Generic CPU board with standard pinout

Started by DBB, March 12, 2013, 11:08:00 PM

Previous topic - Next topic

DBB

Hi, Are you aware of the CPU boards sold by Technologic (the TS-SOCKET boards)? (www.embeddedarm.com) Have you considered developing a CPU board with on-board CPU local PSU and memory and interface logic/drivers but with no peripherals? Such a board could be used for people to develop their own projects without having to do all the work of designing a complex CPU board. The idea is the reverse or Arduino in that the CPU board would plug onto a larger motherboard that would contain all of the real-world interface electronic such as RS-232 driver chips or CAN transceivers and GPIO. The TS-SOCKET boards from Technologic look good but are expensive. I am sure that it would be possible to produce something similar but at a lower cost. The CPU should be powerful enough to run Linux or eCOS and the board should have enough memory to make it useful. The on-board memory should be a combination of non-volatile for Filesystems and (DDR)SDRAM for main program execution.
Like the Arduino, the CPU board could have standard pins (maybe standard 0.1" single or dual row) at either of two ends of the board. All the high-density memory interface tracking would be done on the CPU board which would greatly simplify the design of the motherboard.
Let me know what you think. I already have a Olinuxino board and and LPC-2294 board, both of which are great. Having done development work on these, it would be nice to be able to take my programs that I develop on these and load them onto such a generic CPU board that I could plug into a motherboard of my own design.
Thank you for reading this far.
DBB