Conclusive Engineering Opens Crowdfunding for the Kestrel KSTR-IMX93 All-in-One IoT SBC
Can't decide what connectivity you need from a single-board computer? Well, the Kestrel will probably cover most eventualities.
Conclusive Engineering is taking its Kestrel KSTR-IMX93 single-board computer to the crowdfunding circuit, as it looks to offer a one-stop platform for a range of Internet of Things (IoT) connectivity options — including CAN-FD.
"[The] KSTR-IMX93 […] consolidates all major IoT protocols into one board, offers robust storage (up to 128GB eMMC), supports Power over Ethernet and CAN-FD, and includes NXP's EdgeLock Secure Enclave for trusted execution," its creators explain of what makes the board stand out from the competition in an increasingly crowded single-board computer market. "It's the SBC you can actually take from lab prototype to field deployment — without compromise."
Conclusive Engineering first showed off the Kestrel KSTR-IMX93 back in May, and its specifications haven't changed in the months since. There's an NXP i.MX93 system-on-chip at the board's heart, giving it two Arm Cortex-A55 cores running at up to 1.7GHz and an Arm Cortex-M33 real-time core running at up to 250MHz plus an integrated neural processing unit (NPU) delivering a claimed 0.5 tera-operations per second (TOPS) of minimum-precision compute for on-device machine learning and artificial intelligence workloads.
Elsewhere there's a trio of Nordic Semiconductor chips handling connectivity: an nRF5340 for Bluetooth 5.4, Thread, and Zigbee connectivity, an nRF9151 for Long Term Evolution M (LTE-M) and NB-IoT cellular connectivity, and an nRF7002 for Wi-Fi 6. There's an on-board gigabit Ethernet transceiver plus support for Power-over-Ethernet, a CAN-FD transceiver, USB Type-C On-The-Go (OTG) expansion, MIPI Display Serial Interface (DSI) and Camera Serial Interface (CSI), and general-purpose input/output (GPIO) connectivity including a Raspberry Pi-compatible expansion header. There's even on-board lithium battery management circuitry with charging and capacity monitoring.
With that hefty list of features, there's no surprise to find Conclusive Engineering positioning the board as ideal for a plethora of IoT projects — from industrial automation with time-sensitive networking (TSN) and CAN-FD to smart home with Thread, Zigbee, and Matter support, remote health monitoring with cellular connectivity, and tinyML workloads.
The company is currently crowdfunding production on Kickstarter, with physical rewards starting at €102 (around $118) for "super early bird" backers; hardware will begin to be delivered in February 2026, Conclusive Engineering says.