Two Interesting Boards Coming Down The Pipe

Hey, it’s a hardware twofer! Here’s two platforms coming down the pipe:

First up is the Mimo Dreamplug, the latest in a continued expansion of choices for very tiny, single-board Linux computers. The Dreamplug should be extremely capable of just about any task you can throw at it. With a 1.2GHz Marvell Sheeva CPU, eSATA, fiber optic/TOSLINK, WiFi, Bluetooth, two Gigabit Ethernet connections, and 512 MB of RAM, we’re thinking this could be used for just about anything. It’s a little pricy at $250, but that’s  what you pay for all those features. No idea when it will be available, though. Never mind, you can get the same thing for $150 here. Thanks, [Scott].

Next up is the Kinetis KL25Z Freedom Board, an Arduino-compatable, Cortex-M0+ based dev board being made available for pre-order. The specs on this machine seem pretty good – with a 48MHz ARM chip, on-board accelerometer, a capacitive touch ‘slider’ built into the PCB, and OpenSDA for a USB debug interface, you should be able to make a few cool projects with this board. As a neat bonus, it costs $13, and Freescale is giving away a version of their Codewarrior development environment (limited to 128kB, but that’s all the Flash the Kinetis has). Hopefully, it’ll be a much more open development platform than what our own [Mike Szczys] has been able to wrangle from the STM32 board that has been floating around. The Kinetis should be available this fall.

Thanks [Impulse405] and [Hussam] for sending these tips in.

20 thoughts on “Two Interesting Boards Coming Down The Pipe

  1. Damn, that Dreamplug has been in the queue forever. The Sheeva chipset it uses was a bit old already when it was announced (older arm architecture), but I was interested then. Now, those specs for $250? No thanks.

  2. The Freedom Board isn’t “Arduino Compatible” it’s merely pin compatible with Arduino shields. Which isn’t nothing mind you, but it’s a far cry from running your Arduino code on it.

  3. The Mimo Dreamplug is just a resold version of the regular Dreamplug. The original is about $100 cheaper and available now (I think). Just beware the warranty; if it’s anything like the Sheevaplug the warranty is basically nonexistent.

  4. I have 2 Dreamplugs and 1 D2 Plug from Globalscale … seems to be the same device … they are OK. I have used them as firewalls, squid proxy servers, etc … but I was recently let down when i attached a SATA 2 (3.0Gbs) external raid chassis to the plugs and servered up a share via samaba … the Dreamplug maxed out at ~15MB/s and the D2Plug @ ~ 30MB’s … the Dreamplug was CPU bound big time … smbd running @ amost 90% and the D2 plug @ ~60% … im not sure but my gut is telling me the ethernet adapters are wired into the USB bus … don;t expect miracles with these things … internal IO is also hella slow … lesson learn 700$+ later. Ohh … and no I/O pins/interfaces.

  5. Good job Mimo, slapping your name on someone else’s product and selling it for $100 more. I visited their homepage and felt dirty, much the same as visiting X10’s site.

    The Kinetis board is interesting though. I don’t recall seeing any other dev board with that much FLASH, in that price range. A 16-bit ADC is unusual too. I’d be tempted to preorder one, except there’s no board diagrams or proper MCU datasheets; and I’d like to know the max speed of the ADC.

    1. I didn’t see that in the datasheet, but the 12-bit DAC has 1µS(hi-speed) or 2µS(low-speed) conversion. Looks like it also has an RTC. When I added to my cart it said the lead time was 113 days though.:(

Leave a Reply to fartfaceCancel reply

Please be kind and respectful to help make the comments section excellent. (Comment Policy)

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.