Embest Technologies plans to offer a new dev board/mini-computer with a low power processor in May. It’s called the MarS Board and it’s sort of like a Raspberry Pi, but it costs more than twice as much as delivers far more power.

The $99 MarS Board packs a 1 GHz Freescale i.MX6 Dual ARM Cortex-A9 processor, Vivante GC2000 graphics, 1GB of RAM, and 4GB of store. It also has a range of expansion ports and headers.

MarS Board

The MarS Board has 2 full-sized USB 2.0 ports, a Gigabit Ethernet jack, and an HDMI port built in. There’s also a microSD card slot for extra storage, and 2 mini USB ports.

It also has headers for UART, GPIO, SPDIF and more. In other words, while you could just buy this little device for use as a $99 Android or Linux-powered media center, it’s really designed for use as a hardware prototyping system.

You can hook up peripherals including a keyboard, mouse, WiFi dongle, camera, or other devices. There’s also a connector for an optional 4.3 inch or 7 inch LCD.

The whole device measures just about 4 inches by 2.6 inches.

This isn’t the first developer board to feature a Freescale i.MX6 processor. The Wandboard is is available with an i.MX6 Solo or i.MX6 Duallite CPU. But the MarS Board has a more powerful i.MX6 Dual processor with more powerful graphics.

via CNX-Software

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6 replies on “$99 MarS Board dev board features Freescale i.MX6 Dual processor”

  1. Nice intresting board. I actually prefer Wandboard – is cheaper and it provides also an enclosure: perfect for an mediaplayer or smart tv. (Hope it will arrive soon in my country)

  2. Does this thing scream “CAR PC” or what!?!? I hope someone manages to fashion this into a double-DIN enclosure with a nice 7-inch touchscreen LCD (the touch component would use one of the USB ports).

    Also, with the a touchscreen LCD and SPDIF out, I see some great potential for use as a simple media device in a stereo system with no TV… or better yet, a lightweight portable karaoke machine.

    1. Actually there are some Android CAR PC. One of them is the ZERO Devices ZC100

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