Business of making and selling open source hardware is growing with quite a few project have revenue above million dollar. This was presented in recently organized foo camp by adafruit. Slide:
Video: Open source hardware $1m and beyond – foo camp east 2010
openPICUS board is very simple board with great idea, connect sensor/actuator on one end & wireless modules on other end of PIC micro controller.
One of the design will have WiFi, while other will have Bluetooth as wireless module on openPICUS board. To make things simple to implement, openPICUS team have used 2 layer circuit design.
Board contains Microchip PIC24F 16 bit chip set for processing. Sensors such as temperature, accelerometer, flow detector can be interfaced to PIC. The readings of firmware can be done using wireless link. The firmware should directly download from serial port.
PIC24F has I2C & SPI interface, which can be used to for LCD display. PIC24F has 4 Analog Inputs with 10 bit A/D, 5 Digital Inputs (3 can be used as Interrupt) & 5 Digital Outputs (3 can be used for PWM) which is fair set of IO to interface desired sensors & actuators.
Pros:
- Simple design with good IO capability
- Wireless support
Hawkboard, similar to Beagleboard is open hardware platform for developer community. It uses OMAP L138 SoC, which contains ARM9 processor core along with floating point DSP. AM1808 is similar chip-set but with only ARM9 core.
The board has direct serial console connector for debugging. Board has VGA, USB Host & Gadget, SATA, Audio IO peripheral options, making it useful for various home & industrial application.
Pros:
- Angstrom Linux distribution supports hawkboard. Besides that, users have successfully used Android on hawkboard.
- Both cores, ARM9 & Floating point DSP of Hawkboard can execute upto 456 MHz, which is fairly good processing power.
- VGA video output makes easy to connect to low end display device (e.g. CRT monitor).
- Fairly good price of 110 USD.
Qi Hardware has introduced Ben NanoNote, pocket computer based on JZ4720 chipset. JZ4720 is 433 MHz MIPS processor from Ingenic Semiconductor.
Ben Nanonote comes with 59 key keypad, 3 inch screen, mini SDHC slot, 32 SDRAM & USB mini B host. All this suggests the miniature nature of device.
Pros:
- Ben Nanonote has full linux support & OpenWrt distribution. QT & GTK2 are avaiable to generate better user interface based applications.
- At 99 USD, Nanonote certainly worth it is money.
txtr reader is product of Txtr, Berlin based company engaged in building tools & services for digital reader.
Interesting part is, txtr provides hardware details of txtr reader device. It is based on Freescale i.Mx31 SoC which contains ARM11 processor core.
Txtr aims to integrate digital reading tools & services, while service can be used on various platform, having own open platform attracts community to also launch services on txtr platform. It can also encorages existing device vendor to integrate txtr service on there platform.
Reader hardware consist of Bluetooth, Wifi, Near field communication & EDGE modem to communicate with device. Interface such as, 3D Acceleratormeter, Touch screen based Eleectronic ink display, vibrator motor makes it more attractive platform for developing entertainment applications.
Note: Device is not available as of date.
FriendlyArm has two boards, Micro 2440 & Mini 2440 based on Samsung S3C2440A SoC which contains ARM9 processor core.
Both board have common 64 MB SDRAM, NAND & NOR flash, LCD interface, Touch panel interface, camera interface, Ethernet & Audio In/Out, RTC, SD Card slot, Serial port & JTAG for debug & one USB device port.
While Micro 2440 has 1 USB Host, Mini 2440 has 4 port of USB Host. [Detailed comparison]
FriendlyArm also has 3.5 & 7 inch LCD & VGA board for expansion. Also USB Wifi & CMOS camera module is available as extra accessories.
Linux, Android & Win CE 5 & 6 support is available, which should be very handy. Schematics, User Manual & Data sheets are also available. Forum to discuss about board is quite active.
Quick Pros:
- Good form factor with compact design.
- 400 MHz is fairly good clock rate & device should be use full for hand held application.
© 2010 All About Open Hardware · Proudly powered by WordPress & Green Park 2 by Cordobo.
Valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional | Valid CSS 3
