What's the Lightest Weight Feather That Can Load Up a Linux Distro?

If Groguard has anything to say about it — and it looks like he's got a few words already formed, with his latest 3D renderings that have us all drooling — there's a good chance that the next Feather form factor development board to run Linux is likely going to be something that resembles this little slice of raytraced rendering below.

Known for his Giant Board, Groguard gained notoriety for himself, along with some serious XP when he managed to squeeze a Microchip ATSAMA5D into the Feather format, making it one of the first such boards to feature an MPU, rather than the more maker-favored MCU that would normally be found in that familiar layout.

There's no denying that the Giant Board is a beast. Clocked at 500MHz, it's supplied with a tailored Linux distribution direct from Microchip themselves, and will blast through bare-metal level code if your application doesn't require a whole Linux distribution to do its thing.

Like that, but lighter...

You can see that there isn't exactly oodles of spare space on the Giant Board we pictured above. Typically of MPUs, the peripheral support required is often more complex, with multiple voltage rail requirements, clock domains, and memory management all featured somewhere on the design specification document.

You don't knock out something like the Giant Board in a weekend of KiCAD, even if you forgo sleeping — there's simply just a lot that needs to be set up to get the most out of an MPU — the device itself is focused on flexing its formidable feature set, it's forgivable that it can need a bit of help with the housekeeping.

These days though, if you want to load Linux up on your latest project, the entry requirements for the hardware have somewhat lowered lately.

Last year, we saw this beautiful example of how lightweight a Linux platform can be with this functional business card PCB from George Hilliard — a two-layer board with a single SOC and some flash, together forming a fully-functional Linux computer roughly the size and thickness of a credit card.

The magic SoC that made this possible was the F1C100s — an Allwinner ARM9 processor, with 32MB of RAM co-packaged within its plastic QFN encapsulation, capable of running an admittedly rather lightweight Linux distribution.

With distinct physical similarities in the general layout and placement between the ICs and peripheral parts present on both project PCBs (flash and crystal placement, and general decoupling) — and a general hinting from the man himself — we're fairly confident that we're looking at the fairly imminent release of an F1C100s Feather board, which should be hopefully closer in cost to the MCU boards that many are accustomed to paying for, perhaps less so when posed with parting for the more premium price associated with MPU-based toys.

This is possibly one of the lightweight "look at this" features we've done yet, but the thought of this tiny, Linux-capable SoC coming to the Feather family before too long is too good a tip to pass up on sharing along!

For now, that's all we've got to go on! It's all eyes on Groguard — here's hoping the he's going at full tilt at this one, it's going to get a lot of people very geared up to get their hands on this gadget!