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.
Interesting*
No need to thank me. :)
I think you mean 512 MB of ram…. right?
Don’t shatter my euphoria, crash!
I do and don’t call me Shirley.
I was just thinking I would gladly pay $250 for 512gb of ram! But it doesnt say anything in the post about what kind of ram it is..
512 GB of RAM for just 250$? Screw the board, i want the RAM for that price!
512GB of RAM! ZOMG!
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.
I wouldn’t buy the Dreamplug because:
1. pandaboard
2. $50 gets me a P4 refurbished computer, $200 is a few years worth of electricity
The pandaboard doesn’t have dual gigabit.
The P4 will take around 100x more space. In a cramped apartment that can be huge.
Mimo dreamplug is WAY overpriced. you can get them from other makers for half that.
$149 is the price point for that thing not $250-$299
Raspberry what?
that’d be raspberry ’10th the price of this thing and aimed at a different sector’ pi.
Try working with Coldfire for a while. An unfortunately licensed linker script won’t be so frustrating afterwards.
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.
The Mimo Dreamplug is just a resold version of the regular Dreamplug. The original is about $100 cheaper and available now (I think). Just beware the warranty; if it’s anything like the Sheevaplug the warranty is basically nonexistent.
I have 2 Dreamplugs and 1 D2 Plug from Globalscale … seems to be the same device … they are OK. I have used them as firewalls, squid proxy servers, etc … but I was recently let down when i attached a SATA 2 (3.0Gbs) external raid chassis to the plugs and servered up a share via samaba … the Dreamplug maxed out at ~15MB/s and the D2Plug @ ~ 30MB’s … the Dreamplug was CPU bound big time … smbd running @ amost 90% and the D2 plug @ ~60% … im not sure but my gut is telling me the ethernet adapters are wired into the USB bus … don;t expect miracles with these things … internal IO is also hella slow … lesson learn 700$+ later. Ohh … and no I/O pins/interfaces.
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.
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.:(
Though “down the pipe” has come into common use, the term is actually “down the pike.”