Rationale

As mentioned in my article Fuel Save Alerter, I was originally thinking about deploying the application locally to a Raspberry Pi, but due to the delivery problems I decided to go with an ODROID-M1 with 8GByte RAM instead. This is my experience report.

Parts and Costs

Here is my part list:

So in total the device cost me something like 210€. Quite a bit more than I anticipated for my original Raspberry Pi idea.

The device looks like this:

In the middle picture you can also see the WiFi Module 5BK. I find it sad that WiFi is not directly on-board.

Originally, I bought a different NVMe M.2 module Transcend 240GB SATA III TS240GMTS820S for 31.79€, but this NVMe module was not recognized by the ODROID-M1 at all. I started to read a bit about NVMe and M.2 and learned a bit about M.2 Keys. The Transcend device has a B+M key (SATA + PCIe) and the Crucial device has a M key (PCIe). I guess this has something to do with why the Transcend device was not recognized. I tried to sign-up to the ODROID forums, but the sign-up procedure does not work. I never was sent a sign-up e-mail and without that I could not log-in to the forum. I tried with two different e-mail accounts. Then I tried to find out how to contact someone at the forum via e-mail, but nothing is documented, so I simply sent an e-mail to admin@forum.odroid.com, admin@odroid.com, webmaster@forum.odroid.com, webmaster@odroid.com. None of the e-mails bounced, but I also did not get an answer up until now. So I am not sure if my mail reached the eyes of a human at all.

In the ODROID Forum I found M1 NVMe compatibility reports and via this thread I was pointed to Tested/verified compatible M.2 NVMe for the ODROID M1. Like that I selected the Crucial device.

The installation of Ubuntu on the ODROID-M1 was quite straight forward. Especially this Petitboot boot-loader was a quite pleasant surprise.

1. You download an OS image,
2. put it onto a USB stick (don’t create a bootable USB^[1],
3. boot into the ODROID-M1, where a Petitboot boot-loader awaits you,
4. go to the shell (bottom most option)
5. and follow the instructions from SSD only usage, which basically equates to
   dd if=/usr/var/petitboot/mnt/dev/sda1/ubuntu-20.04-gnome-desktop-odroidm1-20220531.img of=/dev/nvme0n1 bs=4M.

After that you can remove the USB stick and reboot. Now you should be able to boot into the arm64 Ubuntu.

Benchmark

I like to do a byte-unixbench on the environments I use. Just download the UnixBench5.1.3.tgz and copy it onto the ODROID-M1. You will need to install a couple of packages like a build environment including a C++ compiler. But once done you can untar the package and just execute the Run command inside the package.

The running 1 parallel copy of tests version resulated in a System Benchmarks Index Score of 467.5. Just as a comparison, on the netcup VPS for 2.99 € per month I get a value of 647.3, so a factor of 1.38 better.

2022-07-22 Addendum: I’ve now run the benchmark also on one of my old Raspberry Pi 3 Model B, where the running 1 parallel copy of tests version resulated in a System Benchmarks Index Score of 256.1. Even the running 4 parallel copies of tests resulted only in 437.9.

2022-10-15 Addendum: You might also be interested in my newer blog post Thin Clients as Home Servers: Dell Wyse 5060 and Fujitsu Futro S920: an Experience Report.

Summary

All in all I have mixed feelings about the device. It looks nice, consumes little power^[2] and has a nice boot process with the Petitboot boot-loader. On the other hand the deivce was quite expensive, does not include WiFi on-board out-of-the-box and in my opinion has a low computing power as shown by the byte-unixbench for that price. The experience with the forums was also not ideal. I still don’t have access to the forums. I was not expecting that a NVMe M.2 would not simply work out of the box. I’ve never experienced that. This is a standard storage interface. Why do you need a Tested/verified compatible M.2 NVMe page at all? At least a warning on the main ODROID-M1 with 8GByte RAM page about this issue might have been nice.

Footnotes