Aren’t miniature versions of everyday objects just the best? Your run-of-the-mill grocery getter is not especially exciting, but when you turn it into a tiny copy of the real thing, it becomes cute as a button. The same holds true for everything from figurines to furniture. And when it comes to electronics, miniaturization also offers the added bonus of making the devices more portable and convenient — and often more energy efficient.
Speaking of tiny electronics, Anbu Kumar has just released a brief video that gives an overview of the Quantum Mini Linux Development Kit. It may be hard to defend the claim that it is the world’s smallest Linux development board, but it is incredibly small. And despite that small size, it is still packed with some pretty impressive features.
The board measures just 40mm x 35mm, but it comes equipped with an Allwinner H3 quad-core Cortex-A7 CPU, an Arm Mali-400 MP2 GPU, and 512MB of LPDDR3 RAM. A micro SD card slot serves as the permanent storage for the computer, which is capable of running Linux. Wi-Fi and Bluetooth are available for wireless communication, and an onboard TFT display can be used as a graphical interface to the system.
A pair of USB 2.0 ports allow for expansion of the computer, and available GPIO pins can be utilized for interacting with a variety of external systems (or just blinking an LED). The Quantum Mini also has a microphone, gyroscope, accelerometer, and four buttons. Not bad at all for something barely larger than a postage stamp.
What can you actually use this machine for? Well, just about any application where you need a really small computer, but areas like IoT, TinyML, and robotics are certainly high up on the list. As always, if you have some fun project ideas for an interesting platform like the Quantum Mini Linux Development Kit, be sure to let us know!
