I have the same setup, OSX El Cap and have it working. Did you follow the install of the serial driver?
https://onion.freshdesk.com/support/solutions/articles/6000071332-how-do-i-connect-to-the-omega-via-serial-

One issue I had, so I bring it up is that of the cable. I was using a 'power only' cable for a while. A different cable worked. Also, I seem to have trouble with the USB port on the left side. I have no issues with the one on the right. I think they are both USB3.0, so I am not sure what the issue could be.

Nice. One thing I was looking to play with would be a server running on the omega. This might be a good option.

I won't count this team out, but I am a little pessimistic about NodeJS support on the omega. The Omega is running OpenWRT, so I spent a little time rummaging through their documentation. There were a couple of people that tried to get Node running on OpenWRT with mixed success and abandoned the project. That said, not everything works with the 4.0 version of Node, so 1.0.12 is not that old. Not sure what version might show up for Omega.

MediaTek and Seed seem to have a joint venture where they are producing an omega like device that runs on OpenWrt. http://home.labs.mediatek.com/mediatek-labs-announces-mediatek-linkit-smart-7688-an-open-source-development-platform-for-a-more-connected-world/ MediaTek LinkIt Smart 7688

Seed has the devices listed for sale, but MediaTeks documentaion is unreachable at the moment. Will be interesting to see the approaches taken by them for running python and node and such. I can't tell how much of their code is open source, or available on Git because their servers are down.

I know that both devices are trying to make a profit, but hopefully multiple devices running OpenWrt will grow the community. Very interesting to see how different the platforms will be.

@Nayan Sorry, you are right. I read a little ways down, but not all the way. I didn't see that they were using the Omega as a hub with MQTT.

@Theodore-Borromeo you are correct. I am looking at doing a FOV for a robot I am building. I see lots of people just sticking an android phone on the front. That I feel however is cheating, even though it might be cheaper. And it won't run OpenCV.

I understand where you are coming from too though. I was shocked at the price of web cams. I haven't bought one before. I figured I could find a year or two ago's models for cheap, but it is hard to know if they will work. (hence this thread?)

Maybe what we need is a "cheap webcams that work" thread if that is your goal (I would love to find that $10 web cam myself)

My C270 worked out of the box with the onion platform to stream video (for a rear van camera project). Getting it running on a RaspberryPi to stream was really difficult. (motion and opencv are not really streaming packages, and the one that comes on the onion took a lot of compiling on the pi) So I will just use the onion and the C270 for that project. For the robot, I just ordered the more expensive 'official' camera. I know that opencv is well supported there, and for now, I will just use the pi for the dedicated cam and opencv for the video FOV and face recognition for that project.

Good luck though.

@Theodore-Borromeo I found the Logitech C270 to work plug and play. I posted this on an older forum post. I could use it to stream or take a photo.

The good news is that a Logitech C270 works. I got it at Microcenter openbox for $15

[ 1849.270000] uvcvideo: Found UVC 1.00 device <unnamed> (046d:0825)
[ 1849.380000] input: UVC Camera (046d:0825) as /devices/platform/ehci-platform/usb1/1-1/1-1:1.0/input/input0
root@Omega-030D:/# ls /dev/v*
/dev/video0

The PS3 Eyecam I found to be recognized by the omega, but as said, the omega just doesn't have the horsepower. The Pi2 can do it.

I have only used motion on the raspberry pi, but it's function is to take a photo or short video when motion is detected. It is a much simpler algorithm than opencv. You can actually use opencv to detect objects and faces. I haven't used it yet, but now have a book on the project and intend to try to get it to recognize members of my family.

I was able to get the omega to stream video pretty easily (there are other threads). It was a pain to get the streaming library compiled on the pi.

@Kit-Bishop I had no idea about the soft I2C - cool.
I need to get a Teensy 3 to play with it - looks cool.
Found a Teensy shield adapter on Sparkfun - interesting. I can see where you are coming from for sure now.
Do you have your I2C hardware timer/library somewhere? Would be interested to look at it.

@Kit-Bishop Robot to take over the world? I am working on a a couple of simple robots before I start the master plan. My thoughts are a distributed system, and I contemplated I2C as wll. I still think I want to try that direction, but the limitation of one master is frustrating. Trying to switch with a single pin is an idea. My other idea is to leave the I2C to the sensors and what not, but have the AVR's, communicate over something else. There must be something that allows two way communication.

I did some looking around, and there are some other solutions that simply map gpio ports to the host WRT based system without an AVR, so it must be working. In the mean time, I suppose you could wire up a prototypeing system to test it. I don't have many shields, just a couple of cheap motor controllers, so I don't have as much invested - yet.

Have you considered using a ATMEGA or a Arduino Zero? They are faster with more memory, right? I don't have either, but have considered it, because I keep running out of timers and independent PWM signals on the basic Arduino. That list is a lot of things to control. I wouldn't want to do all that in one program loop either.

Yea, that makes more sense. The big issue I see though is that the libraries are not going to work that have been written for the shield. Onion won't have time to write those. I am sure that some people could handle that code just fine (ie. you) . I have found that most of the things that exist as shields exist as a separate board. You might even find 3.3v boards that way. You would have to wire all the connections yourself, so I get the idea, just not sure how worth it would be to Onion.

@Kit-Bishop @Russ-Terrell I don't have an Arduino dock but saw your post....

The Yun (and some other dual boards) communicate similar to what you would have to do with the omega. On the Yun, the linux part is not meant to be powerful and just really a gateway to the internet, but more can be run there. The communication is over a library called Bridge. This is also similar to if you purchased an Arduino wifi shield based on a ESP8266 or had one not in a shield. There are GPIO pins that are there, but not connected directly.

I am not sure how the GPIO pins would get connected directly. Are you wanting an input pin on the Arduino to register as an input pin on the Omega? In that case I suppose a board that didn't have an Arduino but just accepted the shields would accomplish that, but you would have all kinds of software issues then. The Arduino and the Omega are quite different in terms of timers, interrupts, multi-talking, etc.

It is an interesting issue that likely needs a hardware/software bridge - the dock being the hardware. I would be nice to have something where any Arduino shield could be plugged in and just work. Just not sure how that would work. You need to use specific libraries on a shield to work with it. I can see someone writing a I2C wrapper around a library for the Arduino so that the communication to the Omega is easier, but that would be on a per shield/library basis.

Who knows, maybe I don't understand well enough and the Onion folks have some cool ideas that would simplify the programming with Arduino shields.

PS. Several times I referred to Arduino, the Board, and Arduino when I should have just said Atmel Atmega AVR.

@Steve-Fister yea, ok. I might try that, but I use node for work, and need a different version for that. NVM has worked for me in the past, but I haven't used this old a branch before.

@Steve-Fister What did you use to get v0.10.5 node on your machine? Windows? OSX? Like I said NVM gave me issues. I couldn't find the twit package, and twit-old wasn't working on my mac.