The Onion Omega, a hardware development board designed for software developers, aims to radically simplify and democratise the hardware prototyping and development process for the Internet of Things (IoT).
Launched on crowdsourcing platform Kickstarter, the Onion Omega was made available for 
pre-sale there, and had achieved it’s funding goal in less than 24 hours. The Omega is a hardware development board for Web developers with limited experience in hardware development. It is 1/4 the size of the Raspberry Pi, with built-in WiFi and Linux. The Omega allows software developers to create hardware projects in familiar environments, tools (SSH, Git and npm) and use high-level programming languages they are used to, such as Python, Node.js, PHP, etc.
According to its makers Onion, the launch of the Omega was the first step in creating “The Invention Platform For The Internet Of Things”. The next step, already in progress, was to create a comprehensive set of tools, learning materials and and an integrated hardware/software ecosystem in order to foster an open and thriving developer community. Onion’s stated mission was to create tools that allowed inventors from all walks of life to realise their vision.
Omega developers could also harness the free Onion Cloud service to manage and control their creations with the Onion Console on their phone or computer. With the Onion App Store, developers could easily find, install and share apps written for IoT devices. Apps, said Onion, could range from the home automation, security monitoring to robots, drones, among others.
Boken Lin, co-founder of Onion, said in a written statement: IoT is projected to be a multi-trillion dollar industry by 2020, we at Onion believe that everyone, and not just a handful of people (with full-stack hardware AND software knowledge) and companies, should be able to participate in this amazing opportunity. Only by simplifying and democratising, will we see some truly ingenious and innovative creations.
Image Credit: kickstarter/Onion
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