Posted on 08/12/2013 11:49:12 AM PDT by Ernest_at_the_Beach
The MinnowBoard community website reports that Intel is now shipping its MinnowBoard bare-bones PC. It's a bit heftier in price than the Raspberry Pi, costing $199 USD, and can be purchased at Digi-Key, Farnell, Mouser Electronics and Newark. Additional outlets will be added soon.
Intel's MinnowBoard sports an Atom E640 SoC clocked at 1 GHz, integrated GMA 600 graphics, 1 GB of DDR2 RAM, and 4 MB of SPI flash for system firmware memory. The I/O portion contains one microSD card slot, one SATA 2 (3 Gb/s) port, two USB host ports, one microUSB-B port, a serial (UART 0) port for debug serial to USB conversion, a Gigabit Ethernet port, and HDMI output.
The board's "experimenter" features include eight buffered GPIO pins, two experimenter GPIO controlled LEDs, four experimenter GPIO switches, and a system firmware flash programming header (Dedi-Prog compatible). The board boots using open-source UEFI firmware with Fast Boot capability, and the shipped OS of choice is the Angström Linux distribution, which is compatible with Yocto Project.
The board's actual dimensions are 4.2 x 4.2 inches, and can be expanded using daughter cards called "Lures." These cards can be custom developed to "expose features and interfaces as required for developer applications." Lure specifications for the MinnowBoard can be found here, and includes an Automotive Lure and a MiniPCIe/mSATA Lure.
A joint project with CircuitCo Electronics, the MinnowBoard is Intel's first "open source," bare-bones PC aimed at software developers. It's also supposedly the first of its kind to ship with an x86 chip on-board. Price wise, it's closer to some of Zotac's solutions than Raspberry Pi or Arduino, but that could change if units aren't flying off the shelves of the retailers mentioned above.
"Where the MinnowBoard really shines is in its I/O performance," said Scott Garman, embedded Linux engineer at Intel’s Open Source Technology Center. "Powered by PCI Express, you can make full use of SATA disk support and gigabit Ethernet for high throughput applications such as file servers or network appliances."
Intel has several guides up on the MinnowBoard website including an introduction that takes users from unboxing to booting up the OS, toggling one of the two LEDs from the Linux command line and GPIO programming. These are currently in PDF format and will supposedly see HTML-based versions in the near future. The board's schematics and design are also published under a Creative Commons license.
To get involved with the MinnowBoard community, head here. The board is available now for $199 at Digi-Key, Farnell (UK), Mouser Electronics and Newark.
*******************************EXCERPT****************************************
Create and Innovate with Software Development Tools for Embedded and Mobile Developers
Is it merely a board, or does it include drives. If it includes drives, does it include drivers for those drives? Can a user stick a LINUX or Ubuntu disc in it, and boot up a functional computer, or not? If not, it’s not a real entry into the marketplace, but merely to prevent some pent up desire among geeks from snowballing into a real solution.
1920x1080 video?
Thats a lot of numbers. If only i understood.
It’s only 4 inches sqare and comes with linux........
interesting
“... and comes with linux” is all I wanted to read. ;^)
I got it with my new mother board...
HAs an option to load even before Cmos and Windows..
Includes internet browser as well..
Pretty cool in case you need to load drivers or something..
A variant of ubuntu(linux)..
The yocto project sounds like an Intel sponsored project.
Had not heard of the Linux distro before.
Go tpo run,....back later.
Hmmm...
raspberry pi... been out for about 18 months
3.4" x 2.1"
256-512MB system memory
1900x1200 video
$25-35
intels board might be a tad faster (1GHz instead of 700Mhz), but at $30... buy 5
and HDMI output
Assuming YES
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.