Google opened the road with Chromecast, Microsoft followed it with an almost identical peripheral, and finally the open source world has its own HDMI dongle: Mozilla recently presented the MatchStick project, based on Firefox OS.

As today, it’s pretty hard to find somebody who doesn’t own a smartphone and a TV featuring many HDMI ports, so these dongles, which are basically mini-PCs, are becoming pretty useful and interesting, if you want a Smart TV without changing your device.

As it always happens with a new market, the bigger company, like Microsoft and Google, unveiled their version with proprietary operative systems. The MatchStick project though, which has been created thanks to a Kickstarer campaign lasted less than 2 day, will focus on an open source HDMI dongle, which means the OS and the blueprints for the hardware will be available for everybody.

This way, the community of developers will be able to modify and improve the system; furthermore, Mozilla released an SDK which will allow the user to simply and quickly install Firefox OS on the Chromecast dongle by Google. During the Kickstarer campaign, the price for the MatchStick was 18$ plus 5$ for shipping (the first lucky 500 paid only 12$), while the official price is going to be set at 25$, which is lower than the competition.





Source: KickStarter
via Le Comptoir du Hardware.