Avalue Targets the Clever Edge, Industrial Automation with Its New APC Single-Board Computer systems

Industrial computing specialist Avalue Know-how has unveiled two new single-board computer systems, sharing a really acquainted card-sized type issue however with the person’s alternative of two totally different system-on-chips (SoCs) at their coronary heart: the Rockchip RK3566-powereed ACP-3566-PI and the NXP Semiconductors i.MX8M-driven ACP-IMX8-PI.

“Each ACP-3566-PI and ACP-IMX8-PI are designed for hardware-level compatibility with Raspberry Pi equipment,” the corporate guarantees, in case you thought the resemblance to the favored single-board laptop household was solely skin-deep, “together with MIPI shows and digicam modules, GPIO [General-Purpose Input/Output]-based sensors, and HAT expansions. Avalue ensures industrial-grade validation and long-term provide dedication, serving to clients confidently deploy their functions in fields reminiscent of healthcare, good retail, transportation, and automation.”

The 2 boards, dropped at our consideration by CNX Software program, share the acquainted footprint of a full-size Raspberry Pi, proper right down to the one Ethernet port situated subsequent to 2 two-port USB Sort-A stacks and a 40-pin GPIO header a the highest edge. There are variations between the 2 that transcend the processor on which they’re constructed, although: some ports, just like the USB Sort-C energy enter, are shifted, and the ACP-3566-PI seems to return with a floating USB-connected daughterboard for Wi-Fi connectivity — one thing the ACP-IMX8-PI helps however lacks out-of-the-box.

The ACP-IMX8-PI, which Avalue positions because the mannequin of alternative for “dependable industrial computing,” comes with NXP’s i.MX8M chip that includes 4 Arm Cortex-A54 cores working at as much as 1.8GHz and a 400MHz real-time Cortex-M4 core. There’s 4GB of LPDDR4 reminiscence on board, plus 32GB of eMMC 5.1 storage expandable through microSD Card. There’s one full-size HDMI port plus a single two-lane MIPI Show Serial Interface (DSI), analog audio, a two-lane MIPI Digicam Serial Interface (CSI) enter, 4 USB 2.0 Sort-A ports, gigabit Ethernet, and the aforementioned 40-pin GPIO header.

The ACP-3566-PI — designed for “edge intelligence with multimedia functionality,” Avalue says — swaps NXP’s SoC out for a Rockchip RK3566, which means a lift to 4 Arm Cortex-A55 cores working at as much as 1.8GHz and the addition of a devoted neural coprocessor delivering a claimed 0.8 tera-operations per second (TOPS) of minimum-precision compute for on-device machine studying and synthetic intelligence (ML and AI) workloads. Once more, there’s 4GB of LPDDR4 RAM, 32GB of eMMC storage expandable through microSD Card, and lots of the similar options — although this time one USB port has been upgraded to USB 3.0, and there is a bundled single-band 802.11ac Wi-Fi card.

Extra info on the ACP-IMX8-PI and ACP-3566-PI can be found on their respective merchandise pages — however, on the time of writing, Avalue had but to verify pricing and availability.