If you miss the days you could get an organizer that would — sort of — run Linux, you might be interested in Popcorn computer’s Pocket P. C., which was recently open-sourced on GitHub. Before you jump over to build one, though, there are a few things you should know.
First, the files are untested since the first unit hasn’t shipped yet. In addition, while the schematic looks pretty complete, there’s no actual bill of materials and the PCB layers in the PDF file might not be very easy to replicate, since they are just a series of images, one for each layer. You can see an overview video of the device, below.
Still, the information is there, although we haven’t seen the software yet. The device itself is interesting with a built-in keyboard. The specs are relatively straightforward. A quad-core ARM running at 1.2 GHz, 2GB of RAM, and 32GB of eMMC. The IPS LCD is just shy of five inches and has a 1920×1080 resolution. There’s the usual suite of connectors and interfaces and you can get a version that incorporates LoRa.
We hope Popcorn will continue releasing information on the device and will make enough software information available for the device to be truly open source. Of course, most of us will just buy one anyway, but it is nice to know that the source is there if you were to want it.
As we’ve noted before, designing a Linux board isn’t as hard as it used to be. There are till, though, some challenges.
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