When I did my brief survey of potential robotic brains earlier, I was dismissive of single-board computers competing with the Raspberry Pi. Every one I knew about had sales pitches about superior performance relative to the Pi, but none could match the broad adoption and hence software library support of a Raspberry Pi. At the time the only SBC I thought might be worthwhile were the Nvidia Jetson boards with specialized hardware. Other than that, I believed the growth path for robot brains that can run ROS is pretty much restricted to x64-based platforms like Chromebooks, Intel NUCs, and full-fledged laptop computers.

What I didn't know at the time was that someone has actually put an Intel CPU on a Raspberry Pi sized circuit board computer: the Up board.

[caption id="attachment_16918" align="aligncenter" width="647"]UPSlide3Right-EVT-3 Image from http://www.up-board.org[/caption]

Well, now. This is interesting!

At first glance they even worked to keep the footprint of a Raspberry Pi, including the 40-pin GPIO headers and USB, Ethernet, and HDMI ports. However, the power and audio jacks are different, and the camera and display headers are gone.

It claims to run Windows 10, though it's not clear if they meant the restricted IoT edition or the full desktop OS. Either way it shouldn't be too much of a hurdle to get Ubuntu on one of these things running ROS. While the 40-pin GPIO claims to match a Raspberry Pi, it's not clear how they are accessed from an operation system not designed for a Raspberry Pi.

And even more encouragingly: the makers of this board is not content to be an one-hit wonder, they've branched out to other tiny form factors that give us the ability to run x86 software.

The only downside is that the advantage is from size, not computational power. None of the CPUs I've seen mentioned are very fast. At best, they are roughly equivalent to the one in my Dell Inspiron 11 3180, just tinier. Still, these board offer some promising approaches to robot hardware. It's worth revisiting if I get stuff running on my cheap Dell but need a smaller board.