Seeed Opens Pre-Orders for NPi i.MX6ULL Dual-Ethernet Dev Board

Seeed Studio has begun taking pre-orders for the NPi i.MX6ULL development board, targeting those working in the industrial control and…

Gareth Halfacree
5 years ago

Seeed Studio has begun taking pre-orders for the NPi i.MX6ULL development board, targeting those working in the industrial control and transportation sectors with features including up to 8GB of on-board storage, dual Ethernet ports, and a real-time clock (RTC) as standard, plus the promise of Raspberry Pi HAT compatibility.

Based on an i.MX6ULL computer-on-module (COM) attached to a custom breakout board, the NPi includes an NXP Arm Cortex-A7 processor running up to 800MHz, 512MB of DDRL3 RAM, a choice of 256MB of NAND flash or 8GB of eMMC storage, and an on-board battery-backed real-time clock. Connectivity includes two 100Mb Ethernet ports, a single USB 2.0 Host connection, a USB Type-C port for operation in device mode, a microSD slot for additional storage, FPC LCD interface with touch input, and two 40-pin GPIO headers.

The GPIO headers are worthy of a second look: The primary header boasts compatibility with the Raspberry Pi GPIO pinout, with Seeed promising that a range of Hardware Attached on Top (HAT) modules designed for the Raspberry Pi will work unmodified on the NPi — including the company’s own HAT products, which add audio, CAN-BUS, or Grove connectivity. The secondary header, meanwhile, offers additional connectivity above and beyond that available on a Raspberry Pi.

The module plus carrier is, Seeed explains, targeted at “industrial control, rail transit, drone control, and audio output,” though there’s a warning in the company’s product documentation: It has rated the COM component at an operating temperature of -20℃ to 80℃, but has not tested the breakout board’s operating range — something that may make it ill-suited for embedding in more extreme environments.

Pre-orders are now open, ahead of a late October shipping date, priced at $39 for the 256MB NAND and $44 for the 8GB eMMC variants. Seeed Studio has promised support for Debian, Ubuntu, and Yocto Linux through its fork of the BeagleBoard Image Builder.

Gareth Halfacree
Freelance journalist, technical author, hacker, tinkerer, erstwhile sysadmin. For hire: freelance@halfacree.co.uk.
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