Lemaker.org is Giving Away Banana Pi Development Boards to Developers and Fans

Banana Pi is a development board powered by AllWinner A20 dual core SoC with 1GB RAM, and with expansion headers and a form factor very similar to the Raspberry Pi. It can run Debian, Lubuntu, Android 4.2, Arch Linux ARM, Scratch OS, and OpenSuse, but Lemarker.org community would like more educational materials such as open source software or hardware projects, tutorials, etc.., so they’ve launched a program to give away boards to developers and people who can help writing and maintaining documentation. There are three categories of projects: STEAM – “Science, Technology, Engineering, Art & Mathematics” educational, open source projects running on the the Banana Pi Hardware or Software Project –  Open source projects based on Banana Pi which could be helpful to the community, including open source hardware peripherals projects; Banana Pi Fans – You don’t need to be as technical as for the two others categories, but you […]

The World’s Cheapest Linux Computer? Pogoplug Mobile Now Sells for $7

Somebody asked “Anyone knows a computer cheaper than a Raspberry Pi with a network interface?” on Google+ mini PCs community. Some OpenWRT routers such as TPLink WR703N selling for about $20, or the VoCore Wi-Fi module selling for about the same price (Wi-Fi only) were parts of the answers, and I also mentioned some HDMI TV dongles that now sell for around $35, which is still a little cheaper than the Raspberry Pi model B when one considers shipping. But I found the answer by dhead666 particularly interesting: Pogoplug Mobile goes for 7$ on Amazon and that includes psu and network cable. It run Linux great (I’m using Arch) but you will want to have a ttl-usb cable and soldering iron available in case you manage to mess u-boot (go to the doozan’s forums for more info about the u-boot). Let’s have a look. Pogoplug Mobile is not a new […]

Raspberry Pi Model B+ with 4 USB Ports, a micro SD Slot, and More GPIOs Coming Soon

With over 3 million boards sold, the Raspberry Pi is by far the most popular ARM Linux board on the market, but people are often asking for hardware upgrades with a faster processor, more RAM and so on. The good news is that a new Raspberry Pi board seems on the way, but since the real competitive of the Raspberry Pi is not the cheap hardware only, but software support and the community around the little ARM board. So instead of designing of completely new board, they’ve kept Broadcom BCM2835 and 512MB RAM, and mostly made some changes to the ports, and form factor. Since the board has not been officially announced just yet, the full details are available, but according to various reports, the specs should be as follows: SoC – Broadcom BCM2835 ARM11 processor @ 700MHz with VideoCore IV GPU System Memory – 512 MB SDRAM (PoP) Storage […]

$70 MicroNFCBoard Brings NFC Connectivity to Any Board or Device (Crowdfunding)

AppNearMe MicroNFCBoard is a development platform for Near Field Communication (NFC) comprised of an NFC transceiver, an NXP MCU, and all software stack and tools you need for development. This board also exposes various I/Os that allows you to connect to external hardware or devices, and it can be used with an Arduino, Raspberry Pi, mbed or PC/Mac. Let’s go through the board specifications first: MCU – NXP LPC11U34FHN33/421 Cortex M0 MCU @ 48MHz, with 10KB RAM, 48KB FLASH, 4KB EEPROM NFC Transceiver – NXP PN512. Reader/Writer and card operation modes supporting ISO14443A/Mifare and FeliCa schemes.  NFCIP-1 mode Splittable antenna USB – 1x micro USB port for power and programming I/O – 20x through holes with access to serial (UART), I2C, SPI, 4x ADC inputs, IRQ, Boot and Reset, and power pins. (2x pin header that you can solder are provided) Misc – Reset and bootloader enable push-buttons, 2x LEDs. […]

SolidRun HummingBoard Raspberry Pi-Like Board is Now Available for $45 and Up

HummingBoard is a board made by SolidRun that’s mechanically compatible with the Raspberry Pi, and offering the same expansions connectors, and a few extras. The board is comprised of a baseboard and a microSoM powered by Freescale i.MX6 Solo, Dual Lite or Dual. At first it looked like an internal project,  but the board went viral together with the Banana Pi, and the company has now announced availability for the HummingBoard with pricing starting at $45 for the single core version up to $100 for the dual core version with extra options. There are currently three models: HummingBoard-i1 ($44.90) – Freescale i.MX6 Solo with GC880 GPU, 512 MB RAM, 10/100M Ethernet HummingBoard-i2 ($74.99) – Freescale i.MX6 Dual Lite with GC880 GPU, 1GB RAM, 10/100M Ethernet HummingBoard-i2ex ($99.99) – Freescale i.MX6 Dual with GC2000 GPU, 1GB RAM, Gigabit Ethernet, LVDS output, mSATA II interface, PCI Express Gen 2 slot, RTC with […]

Raspberry Pi Compute Module Development Kit Is Now Available for $200

The Raspberry Pi foundation announced a computer-on-module which they called the (Raspberry Pi) Compute Module that will be mostly software compatible with the Raspberry Pi board, and sell for $30 in quantities. They have now announced the availability of the development kit that includes a baseboard (called Compute IO board), display & camera adapter boards, as well as a 5V power adapter, jumper wires, and a USB cable. As a reminder the Compute Module has the following hardware specifications: SoC – Broadcom BCM2835 ARM 11 processor @ 700 MHz with Videocore IV GPU System Memory – 512MB RAM Storage – 4GB eMMC Flash SoM Connector – DDR2 200-pins SODIMM Dimensions – 67.6x30mm board which fits into a standard DDR2 SODIMM connector The Compute IO Board come with two micro USB connectors (one reserved for power), a USB 2.0 host port, two DSI ports for display, two CSI ports for a […]

Maynard is a Wayland based Lightweight Desktop Environment Designed for the Raspberry Pi and Lower-end Hardware

With 3 millions board already sold, the Raspberry Pi board is clearly the most popular ARM Linux development board, and must be one of the most successful Linux device that’s designed to run a Desktop environment. However, the Broadcom BCM2835 processor and lowly 512MB makes it hard to run fully fledge desktop environment such as KDE and Gnome, so most people run LXDE via Raspbian operating systems, and it is much more manageable. However LXDE does not support Wayland, which is supposed to replace the X windows system, and it may not look as nice as it could. So the Raspberry Pi foundation and Collaborra have worked together on a new desktop environment called Maynard that leverages Wayland, and is supposed to be “functional, light and pretty”. This Wayland implementation is based on Weston + GTK, and is using the hardware video scaler (HVS) found in Broadcom BCM2835 to make […]

There’s a New MarsBoard A20 ARM Linux Development Board In Town

MarsBoard, a development board based by AllWinner A10 was released last year, soon followed by MarsBoard A20 with a dual core Cortex A7 AllWinner A20 processor. That board is now called the “Old MarsBoard A20” and is replaced by the “New MarsBoard A20” that features a baseboard + computer-on-module design, increases the NAND flash capacity to 8 GB flash, and supports 1GB RAM by default, with an option for 2 GB RAM. Let’s check the specifications of this new development board: SoC – AllWinner A20 ARM Cortex A7 dual core processor @ 1GHz + Mali-400 GPU System Memory – 1GB DDR3 @ 480 MHz by default, up to 2GB DDR3 Storage – 8GB NAND Flash, SATA II interface, and micro SD slot Video I/O HDMI up to 1080p60 VGA Composite output TV-IN (composite IN) LCD connectors for RGB and LVDS interfaces, capacitive touch support Audio I/O – HDMI, Line In/Out, Microphone […]

UP 7000 x86 SBC