Earlier this week, the Rasbperry Pi Foundation added cooked in wireless capabilities to its popular single board computer with the launch of the Pi 3 Model B. But if you're the kind of tinkerer who would rather have more processing power, faster Ethernet and support for higher resolution graphics, perhaps the Odroid C2 from South Korea's Hardkernel might be just what you're looking for.
Though the processing bump up from the Pi 2's 900 MHz to the newcomer's 1.2 GHz is certain to bring a smile to the faces of more than a few makers, hobbyists and electronic wizards, it's not quite so impressive when stacked up against the 2 GHz clock speed of the C2's Amlogic ARM Cortex-A53 quad-core processor. Hardkernel has also treated the Odroid C2 to twice the RAM of the new Pi 3 (2 GB of DDR3 SDRAM to be precise).
The C2's Mali-450 GPU is reported capable of delivering 4K video output, there's an aMMC5.0 solid state storage slot and a microSD card slot, Gigabit Ethernet, four USB 2.0 ports, a 720p camera input and a 40-pin GPIO header. Operating systems able to run on Hardkernel's new computer include Ubuntu, Android and Debian, but support for the ARM 64-bit platform may be limited at the moment.
Though the Odroid C2 doesn't have wireless capabilities built-in, adding a third party USB wireless network adapter to the setup shouldn't prove too cost prohibitive, especially given that the C2 is priced at just US$40.
Product page: Odroid C2
