New Single Board Computer Lets You Swap Out the CPU and Memory

ganjadude (952775) writes "I stumbled upon this little scoop and thought the Slashdot crowd would be interested in. The new kid on the block, known as the HummingBoard can handle faster processors, more RAM and will fit the same cases for the Pi. Also, you can expand the memory and the CPU is replaceable! The low end model starts at $45 and the high end costs $100. So tell me guys, what are you going to do with yours?" $45 model is a single core iMX6 (an ARMv7) with 512M of RAM, the $100 model has a dual core i.MX6 with 1G of RAM. Full specs.

Re:Just think of what you can do with this!

[CastrTroy]

You can actually run the RPi quite well on batteries. I was able to get 4 hours, 23 minutes [developerodyssey.com] running the Quake 3 demo loop. the battery life wasn't much better when sitting idle, about 5 and a half hours. I used a pair of 18650s in a USB charger/power supply. That's plenty of battery life for a toy robot.

Re: So you can reuse the PC board?

[Big_Breaker]

I built a baytrail server and its amazing for the cost and power budget. The Intel HD graphics aren't for gaming but it can serve and render media on a sip of power. The HDDs are by far the biggest power hog. I struggled with these ARM chips and their custom distros enough. The ability to be on x86 with well supported peripherals is well worth it - gpu especially. Need to run some wintel stuff now and again? Virtualbox works fine. On the other hand ARM chips always have their issues with proprietary gpus and their binary blob drivers rife with kernel compatibility problems. And you find yourself stuck in a back alley of "mostly" compatible software and patches.

You might hate sucking up to Intel but at least the drivers work. I might be burning 7 watts instead of 5 but that's nothing in the overall power budget. And baytrail is much much faster than IMX6.

Re:Just think of what you can do with this!

[abroun_dawnrobotics]

Hi there, First of all. Thanks for posting a link to our website (Dawn Robotics). We're a small company so notice a traffic spike even with just a Slashdot comment. :) Secondly, for people who are interested in building Raspberry Pi robots, we sell a Raspberry Pi camera robot kit [dawnrobotics.co.uk] that doesn't require any soldering and which you can drive around using a web interface on a tablet, smartphone or PC. We also have blog site [dawnrobotics.co.uk] with lots of robotic and Raspberry Pi tutorials. Cheers Alan