Aleph1 recently announced availability of their Balloon Board, a StrongARM SA1110 power development board for embedded use.
It won't come as any surprise to learn that there are many ARM development boards about, some of which are very pricey indeed. What differentiates the Balloon from most of these, is that the design of the board is entirely open, and developers are encouraged to modify and add to it as they see fit. This is in the same vein as a previous product sold by Aleph1, the LART development board.
The Balloon is very small, measuring around 2 by 3 inches, and packs onboard a huge array of functionality apart from its 206Mhz SA1110, such as 64MB RAM, boot and filesystem flash, 3 serial ports, USB, JTAG ports to name a few with plans to add many more options such as ATA.
The board runs ARM Linux, which is preinstalled on the machine, and is becoming increasinly popular for embedded applications such as ones the board might be used for. It has already been deployed in applications such as speech synthesisers and seismic loggers.
Boards can be purchased from Aleph1 for 460UKP + tax within the EU.
In a project that's even smaller and faster (but less flexible), we also note Gumstix, a tiny PXA255 based design, which gains its name from its form factor.
Peter has an association with Aleph1 unrelated to this project
Links
Aleph1
Balloon Board home
Balloon puchasing info
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