Brains for Hot Robots

Posted 24 Nov 2009 at 23:24 UTC by steve

Italian microcontroller company, Dave, has announced a new board based on TI's Sitara AM3505/AM3517 SoCs that may be just what you need for that robot you're about to send into the desert (or the Arctic). The new board is called the Lizard and it tolerates temperatures ranging from -40 F to 185 F. The Superscalar ARM Cortex-A8 processor clocks in at 500MHz. You get 256MB of DDR2 RAM, 2GB of NAND flash, 2 SD flash expansion ports, OpenGL acceleration, touchscreen controller, fast ethernet port, 2 USB host ports, 1 USB OTG port, CAN, 3 UARTs, 2 I2C, SPI, I2S, a keypad controller, JTAG, and some GPIO. Yes, it runs GNU/Linux. But be prepared to spend some money because those temperature tolerances come at the cost of $748 USD. For more details see the Linuxdevices.com article or Dave's Lizard press release (PDF format).

Price Update, posted 26 Nov 2009 at 05:37 UTC by steve » (Master)

Piero Pezzin from Dave emailed to say, when you talk about the price, please note that it referred to the development kit (and 748$ are not so much for a development kit...), not to the CPU module, which is quite inexpensive especially thinking about what it offers. Of course I can't give you prices. We're not sure why they can tell us the price of the dev kit but not the board but at least we know it's less than $748 USD.