Omega Onion : A forgotten gem

I was looking through my electronics drawers a few days ago to find stuff which is no longer useful and can be discarded to make room for new toys.  I came across an envelope containing some Onion Omega kit, a kickstarter purchase I received in November 2015.  I couldn't remember what an Onion Omega does, but it seemed unlikely to do anything impressive, being towards 8 years old.  I was very wrong.

The board is tiny, only 4cm x 3cm.  The easiest way to use it is to plug it in to the mini-dock which gives you a micro-USB connector for power and a serial port.  There is also a USB socket so that you can insert memory sticks etc.  All this is achieved without making without making the system any bigger.  The full dock is a little bigger and provides GPIO pin headers which you can use.

Once the board is connected you can connect the board to a PC USB and connect with Putty.  Switching the processor on shows you a full linux boot sequence giving you console access after about 20s.

There is no SD card so the root filesystem is very small, only 7.4M however you can use a USB stick to add as much as you want

The Onion includes two wifi ports.  The first is configured as an Access Point which you can link to from a PC, iPad or phone to use a browser application.

Once you have set the second port to access home wifi you can access the application from LAN PCs and you also have internet access for software updates or whatever you need.

The Operating System is OpenWRT which accounts for its tiny size.  However the running processes include an extensive list of software and more can be added using the OpenWRT package manager.

Since the Onion is nearly eight years old, unsurprisingly the documentation has been archived but it is readily available and contains some great ideas for projects.  For example you can use python, install a LAMP stack, PHP, NodeJS and cross-compile programs.  GPIO pins are available and controllable for attaching sensors etc.

Overall this is a brilliant little device with a wide range of functions.  It is a shame I forgot about it for so long and I must investigate further.

Initial ideas are:
look at OpenWRT software in more detail to see how so much function is packed into a a small space
Setting up a simple website either using uHTTPd or installing lighttpd
It could provide a local website when we are away in the van.