Piduino

Recently I received one of these beauties. It's like a raspberry pi but runs arduino boards and arduino IDE on it.

So firstly was to go to the pcduino site and download the zip file, unzip it and copy to a sd card (an .img and .sh file) don't use win image or anything like that, straight forward drop and go.

Next plug the card in and turn on the device which welcomes you with the pcduino page before it copies the contents to the onboard chip and whalla the board now has Ubuntu on it with all the essential programs and if anything is a great cheap computer just for that but there's more.

The board also comes with extra connections like Ethernet, wifi, usb and IR on this 1ghz board.

So far I've been very impressed with it and like the all in one feel for using a small computer and arduino together and  for £55 quid certainly worth it.  If after a while you have enough then I'm sure it could be a great XBMC device.

Here are the specs.

Items	Details
CPU	AllWinner A20 SoC, 1GHz ARM Cortex A7 Dual Core
GPU	OpenGL ES2.0, OpenVG 1.1, Mali 400 Dual Core
DRAM	1GB
Onboard Storage	4GB Flash, microSD card (TF) slot for up to 32GB
Video Output	HDMI 1.4 with HDCP support
OS	Ubuntu 12.04 Android 4.2
Arduino extension interface	Arduino sockets, same as Arduino UNO 14xGPIO, 2xPWM, 6xADC, 1xUART, 1xSPI, 1xI2C
Network interface	Built-in WiFi Ethernet 10M/100Mbps
Audio out	3.5mm analog audio interface I2S stereo digital audio interface
LCD	LVDS
IR	IR receiver
SATA	SATA Host socket
Camera	MIPI
Battery	Li-Poly Battery Interface
USB	1 x USB host, 1xUSB OTG
Power	5V, 2000mA
Overall Size	121mm x 65mm

 Software Specifications

Items	Description
OS	Ubuntu 12.04 Android 4.2
Language	English
API	All the arduino shield pins are accessible with the provided API It consists of API to access the following interfaces: UART ADC PWM GPIO I2C SPI
Programming language support	C, C++ with GNU tool chain Java with standard Android SDK Python