Pi clones

The raspberry pi was a great little device a few years ago.  Great price point, allowed you to run linux on a very small device that if lost/stolen wouldn't be the end of the world, but it also had very little horse power to do much of anything.  Trying to run a GUI on it was painfully slow due to the limited ram and single core proc running at 700 or so.

There have been a few different clones, found 2 I liked last night in searching around for things.

The ODROID-C1- http://ameridroid.com/products/odroid-c1
At $37 bucks hard to beat a quad cpu, 1 GB ram device.  It should provide a bit more omf when needed!  It is on my wish list to order now since I found it, perhaps today I'll do it.

The BPi-R1 - http://www.bananapi.com/index.php/component/content/article?layout=edit&id=59
Newegg is carrying these at $75 (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA6DB29F2479).  While not as powerful as the ODROID-C1, this one is the kitchen sink, designed specifically for a home router type setup, it has what I've wanted which is a built in switch.  I've wanted to build a box to route game traffic through and do some manipulation of the traffic.  Not sure if it will be powerful enough, but doing some tcpdumps off this may be an option.

For now I'll stick with the ODROID-C1 I think and just put a USB to ethernet jack on it so I have a 2nd wired port to route stuff through.

Anyway, raspberry pi has made some great things possible.  I hope we continue to see higher powered systems (more ram actually) at the sub $50 mark.

Maybe I'll just build a few of these with ARPWatch on them and drop them on some of my closed networks!