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The MinnowBoard is a Low-Cost, Open Hardware Single-Board Computer (Video)
Out in the Northeast Texas town of Ft. Worth, a company called CircuitCo started making something they called the BeagleBoard -- an open source hardware single-board computer for educators and experimenters. Now, with help and support from Intel, they're making and supporting the Atom-based MinnowBoard, which is also open source, and comes with Angstrom Linux to help experimenters get started with it. David Anders is the Senior Embedded Systems Engineer at CircuitCo. Slashdot's Timothy Lord met David at LinuxCon North America 2013 in New Orleans and made this video of him talking about the recently-released MinnowBoard and the more mature BeagleBoard.
A little deja vu.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
Here is what you want to know: the board costs $200 or £135.
http://parts.arrow.com/item/detail/circuitco/minnowboard
http://www.uk.farnell.com/circuitco/minnowboard/atom-e640t-platform-sbc/dp/2319581
"Low cost" needs substance. It costs $200.
I do not think it means what you think it means.
If tyranny and oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. - James Madison
But it's a 64-bit dual-core AMD APU with an integrated Radeon HD 6250. Considerably more powerful than the Minnowboard, but still runs on 10W.
Even an article about the MinnowBoard can't help shouting out the GizmoBoard:
At the heart of the MinnowBoard is one of Intel’s less powerful processors: the Atom E640T. Running at 1GHz, the single-core chip offers a 32-bit x86 implementation – already putting it on the back foot compared to the dual-core 64-bit APU found on rival AMD’s Gizmo, the closest device for comparison – while generating a surprisingly small amount of heat, allowing for passive cooling through a compact heat sink.
Source
Basically, MinnowBoard has been outdated for some time now. Not sure why this spam is on the front page.
Full disclosure: I almost got the GizmoBoard as an HTPC, but the 2GB RAM and lack of HDMI really turned me off. HDMI can be cobbled together (there's a high-speed connector that actually exposes HDMI lines, but you'd have to wire it to a female connector yourself), but swapping out four 96-FBGA surface-mount packages to upgrade the RAM to 4GB just seemed like more rework than I wanted to sign up for.
Chuuch. Preach. Tabernacle.
If I wanted a freaking atom board, I'd buy one for $100 and load it up with another $100 worth of RAM.
I'm going to keep complaining about the fact that there's not a low power, low cost ARM platform out there ($200 or less) with hardware SATA RAID support. While the cubieboard is the best ATM and supports port multipliers, it's really too bad that the thing can't use both devices attached to the multiplier at the same time. All I want is a hybrid NAS and home server that has 2-4 cores and 2-4gb RAM. Size isn't really a factor but power usage is...
Anyone know of a platform I've not looked at?
They should have called it the Sushi Board
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
http://www.pcper.com/news/General-Tech/Bay-Trail-M-Powered-Intel-NUC-Coming-Q1-2014-140
You have to wait, but compared to this it's worth it.
PowerVR-based GMA 600? Not even once.
Richardson, a city of about 100,000 people where CircuitCo is located, is part of exurban Dallas, not exurban Fort Worth. The summary is incorrect.
These are really, really nice.
Cheap. Small. Good community. About the only bad thing I have to say about it is that I had to go to Radio Shack to get a converter for the power.
It's confidante, not cosmonaut!
Too expensive to matter. It isn't just uncompetitive, it's priced completely out of it's market.
Is it? A Celeron NUC looks to go for $177 at newegg, and the Minnowboard only has 1GB of RAM, which you can grab for the NUC for $17.99. That comes out as cheaper than a bare minnowboard, and the NUC includes the case and power supply to boot.
What I would rather see in an embedded Linux board is more I/O. I am not talking about USB, HDMI or Ethernet but honest to goodness digital I/O's and serial busses like I2C or SPI. The minnowboard has a measly 8 GPIO's and two more hardwired to LED's. That isn't worth $200 when I can get the same thing by purchasing a cheap Atom ITX board and then adding an FPGA PCI I/O card from Mesa Electronics for slightly more.
If you want to impress me and make it worth $200 then how about using the Intel Atom Processor E6x5C featuring an embedded Altera FPGA which is connected to the CPU by a friggen PCIe Gen2 x1 link. Then include a default bitfile for the FPGA which gives you a bunch of GPIO, PWM and UARTS for serial ports like RS232, SPI and I2C. Also breakout the remaining PCIe link for further expansion. A kernel driver will then expose the various I/O devices inside the FPGA to a standard API. Then port the Wiring libs which is used by the Arduino to the new API for the FPGA and you will now have a development board that will blow the competition away. Even the Arduino IDE can be modified to build Linux binaries for the new API. Bonus points of you throw a nice 8 channel 16 bit high speed ADC on there. No re-learning new libraries or languages. Arduino libs could be added without code modification provided they don't make low level calls. Even then simple modifications could be made to port them. The API could also be called from any other language like C++, Go, Ada, D or whatever you fancy so you can write code in your language of choice. Newbies could plug in the board wait for it to boot and configure the FPGA and start writing code and wiring it into their projects, they already know Arduino libs so let them use those. If you really want to be fancy use the RT PREEMPT patch and let more advanced users write code for real time stuff guaranteeing determinism.
Imagine then if the internal FPGA bits could then be added to or modified to include new I/O devices. Establish a standard bus and I/O address space for the FPGA and make a template for writing new modules. Write a GUI editor which lets you snap modules onto the bus like Legos and set the address space and their I/O pins. Call Quartus using scripts in the background and generate the new bitfile which can be uploaded on the fly to the FPGA from the host OS. Then the standard API for the kernel driver would simplify writing libraries for talking to the new modules. Want to make a CNC? Add quadrature encoder interfaces and H bridge controllers and directly drive servo motors. Software radio, DSP, video processing, audio processing, the possibilities are endless. Then the community can release HDL modules which the user can snap into their designs and then do the wiring. This way people don't have to learn complex HDL programming, they use what the community provides. Don't like the default bitfile layout or standard templates? Write your own HDL code and do what you please. Open hardware means you have all the specs and source.
If that were available for 200-300 then I would gleefully say shut up and take my money.
Folks around here say North Texas. Northeast Texas would be Texarkana.
Either that or North Central Texas would have sufficed.
Getting back to the Minnow board, it's a little pricey but I'm sure third parties will start embracing it like the hardware vendors around Raspberry PI.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
After using ZFS for a bit I'm no longer impressed with hardware RAID. Lots of bare SATA or SAS sounds better to me.