OK….

This is a cool little SBC (Single Board Computer) on a big ass heat sink from ODROID. I saw this and thought ‘what can I do with it’. I already use a RPi 3+ and Pi-Hole to run my DNS service inside my local network and to block ads and garbage. I use an old Dell machine to run my firewall. I built the Freenas system which has so many features and options I haven’t even touched the surface of it yet. What am I going to do with this?

Before I tell you what I did I’m going to explain a bit about this thing and what attracted me to it. First of all cost. The complete package consists of board, power supply, case and the SD card for $78 USD. It’s a bit more than the RPi 3+ but an added feature is the SATA connector which allows you to install a drive onto it. If you use a SSD drive you have a full solid state system. Use a big ass spinning drive and it’s a storage appliance. Dream shit up. Like the RPi, it’s a great project starter.

There are a bunch of pre-packaged OS images for it and a small community out there for support and sharing of ideas, uses and development. Loading the OS onto the SD is straight forward, even easier when you read the instructions first. Duh! A cool thing is with SD cards it was simple to create a few different images and swap them back and forth. As long as the mount and share permissions with the drive are consistent you can swap OS systems on SD cards in seconds.

I started out loading a straight up Ubuntu 16.04 Server package to see how it performed so I could get a better idea of capabilities and what I could possibly do with it. It’s actually pretty fast as long as you don’t bury it with overhead like a desktop GUI. I loaded Webmin and it seemed to handle it fine. They do have a desktop version of Ubuntu 18.04 with Mate as it’s GUI but I didn’t try it.

Next I found a package based on OpenMediaVault. Simple install and worked fine. My issue here is that I just built a FreeNAS system with 50 TB of ZFS storage. Do I really need a 2 TB file server? Nope. But it did work and was straight forward to get the whole thing up and running in minutes.

Next up KODI. Simple and fast install and worked easy. Mount the drive and load up whatever you want. You could spend a few bucks and buy a big drive like a 8, 10, or 12 TB drive and have tons of KODI storage for music and video. Here again My FreeNAS box. I loaded Plex Media Server in a Jailed environment and pointed it to over two thousand  HD movies and over a million tracks of music. I really don’t need KODI.

Odroid offers all kinds of SBC, parts, and pieces for great project starters. Prices are decent if you buy from the US distributor. ameridroid.com rather than Amazon. You wont get you parts the same day but for us in small town USA it really never makes a difference anyway.

So my intention is to make a caching DNS, Pi-Hole server out of it. I’ll keep you posted.