The original UDOO board was pretty amazing. A merging of Raspberry Pi and Arduino, the system let you run a tiny computer on a single board as well as control electronic projects. It was a very geeky little tool and proved to be quite popular. Well, the UDOO is back and it’s a lot better.
The new UDOO Neo includes a Raspberry Pi, an Arduino board, a 9-axis sensor, magnetometer, accelerator, and gyroscope, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and it now runs Android. This means you can embed the board into your own gadgets – a drone body, for example, or a game device – and use the built-in Arduino to read and write to switches and relays and the sensors to define the position of the object in space.
It starts at $49 and should be shipping in September. I’ve played with the first UDOO and was very impressed and the folks who created it promised me that this next one would be quite a cool device – and I think they delivered.
If you don’t know what you’d use the UDOO Neo for then you’re probably not the exact audience for the device. However, tinkerers will find plenty of uses and folks who are looking to start moving Android into hardware will enjoy the dual OS support. Generally these boards are great prototyping tools and are a lot of fun to play with. My son and I used our original UDOO to make a mini arcade system and a cellphone.
You can check it out on Kickstarter here and it’s already fully funded.