RIoTBoard, which stands for “Revolutionizing the Internet of Things Board”, is a new Android & GNU/Linux development board sold by Element14 /Newark powered by Freescale i.MX6Solo Cortex A9 processor. The board also features 1GB DDR3 RAM, 4GB eMMC and plenty of ports including Gb Ethernet, HDMI, and more. The board can be used to design netbooks , nettops, mobile internet devices (MIDs), PDAs, portable media players (PMP) with HD video capability, portable navigation devices (PNDs), industrial control and test and measurement (T&M), and single board computers (SBCs).

RIoTBoard specifications:

SoC – Freescale i.MX 6Solo ARM Cortex A9 MPCore Processor @ 1 GHz with Vivante GC880 and GC320 GPUs for 3D & 2D graphics, and HD video processing unit.

System Memory – 1GB DDR3 RAM

Storage – 4GB eMMC, microSD and SD card slots

Video Output – HDMI, LVDS, and parallel RGB interfaces

Audio I/O – Analog headphone/microphone, 3.5mm audio jack

Connectivity – 10/100/1000M Ethernet

USB – 1x mini USB 2.0 OTG, 4x USB 2.0 Host, 1x mini USB (OpenSDA)

Camera – CSI interface with support for CCD and CMOS cameras, 1 Gbps MIPI Lane

Debug – 3-pin UART TTL level, 10-pin JTAG, OpenSDA

Expansion connector – 40-pin header including 3x UART, 2x I2C, 2x SPI, 3x PWM, 10x GPIOs

Misc – 4x LEDs (Power, Open SDA and 2x user-defined), reset button, boot configuration interface

Power Supply – 5V/4A (recommended)

Dimensions –

An Android 4.3 images is already available for the board, and according to the user’s manual an Ubuntu 11.10 image with Linux 3.0.35 should become available too. Technical documentation includes a Quick Start Guide, a User’s manual, Freescle i/MX6 datasheet, as well as the schematics in PDF format. They also provide links to development tools namely ARM DS-5 and CodeWarrior.

The board ships without accessories, and you’ll have to add required cables and power supply. The recommended power supply is 5V/4A in the documentation, but that seems a bit overkill, and a blog post mentions 5V/1A should do.

The board is available now for $74 on Newark and Element14 websites (The link differs for each country, and you may have to search for riotboard to find it). Please note again the Ubuntu image is not available yet, so if you are interested you may want to wait until a proper Ubuntu image is released. Further information including documentation and Android image and tools are available on riotboard.org.