If you’re dreaming at a more powerful Raspberry Pi 2 version, your dream comes true partially. This is not a new Raspberry Pi board. It is called Up and is trying to combine the Raspberry Pi form factor with a more powerful processor and a wide range of standard form factors. In other words, Up is a prototyping platform for both makers and industrial market.
Up is a small computing platform designed and manufactured by AAEON, a company member of the ASUS group since 2011. The manufacturer claimed to build a 100% compatible board with your Raspberry Pi 2 already purchased solutions. This detail makes me think at Up as a Raspberry Pi 2 on steroids.
The board has the heart of a tablet. It comes with a quad-core x5-Z8300 Intel Cherry Trail Atom processor able to work at up to 1.84GHz. Also, the board is equipped with 1GB DDR3L RAM and 16 GB eMMC.
In robotics, IoT, automation, drones and more, we need power, but also a lot of inputs and outputs. Up feature 40 general-purpose inputs/outputs (GPIO) that replicates the connectors and pin definitions of the Raspberry Pi 2 block pinout. In addition, the board has five USB 2.0 ports, one USB 3.0 port, one Ethernet connection, one DSI port, a serial interface for camera, an audio/video interface and a real-time clock interface.
On the software side, Up also reproduce the Pi 2 support for Linux, Android and Windows. The board support a Linux version based on Ubuntu, Windows 10 and the Android OS version called Lollipop.
The board is expected to come at an affordable price for both hobbyists and industrial use. What if the board costs around €89? Are you prepared to buy twice the power of Raspberry Pi 2 at the price of two and a half Raspberry Pi 2?
The board is still in the release stage. You can contribute with your financial support here on the Kickstarter campaign.
