96Boards hardware development platforms support add-on boards called Mezzanines, and you’ll find a bunch of them on 96Boards website.
Most are designed and manufactured by companies, but in order to bring more (individual) open source hardware developers on-board, the 96Boards Community Mezzanine initiative was launched to bring industry representatives and community members together.
The idea is to encourage people to submit their KiCad/Altium 96boards’ mezzanine designs to the github repository, and the manufacturing costs of the most popular designs can be lowered by offering them through GroupGets group buying platform.
The first of those boards to be launched is 96Boards GPS Mezzanine with the following specifications for the R1 board:
- Adafruit Ultimate GPS Module
- PA6H_1103854 – 66 channel w/10 Hz updates
- MTK3339 chipset
- -165 dBm sensitivity
- External u.FL antenna connector
- Fix and PPS signals brought to down baseboard
- Expansion – USB UART breakout, breakout headers for I2C, SPI, GPIO, and power lines
- Misc – GPS Fix LED, prototyping area, CR2032 battery slot
- Dimensions – 85mm x 54mm
Some of 96Boards already have GPS, but the mezzanine would be bring such capability to any 96Boards CE compliant hardware, since it’s connect via the 40-pin low speed connector. You’ll find the KiCad hardware design files on Github.
If you are interested, you could reserve one or more boards for $75 each, and manufacturing will carry on if the number of reservation exceed 25 boards.
Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.
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