 So this is the new Dragon Board. Hi, I'm Dave Mandela with Lunaro, and I'm the director working on 96 boards. I'm here talking with the Arrow guys about the Dragon Board 410C, and I wanted to thank the Arrow guys for being sponsors for Lunaro Connect this year because we really, really appreciate the sponsorship. With that, let me turn it over to the guys from Arrow. Alright, so my name is Glenn Carlson. I handle the open source effort on behalf of Arrow Electronics, and what you see here is the Dragon Board 410C. This is the first board that Arrow Electronics has released into the 96 boards CE specification. Show it on the back. So this is going to be available soon? Yeah, we expect to launch this one in mass production in late Q4 time frame. Alright, so what can people do? Can they pre-order already? Yeah, you can go to arrow.com and get your order in. Dragon Board 410C. So, and you have another one too? Yeah, in fact, my name is Brian Sham, technical marketing manager at Arrow Electronics, and this is the second board that we are working on. This is an free-scale i.mx6 processor. It's based on that. That processor has, it's a dual core Cortex-A7 at 1 GHz. It also has on board a Cortex-M4 co-processor running at 266 MHz. This is also Cortex-M4, so it's like heterogeneous a little bit? Correct, heterogeneous processing, yep. It's the CE specification 96 boards, so it's got the complement of Bluetooth Wi-Fi, USB, HDMI, and of course the low-speed and high-speed expansion connectors with mid-speed DSi and mid-speed CSi on it as well. So, Arrows, you provide the components for the whole world, right? We do. That is one piece of it, yes. And this is towards the developers. You're doing lots of stuff with that? Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, for the sake of the NARO, we wanted to get these in the developer's hands to really develop the software on these boards. But we absolutely find, we think a lot of customers are going to be interested in these low-cost boards for their development purposes as well. Yeah, and these are really neat. I'll jump in here for a minute, because one of the cool things about the Dragon Board and this future board, the first two boards that hit the market, Dragon Board was one of two, the first two, they're 64-bit machines. Right now, short of buying a very, very expensive development board from ARM itself, you can't really get your hands on early development silicon for 64-bit ARM. That's incredibly cool. Put it together with a low-speed I-O, with GPIO, I-squared C, and other bits in the high-speed bus. This is just a really incredible piece of kit for doing development work. On top of that, part of the CE spec is that this power supply looks like just a normal power supply, but it's not. For folks like myself who never quite know what they're going to grab out of the toolkit to power the board up, this thing works from 6 volts to 18 volts. Just plug the right, get it into the hole, and the board will power up. That's really cool, and there's enough capacity on this board that I actually use a 12-volt supply, drive 5-volt relays, and drive 12-volt motors through the board, letting the power supply and the board deal with it. So that's really incredible for developers. And I'm going to be taking a demo setup to the New York World Maker Faire this coming weekend. And I'll have that in the Qualcomm booth showing that off. So I'm really excited about what this does for makers. I'm excited what it does for developers here at Leonardo. We can finally work on these things anywhere we want to, anywhere we need to. It hooks up and we can do our jobs. Without this level of quality of board, you know, it's very hard to do things. And the other thing that makes me excited about this, this is a production quality board. Even though it's targeted to developers right now, this is high quality. You could put this once it passes all its FCC approvals, you got a yada. But once it gets through all of that, you could put this into your own products with your own mezzanine cards to do your own things, whether it be a UAV, whether it be a rain sprinkler control system, whatever it may be, you can base your product off this board, put your own mezzanine card on it, and do things with it. And in a year's time or two years' time when the more powerful chip comes out or maybe your product needs a boost, you can just get the next, the Qualcomm 810 chip or whatever it may be in the future, put the mezzanine board onto it, and you haven't lost all that development effort. It just is going to keep working. That makes me tremendously excited to develop it. Standard positions for the connectors. Yep, electrically all the connectors and the pinouts are standardized, both on a low speed and a high speed, the USB, the USB on the go for flashing, the HDMI, and everything is standard. So it will continue to be in the same places in the future. These boards are identically sized. All connectors are located in exactly the same places. So this is an important piece. Now there is an extension to the CE standard, and you can make the board a little bit bigger. Everything within the standard CE still has to be in the same place, but if you have more special things you want to add to a board, you can do that. So to me, this is a chance where you as the vendor, here, today I need a 32-bit board. Well, when this is out on the market, I can get a 32-bit board. In a 64-bit, I come to this board. In the future, if I need a 64-bit with some special DSP or some other kind of thing, I can look and see whose sock is on a 96-bit board that fits my need. That is tremendously cool in this industry. We haven't had that before. You could get the different boards, but then you had to redo everything you've done in the past. Quite frankly, that's not a lot of fun. When I got to invest time in making a board, having to redo it to fit anything else, that's just a bummer. I don't know how many times this has happened to me as a developer. I'm working on some board. I've put a daughter card on it and they go end-of-life just as I'm about ready to try to make my product. In this case, if a board went end-of-life, I just pick up the next one that's replacing it, put it in and I haven't lost my time. So this is what happening with 96 boards is bringing the maker into the the narrow world. And that to me is a huge deal. I've been a maker for a very long time. I'm a member of the Dallas maker space. One of the largest maker communities in the United States. We're at almost a thousand people. And I'm excited to show this off to the Dallas folks and I'm excited to go to the World Maker Fair and show this off to makers. I think there's going to be a lot of accelerated development based on the fact that these are available. It's like a 64-bit arm Arduino. In some ways, yes. And in fact, we have a library, Lib96 board's GPIO Lib. It's designed to actually add calls that any Arduino programmer would recognize for running the GPIO. There's also Libsoc done by a gentleman out in the UK. And he's agreed to take patches to make that library which takes care of GPIO and I2C and other things to standardize that. He's agreed to take patches for 96 boards to standardize across the 96 board family. It'll still do all the stuff Libsoc's done but there'll be an option to turn on 96 boards and then all 96 boards will be smoothed across the family. So I'm really excited that we're getting support from the community. We're getting support from the vendors and we're getting interest from makers and others. What do you guys think of makers? How do you see makers as part of your community buying things and so forth? Yeah it's a great question. The makers I think are really the future of this industry to some extent especially with boards like this coming out at very aggressive price points. You can put these boards in a lot of people's hands and really this thing will go as far as your imagination will allow and we're really excited about that. We haven't really seen anything like this from the maker community. It's almost bursting into the upper echelon and we're very excited about this. The boards are one piece of it. The other piece is the rest of the ecosystem, the mezzanine cards, the additional experience that we're going to offer through the addition of sensor technology and all the things that are going to plug into these boards and allow you to evaluate a lot of different applications. You guys have a wide supply of sensors and other things so I can buy the board and eventually I'll be able to buy the cards and then I'll buy sensors and other parts from you because that's one stop shopping. That's pretty cool stuff. Do you think people are going to soon be bringing out robots and drones and this is what's going to happen. It's going to be all kinds of stuff, right? It wouldn't surprise me a bit. We'll see mezzanine cards that address UAVs and address robotics. I really believe it's all going to happen. It takes a little time. One of the key things is this board has an open source GPU. It's the first board you can get your hands on at a reasonable price that has an open source GPU. It uses free Drino. So this board is nearly 100% open source. Not quite. It does have a locked boot loader but it is from after the boot loader it's all open source. That is amazingly cool for folks in the open source community and for folks doing development work with specialized things like robotics and UAVs and things like that. This is cool stuff. This is something that the open source world has been waiting for many years. For many many years. The arm space and open GPU, that's a first. They've always been closed proprietary. It's a huge deal. It's not a big deal. It's huge. It's huge. You're working with the Canonical, right? I used to work at Canonical. One of my bugaboos. I was the guy who headed the team that ported Ubuntu to ARM. And one of our biggest headaches was to deal with the closed source GPUs. How do we get a video acceleration without having to have million licenses signed for the end users? And it was really really hard. We ended up in certain boards TI for example made it very easy for people to use their board. Other vendors you had to go sign individually. You could buy a board but you still had to execute a license to use the video acceleration. So varied across the board. But this board, you don't have to sign anything. You don't have to do anything. It's all in open source and you can go get the free Drino. You can make modifications. You could use the GPU for math processing if you want to. Now I can't because I don't know how to do that. But there are people who do know how to do it and you can get that done because it is open source. So you can use this thing for lots more than just even video acceleration. How's the performance running Ubuntu? You know, it's surprisingly good. We still have some work to do getting the load to work as well as we want. There are things that still need to go up in the mainline. But we're making significant inroads to it. And once we get all the stuff in the mainline I think this thing will be really a screaming even without everything where we want it. It's still a really powerful board. And it's going to be a good price for these boards. $75 $75 $75 for 64 bit quad core A53 Gigabyte of RAM 8 gigs of storage on board with GPS Wi-Fi and Bluetooth on board. So if you need GPS, if you need Wi-Fi, if you need Bluetooth if you need storage, all of a sudden $75 that's a pretty inexpensive price for what you get on this. This thing is also set up interestingly enough. It's got some switches here. And those switches enable different things but one of the key things is it says where it boots from. So this is able to boot from internal EMMC flash, the 8 gigs. Or you can put a microSD in and boot from the microSD or you can switch back and forth depending on what you're doing. You could have Android AOSP on this internal and you could have Ubuntu on the flash or vice versa. So you can work in different environments simply as what you want to boot and bring it up. So it's really neat that all that. And I also here tell now this is a Linux thing and I'm a heavily dedicated Linux guy. I've been an open source for very many years but I also hear Microsoft's interested in this board and they're going to bring out some kind of build of Windows 10 for it. So I can't tell you how that will work but I'm kind of excited that a company like Microsoft who, you know, for years hasn't been in the embedded space very much they're going to bring out a build for this. That's neat stuff they think 96 boards is cool too. You know, hey, I'm not I'll personally not use it but I'm glad it's available for other people. It was Microsoft keynote today. Isn't that neat? Microsoft has finally come around. First they laughed at us and now they're here talking to us. And so a year later, two years later how do you really think it can be giant? I think 96 boards is going to be huge. I think, you know, a couple of years from now there's already, you know, a total probably of over nine boards in the pipeline today. I don't know how many there's going to be in a year but there's going to be a lot. The cool thing is because they use different SoCs, this is Qualcomm and I'm excited by it but each SoC vendor brings certain strengths with their SoC. TI has DSPs. They're known for that. Qualcomm is known for other features. FreeScale has a M4 heterogeneous. So each vendor brings their own SoCs. The cool thing is it really caters to what ARM is known for. You can find a 96 board that's going to meet your need for your project whether you need 64-bit, 32-bit, do you need a co-processor, don't you need a co-processor. All of this will be available and then on top of that you can take the mezzanine cards and they'll fit across the entire family. That's amazing. You know, other vendors have cards that have brought out different versions of the boards over time. They can't even use their early plugins to the later boards. This you'll be able to take these mezzanines and keep moving around and using them. It's exciting. It's for me it's something I fought for for years, talked to vendors for many years and never had much luck. I took Linaro and George our CEO to get the thing off the ground but this is cool and it's it's a game-changer in this space, I really truly believe.