With
Overo Earth, the open source community can freely innovate in a vast
range of application areas using this tiny computer. Ideal for 1,000 to
50,000 EAU products, Overo Earth encompasses impressive computational
power, handheld power levels, tremendous expandability and open source
software at significantly reduced design time and cost.
The Overo Earth motherboard is now available for purchase at www.gumstix.com for
$149 USD.
Nearly 40 percent smaller than existing Gumstix motherboards,
the Overo Earth motherboard runs Linux
kernel 2.6.27 or higher. Linux developers can also take advantage of
the 256 MB low power DDR RAM, 256 MB NAND flash, on-board microSD
adapter, 24-pin flex ribbon connector for camera control signals and
two (2) x 70-pin AVX 5602-14 Connectors
for a wide range of functional options in expansion board design. The
power consumption of the Overo Earth motherboard is typically less than
1W.
“Our
customers are always asking us for smaller and more powerful handset
devices, developed in faster timescales” said Ben Toner, Engineer &
Business Consultant for mobile terminals at Roke Manor Research
Limited. “Building on Texas Instruments’ powerful OMAP family, the
additional functionality offered by Overo can facilitate even faster
handset design. This increases our competitive advantage in this
marketplace which is good for us, and more importantly good for our
customers.”
"Beginning with Gumstix’ Overo product line as a common
development
platform, our company is transitioning into the growing market of
applications consulting,” said Ben Toner, manager of engineering, Roke
Manor Research. "Roke plans to incorporate Overo into the design and
production of our handsets that terminate a network such as a PDA or
cell phone.”
Overo Earth is plug compatible with future Overo products to
be based
on TI’s OMAP35x applications processors, such as the superscalar
OMAP3530 which features the ARM,
high-performance digital signal processor (DSP),
PowerVR SGX™ graphics engine licensed by Imagination Technologies and
multimedia-rich accelerators.
“Our
customers now have access to the widest range of performance and
expandability in a small, reusable reference design with the Overo
motherboards,” said Gerard Andrews, applications processors product
line manager, TI. “We look forward to seeing the design ideas and
innovations that spur from the open source community as product
engineers from around the world harness the small size, high
performance and low power of Gumstix’ tiny Overo computer.”
Leveraging the laptop-like performance of the OMAP3503
processor, the
Overo Earth motherboard takes advantage of the 600 MHz ARM Cortex™-A8
processor and integrated peripherals. This Cortex-A8 processor achieves
an additional 4x performance improvement over the 300MHz ARM9 through
its superscalar architecture, which allows implementation of
instruction-level parallelism within a single processor. For more
information, visit www.ti.com/omap35x.
About Roke Manor Research Limited
Roke, founded in 1956, is a Siemens centre of excellence for
communications, electronic sensors and networks, innovative solutions
and specialist R&D contracts worldwide. The company employs 478
people. Orders for the financial year ending 30 September 2008 were
£47.2 million and turnover for the same period was £43.4 million. For
more information, visit www.roke.co.uk.
About Gumstix, Inc.
Founded in 2003, Gumstix develops and sells small form factor
computers
and related products to commercial product designers, network managers
& software engineers in more than 40 countries worldwide. For more
information visit www.gumstix.com
Trademarks
OMAP is a trademark of Texas Instruments. ARM is a registered
trademark
of ARM Ltd and Cortex is a trademark of ARM Ltd. POWERVR SGX as a
trademark of Imagination Technologies Ltd.
