Two New Gumstix with Expanded I/O

Posted 10 Feb 2005 at 23:30 UTC by steve

The tiny Gumstix microcontrollers have become popular with robot builders since their release despite one major shortcoming - lack of I/O. But now they've announced two new boards to address the I/O issue: the Connex 200g and Connex 400g. The new boards include two RS232 ports, an LCD controller port, a USB device port, I2C, PWM ports, AC97 audio, and a JTAG port. The only downside to all that I/O is that's it's only accessible through two tiny Hirose connectors. Otherwise, the small Linux boards are similar to the older Gumstix boards, now called Gumstix Basix. The new boards include a 200 MHz or 400 MHz XScale processor and 64MB of SDRAM and 4MB of Flash. Gumstix also announced some new daughter boards providing Ethernet and a Type II Compact Flash adapter (for adding a WiFi card, of course!). The Connex 200g is $109 and the Connex 400g is $139.

Add 'em up!, posted 11 Feb 2005 at 14:52 UTC by jeffkoenig » (Master)

It looks like Gumstix has a plethora of add-on modules, two of which appear to be break-out boards (Breakout-SMT and Breakout-TH).

This would be $25 well spent - the Hirose connectors are expensive through Digi-key, and they have a 0.8mm pitch, which may be troublesome for low-end layout software (I'm presently using the 40-pin and 100-pin versions on a project).