Gumstix is shipping two very small XScale-based single board computers that come with uClinux and target battery-powered handheld devices, robots, and wearable applications. The Gumstix boards are also available in “Waysmall” systems, complete with tiny cases.

Gumstix was formed in February, 2004, and the tiny boards and systems are the company's first products. Gumstix is self-funded, and uses lean-production methods with a manufacturing partner in the Silicon Valley. It says it can deliver to hobbyists from stock or drop-ship larger orders from manufacturing.

According to Gumstix's Robert van Gool, Gumstix products are priced at razor-thin margins. “We want to get product out there, and make it accessible to as many people as possible, and that includes OEMs and hobbyists.”

The boards

The Gumstix board measures 3-1/8 inches long, 13/16 of an inch wide, and 5/16th of an inch thick (20 x 80 x 8mm). It weighs “less than a tablespoon of water,” the company says.

Gumstix boards are based on an XScale PXA255 processor — the same used in Samsung Linux phones, Sharp Zaurus PDAs, and some robot designs — clocked at 200MHz or 400MHz. The boards include 64MB of SDRAM, 4MB of Flash, an MMC/SD slot, and multiple I/O including GPIO pins, serial ports, a USB 1.1 client, and an I2C bus. The boards include a DC-DC converter designed to function with 3 AAA batteries.

A bare-pad connector based on a Molex 54546-2491 enables enterprising hardware hobbyists and designers to solder or press-fit daughtercards. Gumstix is working on a number of such modules, that will support UART transceivers and Bluetooth modules.

Waysmall systems

The Gumstix boards are available as Waysmall systems with tiny cases measuring about 3-1/4 by 1-3/8 by 5/8 inches (83 x 36 x 15mm). The Waysmall systems include 2 mini-DIN8 serial ports, 1 USB mini-B client port, and an AC wall adapter (4.0V) power supply.

The complete Waysmall system

The Linux implementation is based on a 2.6.4 Linux kernel with uClinux configured. ARM and MontaVista XScale kernel patches were applied. U-boot is used as the bootloader.

Out of the box, the Gumstix and Waysmall systems boot to an ash prompt in 17 seconds, according to Gumstix, with the root filesystem mounted on a RAM disk and the MMC card mounted at /mmc. Busybox and uClib provide a minimalist Linux utility suite and library. USBnet is used to connect the device as a USB client to a host development machine. DropBear provides a minimal SSH host.

The gumstix Linux distribution includes PTXdist userland generation tools to configure and generate makefiles for putting together new gumstix firmware.

Gumstix Linux is available as a single-file download from SourceForge.

Gumstix boards and systems are available now at prices ranging from $109 to $170. More details and an online store are available at the Gumstix Website.

 
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