This Maker Created Their Own Custom SBC

Single-board computers (SBCs), like those made by Raspberry Pi, have dramatically changed the way makers and engineers approach problems. With the power of a full computer in a small and affordable package, the possibilities are almost endless. But what if none of the SBCs on the market fit your needs? Cyao didn’t let that stop them, because they made their own custom SBC.

From a practical standpoint, this SBC, called Icepi, isn’t all that different than a Raspberry Pi. It is the same size as a Raspberry Pi 3 Model B and has a similar set of features. But we don’t see many custom SBCs and so this is still very special.

Cyao built it around an Allwinner H3 SoC, which has an Arm Cortex-A17 quad-core CPU and a Mali-400 MP2 GPU. They paired that with 512MiB of DDR3 RAM and that can be upgraded to 1GiB. It has a 32GB eMMC storage chip, a microSD card slot, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Ethernet, an HDMI port, a headphone jack, USB-A ports, and USB-C ports.

All of that hardware goes on a custom four-layer PCB and there is even what appears to be a Raspberry Pi-style GPIO header.

Cyao has tested the Icepi and confirmed it works with both Linux (Debian, specifically) and the H3Droid Android image.

And to cap it all off, Icepi is open-source. If you want to make one, you can find all of the files you need on the GitHub page.