[IDEA] New Odroid M1

[TheOldPresbyope]

@Relocated2007

• HardKernel makes nice bits of kit. I have an Odroid HC1 which has been running my OpenMediaVault NAS for 5 years and an Odroid C1 which I bought 7 years ago and experimented with in several projects.
  
• To the best of my knowledge, none of their boards will boot and run Raspberry Pi OS so they won't boot and run the moOde image.
  
• In particular, the M1 hardware drivers are different because of the differences in CPUs and supporting infrastructure and the M1 uses an entirely different booting process ("petitboot", about which I know nothing). 
  
• With some work, a developer who knows both the Odroid and moOde ecosystems should be able to port some, most, or perhaps even all of moOde as we know it to the new platform. Note that Odroid offers a Linux distro only in the form of Ubuntu (with a 4.19 kernel---here's a vague promise of "Mainline kernel will be available several months later" but no explanation of what that means). OTOH, moOde is built on Raspberry Pi OS which in turn is a kind of Debian distro. Thus the port won't be able to take advantage of the new binary packages that are in the moOde development pipeline.
  
• As a data point, many years ago I ported an old version of moOde to a Cubox-i 4Pro just because it was there. There is no i2S bus on that board so I dealt only with an external USB DAC. It was so long ago I don't recall the distro I started with. I concluded the result wasn't worth the sweat equity I put into it. A port should be easier now but you won't know until you try.
  
• Successful use of moOde with the Odroid M1's onboard DAC will depend critically on the quality of their ALSA driver. I see no details on their website.
  
• For other i2S-based or otherwise GPIO-based DACs, one would have to convince the DAC vendor to develop M1-compatible drivers. Good luck with that.
  

The Neural Network processor on the M1 makes it a very interesting board for other reasons so I suspect it will sell well and build up a knowledgeable user community over time. This could get interesting for the high school FIRST robotics teams I've mentored, for example. I'm tempted to buy one just to play with---there's a mobile robot platform under my desk which is crying out for a pair of eyes and the intelligence to classify targets objects in the vicinity.

Regards,
Kent