by OLIMEX Ltd in linux, olinuxino, wireless Tags: iot, olinuxino, rt5350f, wifi

This one was inspired by the VoCore project which recently ran on Indiegogo.

We have not hear for RT5350F before, but when we saw it we instantly though it’s good candidate for tiny OLinuXino.

RT5350 is nice small MIPS architecture chip running on 360Mhz and specially made for routers.

It have build-in 802.11n WIFI, 5x 10/100 Ethernet MAC+PHYs, 28x GPIOs, 2x UARTs, 1xSPI and 1x I2C.

Perfect for IoT tiny Linux running board collecting data from sensors and logging or sending it to the Cloud.

What we like in VoCore is that they commit to release it as OSHW design, but the schematic they made available on their page have few significant errors compared to the reference design from Ralink, if these errors are intentional or not we do not know, but the schematic they publish will not work for sure and this is not so good sign 🙂

Another thing is that they decide to use 32MB RAM while the chip can support more, and to make size as small as possible they didn’t break out all Ethernet interfaces.

Also they decided to use chip antenna, which are well known with their bad performance, so probably their design will be with very limited WIFI range.

This is why we decided to make it properly and our preliminary schematic is now complete.

Our version is with 64MB of RAM, 8MB Flash and all RT5350F pins are available on 2x 34 pin 0.1″ step connectors.

We put proven design for PCB antenna + option for external antenna on connector.

The PCB size become 40×40 mm vs. 25 x 25 mm but we think the benefits are more compared to the bigger size.

We probably will have the first prototypes in September taking into account our Summer Break 1-15 of August.

The price of RT5350F-OLinuXino module will be EUR 15 for single quantities and will drop to EUR 10 for 1000 pcs. i.e. less than Arduino but with 64MB RAM, Linux and WIFI on board!