt_rt.
I've already had one go which was a fail as way off his process.. Need some quiet time to go again
There is a bit of an issue with hardkernel cos their bullseye build is 6.1 kernel and the preempt_rt I could find was for the 5.10 kernel
My order is still in processing so smacks of Chinese new year!
 

CarterKraft wrote:

I ordered a N2+ 4gb as well.

If I can get that working for a plasma build it will be really convenient.

Side not, after shipping from HardKernel it doesn't appear to much cheaper if any than just buying from Amazon.
Price + Shipping = $111.98

So follow this process. forum.odroid.com/viewtopic.php?p=365324#p365324