Gizmo2 - Unsuccessful Roadtest

3 Apr 2015

I originally posted a proposal for a media center application. The goal was to make the Gizmo2 WiFi capable via a mini Wifi PCI card.

The cheapest and best I could find was from mWave.

http://www.mwave.com.au/product/intel-7260hmwwbr-dual-band-wirelessac-7260-minipci-express-card-ab49888?gclid=CKeM8tzYsMQCFQYGvAodgRwA5Q

Then add a few cables and antennas from eBay to complete the WiFi portion.

http://www.ebay.com.au/itm/RP-SMA-2-4GHz-16-dBi-Booster-Wireless-Antenna-WIFI-WLAN-For-PCI-Modem-Router-/140737681488

http://www.ebay.com.au/itm/U-FL-IPX-to-RP-SMA-female-RF-Pigtail-Cable-Jumper-for-PCI-Wifi-Card-10cm-B149-/311319267013?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_15&hash=item487c1306c5

This would have satisfied the hardware component of the platform.

Secondly I wanted to build Kodi for the Gizmo2, and using the readily available Ubuntu distro, strip it down to just the minimum required to support Kodi. Ultimately a media center distro for the Gizmo2.

This is something I really wanted to do, but I cant convince my wife to part with the cash for the Gizmo2.

Top Comments

Brett.Wildermoth over 9 years ago

IIf you look at my review of the raspberrypi2, then you'll see I had it running a media center in 30 minutes, the gizmo2 would have been a challenge for at least a day or two
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fvan over 9 years ago in reply to Brett.Wildermoth

But then again you could argue that all the projects proposed for the Gizmo2 could also be achieved on a raspberryPi2.

That's true, but in the case of the RoadTest, you get the Gizmo2 for free. If not selected, a more cost-effective solution like the Pi 2 could be considered as it no longer has to be about the Gizmo2.
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Brett.Wildermoth over 9 years ago

I agree I had a B+ and it skipped like mad, The Raspberry Pi2 is a bit better but not as good as my Cubox-i4pro. But I wanted to see what the Gizmo2 would be like, also porting a media center distro to it would have been fun. OpenELEC is already available on both raspberry Pi and CuBox,etc, but this is out of the box ready to go. I wanted to build my own for a platform that did currently have a media center distro. Also network to my media center is via WiFi and the dongles are barely sufficient (30Mb/s), especially if you have lots of things sharing the port. But then again you could argue that all the projects proposed for the Gizmo2 could also be achieved on a raspberryPi2.
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Anonymous-330417 over 9 years ago in reply to fvan

Yah.(Have a B+ it hangs quite alot ..)
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fvan over 9 years ago in reply to Anonymous-330417

A Raspberry Pi 2 with one of the (many) media player distributions will do just fine. It's smaller, cheaper and has a great community you can turn to for support.
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