armStoneA8 is a small, powerful and cost-effective SBC, offered by F&S. Its PicoITX form factor with CortexA8-1GHz is suited for developing small but high-performance applications. It comes with 512 Mbyte RAM and 128 Mbyte NAND Flash, which is sufficient to boot WCE or Linux directly from Flash. A micro SD-Card can be added optionally. The board offers interfaces such as USB Host/ Device, 2x LAN, RS232, CAN, SPI, I2C, and Audio (IN/ OUT). Furthermore, a LVDS interface (max. resolution up to XGA/WXGA), a HDMI/ DVI interface up to 1920 x 1080 and a touch panel interface are available, so it is possible to control two displays/ screens independently.
The CPU offers functions like 2D/ 3D, 5 Window-Layer, FPU and a MPEG4/ H264 Decoder up to 1080p@30fps. DirectX, Open GL and Gstreamer are supported. With a power consumption of less than 4W, armStoneA8 can be operated without fan or cooling element. F&S’ software department supports Windows CE6.0R3, WEC7, as well as Linux for armStoneA8. Bootloaders and the operating system are pre-installed. A customized WCE6.0R3 or WEC7 (with bootloaders, kernel, interface drivers, Silverlight, Mediaplayer and IE) offers a powerful real-time operating system. Compact Framework 3.5 contributes an ideal base for software development. F&S‘ Linux BSP(2.6.37 with uboot, BSP, Buildroot, QT and GStreamer) contains a customized kernel and all interface drivers including Source. Additionally, a Cross Compiler Toolchain for programming own bootloaders, kernels, or further software, is provided.
