Chumby Hacker Board

This is pretty neat. It's a Single Board Computer that is basically the guts of a small device called a Chumby. The hardware is all Open and it runs a custom distro of Linux. Specifications below.

• Freescale iMX.233 processor running at 454 MHZ
• 64 MB onboard RAM
• Comes with 512MB uSD card with 100 MB Linux installation all ready to go
• Dimensions are 3.9" (100mm) x 2.4" (60mm) x 0.75" (20mm)
• 3.3V I/O pins can talk to most sensors, motor drivers, etc. No struggling with 1.8V levels.
• Low power, fanless CPU draws only 200 mA at 5V
• Built-in Lithium Ion/Polymer battery charger and 5V boost converter for portable projects
• Three USB ports!
• 1.9W mono speaker amplifier into 4ohm (0.1" JST onboard connector)
• Microphone input (0.05" JST onboard connector)
• LCD controller with 2mm output port
• 3.5mm A/V output jack with stereo audio and NTSC/PAL composite video
• Back of board has GPIO outputs on 0.1" header spacing, plug in an Arduino proto shield! Serial ports, ADC's, PWM, GPIO all running at 3.3v logic
• Quadrature encoder connections onboard
• 5-way joystick on-board
• MMA7455 3-axis +-2G to +-8G accelerometer on-board
• 3.3V TTL serial port for easy shell access
• Full GCC toolchain is ready for you to download and get crackin'!
• Schematics, Gerbers and original layout files are at the Wiki

All for only $89 at adafruit.

This could have quite a few uses for ham radio operators. Linux has integrated support for AX.25 Packet in the kernel. I've heard it's possible to set that up with a sound card interface. If someone made the software available this could end up being a very small Echolink or IRLP node. I wonder if the processor is fast enough to do simple software defined radio tasks? This could make for a tiny, full SDR with one of the softrocks or some other SDR kit. The CPU uses very little power.

My only disappointment is no onboard wifi. It's a small loss though. Not everyone would use it and it's easy enough to add a dongle on one of the usb ports.

Supposedly the board is only in beta right now so it's subject to revisions and has a limited production for now. I see a bright future for this thing.