At World Maker Faire last weekend, I got the chance to check out Minnowboard, a new Open Source microcontroller board that is going after the Raspberry Pi market not by emulating the popular RasPi, but by blowing it out of the water with a four-inch $200 mini PC running Ångström Linux on an Intel Atom CPU. It has a host of intriguing features like x86 compatibility, gigabit ethernet, and a gig of DDR2 RAM, as well as the GPIO pins that hardware hackers like.
As a brand-new platform, the MinnowBoard has precious few accessories to offer. However, they have released the MinnowBoard’s specifications for their add-on boards, called Lures, enabling fans to start building compatible open-source products.
At Maker Faire, they had a neat demo at their booth — a hobbyist robotic arm controlled by a MinnowBoard and equipped with a camera and OpenCV computer vision library, enabling the MinnowBoard to detect an object and direct the manipulator to pick it up.
Comments
I'm using the Raspberry Pi today with it's H.264 hardware Encoder. Does any of these boards mentioned here have a H.264 hardware encoder ??
Cubieboard is also a very nice board if your interested in the micro arm things
i2c (TWI)
spi
RGB / lvds
CSI / TS
-FM in
adc
CVBS
VGA
SPDIF-out
Touch-Panel
http://cubieboard.org/
Soon they are releasing the Cubietruck, its a bigger brother with more options
http://wandboard.org/
take the quadcore and your still much cheaper.
i have played with the dl and solo variant. both have a nice performance.
the best is - you can use ubuntu :-)
this is the best performance for your money you can get!
Hi Tom,
Without wanting to sound negative, but this is clearly lowering the bar on embedded computing. The E640 core is what we have been using 2010 on a much smaller footprint (Kontron / Lippert credit-card sized computers). A 1GHz single-core Atom is about as slow as it gets these days.
And there is no need to spend $200. Please have a look at the Odroid series. It's what we currently use in the Pixhawk research project (yes, the autopilot was named after it). You get a 1.7 GHz QUAD core for $89 (Galaxy SIII processor) and a 1.6 GHz OCTA core for $169 (Galaxy S4 processor, the octa is not that interesting for high-performance, as its a hybrid design, so you're equipped off with the quad already).
We'll be releasing a setup / demo tutorial soon.
Gary, They recently announced and verified - within the last two or three days - that they were indeed on schedule and would begin shipping the dual-core units to their Kickstarter backers on 9-26 (tomorrow!) with the quad-core units following shortly thereafter. I'll keep you posted.
Hi Joe, I had also seen the UDOO and the Quad core version with SATA certainly is an interesting device that burns less power than the Atom and certainly has enough power for some mid level vision stuff.
And they have a reasonable pile of IO.
I am most worried that with the level of over funding they have received that getting it together may prove to be a difficult challenge for them.
If they actually are successful at meeting current orders, I will give them a serious look.
At $129.00 it is very attractive.
So a $200 PC can blow a $35 raspberry pi out of the water. Who knew.
Have you seen the UDOO board? Here's the feature list:
I don't work for or represent them. I just think this is a real nice hobbyist / experimenter board and I'm waiting patiently for mine from their Kickstarter project.
Their website is udoo.org if y'all are interested in checking them out.
Cheers!
@Gary,
The new CGS ( Link ) that I have just finished building has an Intel motherboard with twin embedded Atoms running at 1.8GHz, but is a heck of a lot bigger than this board:-)
I agree with your observations. Too bad they could not have started with a full house instead of putting it off as future "lures".
Thanks for the correction for the Minnowboard link.
Regards,
TCIII Admin
I first found the site for this board a couple of months ago (who's link should be minnowboard.org not minnowboard.cc).
I have been looking at Atom based boards for some time and the fact is this one suffers from the same thing as many of the others.
Namely, not enough native IO. 8 GPIO pins aren't really enough to do much with.
This means you really need to plan on using it to communicate via a serial interface to something with a bunch of IO on it to actually do anything (lure or not).
At slightly over 4" square it is small and the Linux is valuable but it really needs IO and CAN ought to be built in rather than a future "lure".
As Thomas says above, you need this class of processor to do serious visual stuff, whether SLAM, object recognition or even decent avoidance and path finding.
I want a PixCondor with an Atom, Sata, a decent GPU, CAN and plenty of RAM and even more IO.
And yes I'll be happy to pay over $200.00 for it and put a fan on it.
-
1
-
2
-
3
of 3 Next