gumstix

At the encouragement of some friends in robotics, I designed and built a small computer based on the PXA255. It's 20mm x 80mm, and includes 64MB SDRAM, 4MB Flash, MMC/SD/SDIO slot, and power management. It takes 3.6V –- 5.0V power, and has been drawing under 200 mA.

For various reasons now forgotten, I chose the arm-linux-gcc 3.3.2 toolchain, the u-boot 1.0.0 bootloader, the kernel version 2.5.70 and I'm using the MMC as the filesystem. I've exposed several signals: ST-UART, FF-UART, NSSP, I2C, USB client, and JTAG. I still have some (pretty straight-forward) bugs to be ironed out but a few other friends are now diving into these.

So it is finally ready for the open-source community, I think, especially for software and appliance developers. It really is small- small enough for a truly wearable computer or a distributed robotics controller. Without a battery it weighs 12g (less than a tablespoon of water) and can fit in a collar undetected. Although in fact it is bigger than a collar-stay, the idea of a "collar-top" computer intrigues me. There's a lot of compute power and this can be worn -fundamentally- invisibly.

I designed it to make easy to integrate into devices and would love to hear from any interested people or groups that have suggestions, ideas, or uses.

For more information about gumstix boards and systems
visit our new site at gumstix.com

gordon@gumstix.org

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Last changed: 02/22/2004, 09:57:11