Seigo: Introducing Improv
On his blog, KDE hacker Aaron Seigo introduces Improv, the first hardware product from the Make•Play•Live community. Improv is a $75 development board, with some fairly beefy specs and running Mer OS, that will be shipping in January. It consists of two separate boards, the CPU card and the feature board, with the latter being an open hardware device. "The hardware of Improv is extremely capable: a dual-core ARM® Cortex™-A7 System on Chip (SoC) running at 1Ghz, 1 GB of RAM, 4 GB of on-board NAND flash and a powerful OpenGL ES GPU. To access all of this hardware goodness there are a variety of ports: 2 USB2 ports (one fullsize host, one micro OTG), SD card reader, HDMI, ethernet (10/100, though the feature card has a Gigabit connector; more on that below), SATA, i2c, VGA/TTL and 8 GPIO pins. The entire device weighs less than 100 grams, is passively cooled and fits in your hand."