HummingBoard Development Board – Raspberry Pi Alternative

A TV system running on android, a virtual DJ mixer or even running a custom-made Android phone. Since the advent of development boards there has been no limits on the imagination of electronic enthusiastic’s. Until now Raspberry Pi was synonymous with every entry-level and amateur students and professionals. Then came a plethora of stand alone development boards like UDOO, Beaglebone, CubieBoard, Banana Pi and so on. HummingBird is the new addition to this league of development boards.

HummingBoard development board has been developed by SolidRun Ltd. It is an under $50 computer development board. And as all such boards, its open source too. The company has launched 3 models namely i1-310-D, i2-310-D and i2eX-310-D.

i1-310-D is the most basic version. It has a 1GHz i.MX6 single core processor, having a 512 MB RAM comparable to Raspberry Pi. It has a GPU chip which is analogous to graphic card’s in PC’s which renders high quality video gaming experience. It supports OpenGL IES 1.1/2.0 which is the newest version for GPU’s. It aslo supports hardware video decoding/encoding. It also supports 1080p HD videos.

All the 3 models has Ethernet support meaning you can build your own web server or your own personalised cloud storage. It is also provided with 2 USB ports and a micro SD card interface. That’s for the basic version. Well not bad for under $50 bucks.

The really cool thing about HummingBird is that it supports a variety of OS like Yocto, XBMC, Debian (Raspbian OS) and guess what even Android and Ubuntu. Really cool huh? The higher version of board i2eX-310-D also has a SATA port so you can plug-in your hard disk and do a variety of stuff. It also has a back-up battery connector in case of power failures. It also has a IR based control for any such applications.

HummingBoard with its clearly distinctive features, low-cost and high-efficiency is the next big stuff in embedded system field. These are exciting times for the electronic geeks and nerds, aren’t they?