The CHIP Pro Goes From Breadboard to Factory Floor

If you’re reading the Hackster blog, chances are you’ve probably gotten your hands on (or at least heard of) the CHIP $9 computer, or even the PocketCHIP that adds a keyboard and a small screen. This is a neat idea for hackers and experimenters, but if you want to mass produce a device, it’s probably not the right platform to use… until now.

That’s because our friends at Next Thing Co. have launched the CHIP Pro. It packs similar specs, enabling you to easily run Linux on your project, but is slightly smaller than the original and is designed to be placed on a circuit board.

The CHIP Pro is equipped with an Allwinner R8 ARMv7 Cortex-A8 at 1GHz, a MALI-400 GPU, and either 256 MB or 512 MB of NAND Flash. It also includes 802.11 b/g/n Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4.2, and is fully certified by the FCC.

In addition, you can just buy the GR8 SoC that goes on it by itself, or a development kit to allow access to all the board’s pins.

All of this sounds nice, but what is really interesting is that these boards can come from the factory flashed with your custom software. This could save you a huge amount of time and headache when producing a large quantity of your creation!

Intrigued? According to Next Thing Co.’s site, the board will be available in December at any quantity for $16, while the dev kit is currently on sale for $49.