In the world of microcomputing few can compete with Ardiuno and Raspberry Pi.  There are some new names like Hummingbird and Banana Pi but in sheer sales they pale in comparison and only offer a nominal jump in performance.  For $65 you can own an Odroid U3 from South Korea.  It is essentially a  Samsung Galaxy S3 made into a microboard with ethernet, USB, HDMI and audio output.  There are breakout boards and GPIO pins for any functions that you wish.  You can run android or linux on the boards and they are extremely capable.  I have several operating functions throughout my lab alongside Raspberry Pi's and Arduino.  I will give an overview of the functions of the Odroid in my planes.

The Odroid U3 is a a 1.7Ghz Quadcore Arm Processor with 2 GB DDR3 RAM.  I have a 16GB emmc card in each system.  You can change the SD boot priority and use up to a 128 GB card in the SD slot for storage.  I will be changing some systems to 64GB eMMc cards sometime in the future.  I am running Unbuntu 14.04 LTS in my Odroid but you can also run Android 4.4 as well.  I have three that operate as servers for various functions.  They each have a 1TB External Drive for data logging and backing up.  The Main server uses two 2TB drives in Raid 1 configuration as direct mirror backups of the entire complex.  We also have offsite backup servers but I will not get to far into that in this post.

Our use of the odroids in this fashion are as follows.  We have a single unit on board attached through a serial connection in order to communicate with the Pixhawk autopilot.  It can recieve full sensor telemetry and it can send commands to the Autopilot based on image recognition software requirements.  The Odroid is serving as an embedded linux computer to handle the heavy load the vision software will require.  We will be working with a dynamic image recognition engine in conjunction with cameras  operating in a Themal, HD Visible, and Multspectral modes.  We will have more details on the software itself soon.

On the ground we will be using at least two Odroids in the central command station.  The will be operating two to four screens and will operate multiple planes from a single user or from multiple users.  The main control and data acquisition will all be cloud based and so can also offer views to multiple observers simultaneously.  We will also be showing more of this soon.  Thank you to all who are following our project.  We hope to enter the hackaday prize with it as well.  Thank you and we look forward to participating.