The makers of the UP single-board computer are back, and this time instead of a model with an Intel Atom x5 Cherry Trail processor, they’re building a “hacker board” mini PC with an Intel Apollo Lake processor.
It’s called the UP², or Up Squared. And it’s expected to ship in April.
You can reserve one by making a pledge to the company’s Kickstarter campaign, which has already exceeded its relatively modest goal of $10,968.
The Up Squared is a single-board computer with 2 HDMI ports, 2 Gigabit Ethernet ports, 4 USB 3.0 ports, 2 USB 2.0 ports, a SATA3 connector, an M.2 2230 slot, a mini PCIe slot, and a bunch of developer features including a 40-pin GP-bus and 60-pin EXHAT.
The system is available with Celeron N3350 dual-core and Pentium N4200 quad-core processor options up to 8GB of LPDDR4 memory, and up to 128GB of eMMC 5.0 storage.
The cheapest model is priced at 89 Euros, or about $98. It has the Celeron processor, 2GB of RAM, and 16GB of storage. You can pledge a bit more for extra storage and/or WiFi, Bluetooth, and accessories including a power supply, HDMI cable, and SATA cable.
A model with the Pentium chip, 8GB of RAM/128GB of storage, and all the other extras is priced at 259 Euros/$284.
Keep in mind that while you could use the UP Squared as a system for desktop computing, media center activities, or other home use, it’s probably overkill for some of those things, since it’s really aimed at hackers/makers who will take advantage of all the exposed I/O pins for connecting hardware to extend the system’s capabilities and/or debug software and hardware issues.
But it’s one of the first Apollo Lake-powered developer boards I’ve seen, which makes it an interesting upgrade from the original Up Board… even if it won’t ship for another half year.
The Up Squared officially supports Windows 10, Windows IoT Core, Ubuntu, Yocto, Android 6.0, and Ubilinux.
via Hacker Boards