 Great. All right, I think I'm going to get started. I'd like to thank you all for coming. Some of you may have heard rumors about a new Intel Atom-based embedded board that's being marketed towards the hobbyist and maker communities. I'm here to tell you that that rumor is true, and that's actually what this talk is going to be about today. So all of you who are here are going to be the very first to hear the public knowledge about this board. So a little bit about myself. My name is Scott Garmin. I work at Intel's Open Source Technology Center. I've been a software engineer working on the Yachto project for about two and a half, going on three years now. And so in addition to kind of working on the actual build system itself, I also have a prior background previous to working at Intel, developing embedded Linux-based products. So I worked for a company that makes multi-room home audio systems. These are systems that allow you to play music in different rooms of your home or your business, and which you would control via keypads or touchscreens you would have installed in your walls. Also, I've worked kind of, again in the audio kind of sphere, making sound level monitoring devices that would go into very loud venues. So think of things like concert stadiums or racetracks, where the venue owner has to prove that they're complying with local limits on sound regulations. So these devices would inform the venue owner of what the current sound level pressure levels are at and I'll give them an audit trail that they can use to demonstrate that they're in compliance. But you know what, in the context of this talk, I don't know that any of that is really all that important. I could probably sum up what really matters in a single sentence. Hi, I'm Scott, and I like to make things. I'm sure this is something I have in common with most all of you in this room. We all like to make things, whether it's for commercial purposes or for our own personal projects. And it's a great feeling when you can take a concept and turn it into reality. We refer to this as engineering, but it's really a creative process when you can take something that didn't exist before and bring it into existence. And I think it's safe to say that we all get some kind of rush or buzz when we're able to make this happen. And now, at this point in time, I think it's a great time to be a hacker, whether in software or hardware or some combination of the two. The thing is technology is changing and evolving so fast. I know it's kind of a ridiculously cliche thing to say, but it's true. Every day it becomes possible to create and deploy projects with increased levels of complexity and capabilities that people weren't even thinking of 10 or 15 years ago. The possibilities of what can be done keep unfolding before us and the limits that we previously ran up against keep falling away. There are so many possibilities out there that it's impossible to pursue them all. Hence the problem of so many toys so little time. So speaking of toys, how many of you have played around with quadcopters before? There are a lot of fun, although it would be nice to get some that have a battery life of longer than 15 minute fly times. But that's a problem that technology is going to solve. 3D printers. Another example of a game-changing technology that's coming down in price and yet increasing in capabilities. And then there's the fun and creative stuff. So I found this thing on Hackaday. This is a device that someone created and actually machined himself that dispenses treats to his dog remotely. And the way he set this up was so fun. He actually set his dog up with an email address and when you send his dog an email, this device will measure out and dispense some treats onto the floor for his dog. Presumably he'll make some noise so the dog knows that the treats are coming. And that's not the end of it because if you look closely, you can kind of see a webcam there at the top there. And so as the dog is enjoying the treats, the device takes a photo of the dog and then emails that photo back to the center so you get this whole kind of interaction. I'm sure that dog is very grateful for all the emails he gets. Yeah. He probably wouldn't want one, right? Now another really neat concept that I saw from kind of like a user experience point of view was somebody who created this thing, it's like a commuting barometer. So if, I don't know if you can see the symbols there, on one side there's a bicycle symbol and on the other side there's a symbol for the London tube. And this is something that basically tells this guy in the morning whether it's going to be most expedient for him to bike to work or to take the subway. And so what it does behind the scenes is it's gathering some information and for example if the weather forecast for that day involves some precipitation, that needle is going to trend toward the subway side. And then if there's known delays in the subway, you know, transit times, that needle is going to move back towards the bike side. So, you know, as somebody I'm pretty passionate about bicycling and bike commuting myself, I thought this was just such a really neat idea. And then of course you can combine some of these technologies. You know, this is a 3D printed quadcopter, which is really handy because if a part breaks you can just print out a new one. And then also if you're taking a design and you want to improve upon it, you can start iterating, see how your changes take effect. You know, this is that whole process of engineering new products. And the cost of doing this keeps coming down. The possibilities of iterating and failing quickly with low investment keep happening. This is the future of how things are being done. So the fact that so many possibilities exist and that the cost of exploring and making something from all this potential that's out there also means that the playing field is being leveled. So between individuals and companies, you can think of all the Kickstarter campaigns you've seen that have been done by an individual or maybe a small independent group of people who are raising money to create a really interesting kick-ass product. And the playing field is also being leveled between smaller companies and larger companies because this whole scaling down of the costs and scaling up of the benefits, benefits, you know, the smaller companies even more so than large companies which are able to make those big investments. So I think that the next big thing in embedded, the next killer application that runs on an embedded Linux device is very likely to come out of the kind of hacking and experimentation that people do with affordable embedded platforms. You know, it's the kind of experimentation that you do, whether that's for fun or for profit. So I'm here to talk about a new embedded board that has a lot of exciting potential. But before I dive into the tech specs for the thing, there's an important question we need to answer. What are we going to name it? And some of you may know or have seen the pattern in affordable embedded boards that they get named after an animal. And in fact, there are so many animal-based boards on the market that someone created a website just listing them all. So you can see, if you go to AnimalBoard.org, you see a list of all these different boards. You can see that the font choice is also something that everyone seems to agree on as well. And if you take a closer look at the bottom of the page is a footer where the author of this site asked what I think is a very insightful question. Why are there no fish? Well, there is now. So I'd like to introduce you to the Minnow Board. We don't have a name for this little guy yet, but I'm thinking Splashy the Minnow is the one I'm in favor of. That may not be his final name, but that's the one I'm going to vote for. The Minnow Board is an affordable and powerful, small-form factor embedded board with an atom processor. It's a true hackable and standards-based board that is designed for hobbyists, students, researchers, and other experimenters. At the same time, it's also very well suited for heavy-duty embedded applications that require significant amounts of computing resources. Now there are four areas that we wanted to make the Minnow Board exceptional at. These categories are in performance, flexibility, openness, and standards. So let me dive in a bit more and tell you about how the Minnow's design reflects these values as I kind of expose some of the details of what this board is actually made of. So performance-wise, we're using an Intel atom processor. Like I said, no surprise from the title of this talk. It's running at a gigahertz, and it includes some features in the silicon, so we have hyperthreading capability and virtualization technology. IO-wise, I think the Minnow is really going to shine on a lot of IO-intensive applications because we're using PCI Express to power all the major peripherals. So your video, your SATA disk access, and gigabit Ethernet. There's none of this connecting an Ethernet adapter to a USB port. You know, the Ethernet is kind of a first-class citizen on the PCI bus, and you're going to get a lot of exceptional performance in terms of IO. So you can see this board going into a lot of appliance-like devices I like to refer to them as, so things like network-detached storage. With the gigabit Ethernet, you have things like network appliances, security appliances, things like that. Performance-wise, we also have UEFI firmware, so it's a modern, standards-based firmware that has fast-boot capability so the firmware can get out of the way and get your OS and application booting as quickly as possible. And then in terms of flexibility, the Minnow board is one of the most affordable Intel Atom boards you can buy, and it will be available for $199. And I'll go into details of what you're going to get with that $199 in just a little bit. The Minnow, again, with its higher computational power, can scale up to higher workloads. You can do very simple things such as have a little embedded web server that responds to a request and changes the GPIO line. And you can also do more serious applications, like I said before, some of these appliance devices and other things that, you know, I'm sure I can't think of right now that people are going to take this thing and make use of it for. Flexibility, again, comes into play with the small form factor. We're looking at a four-inch by four-inch board. The board, again, with UEFI has very extensive capabilities you can do in terms of firmware, pre-boot capability, firmware applications. And then we take the expandability of the board very seriously, too. So we have what we're calling Minnow board lures, and these lures will allow you to create add-on boards that would add things like, you know, display support, wireless capability, additional IO options, and so on. Now, one of the things I'm most excited about with this board is the fact that the Minnow is the first atom-based board on the market which is fully open-source hardware. So you don't need to sign any NDAs to obtain the complete schematics of the board. That means for any of the entrepreneurs in the audience you're free to spin your own Minnow board and customize it any way you want. And CircaCo is happy to do this for you, too, being the designers and manufacturers of this board. They're the experts in it, and they're available to help you out if you need it. Which license, what? Well, the schematics are just going to be available. It's going to be more public demand, I guess. Okay, sorry. Creative Commons. Thank you. Also, in terms of openness, you know, we want this to be an open platform, so we're starting with some open-source software. We're using the Anxtrum Linux distribution, which I'm sure many of you are familiar with. Anxtrum is a binary distribution which is very well suited for embedded applications. It has a good breadth of packages you can install that are suitable for embedded applications, and it's also, you know, very well optimized for embedded use. And Anxtrum is Yachto project-compatible, something that's really important for me as somebody who's been a Yachto project developer. I'd like to see this board be a great way to introduce people to the Yachto project and get them working with it at an affordable cost. And then the Minnow board lures are also, you know, some of the initial lures we're going to be releasing are going to be open-source as well. Now, in terms of standards, I think we all recognize that X86 is a pretty important standard until it's been involved in a lot of standards that we make use of every day, so things like SATA and USB. And then at the same time, you're going to get all the embedded bus goodies that you expect from a good embedded board, so SPI, I2C, GPIO, and also some other stuff like CAN, Control Area Network Support. Standards-wise too, I include Anxtrum and Yachto, the Yachto project as well, because, you know, I think somebody pointed out to me that we have over 10 talks here at ELC that are about the Yachto project in some way, or related to the Yachto project, and I think Yachto project is really kind of living up to this promise of being a really great standardized way of creating embedded Linux images, so I include that here too. And then UEFI firmware, you know, we're not dealing with legacy BIOS anymore, so we have an open platform for firmware development. Now, this is the block diagram for the board. I don't know if you can see many details. It's probably not too important to go through each and every option here, but the fundamentals here, this board is based on Intel's Queens Bay platform, which combines Tunnel Creek, Adam's CPU, with the Top Cliff chipset, which is a PCH, the Platform Controller Hub, and you have, you know, all of your I.O., for the most part, tied to that, the PCH. So here's a list of the highlights of the Minnow Board's hardware, kind of like in a more list form. Most of the things here, one thing I didn't mention was the board will be shipping with a full gigabyte of RAM, so again, scaling up to all sorts of applications that might be a little bit more memory intensive. I.O. wise, that PCI Express is really going to make a big difference in the Minnow Board and its performance. And then I don't think I mentioned SDIO is also one of our I.O. capabilities for the board. Now, for that $199 price, you get a board that you can actually kind of get started with. You can boot it up immediately and start making use of it. So we include a microSD card with some software, the USB cable, and power adapter. So nothing to get in your way of actually being able to immediately make use of this board once you get it in your hands. Software-wise, that microSD card that I just previously mentioned is going to include the angstrom distribution, which is Yachto Project-compatible. This is, to my knowledge, one of the first embedded boards, two that was done in close development with some folks from the Yachto Project team at Intel. So we've got a really solid board support package, which will be immediately available as soon as that board is shipping. And it will be well-optimized for the hardware features of this board. And also software, well, software-firmware-wise, we have UEFI as a development platform so you can develop and debug your own firmware and make use of that fast-boot capability. So performance, flexibility, openness, and standards. This is basically the laundry list of why we think this board is really compelling as an option. One of the many options that you have available using with low-power, low-cost embedded boards today. Now, I think at this point in time, I haven't checked, but our website minnowboard.org should be up. At this time, it should just be a splash page. Get it? Splash page. So you're just going to find the most basic information. So we do have things like the block diagram and specifications and so on of the board up there. There's also a link so that you can join a mailing list if you want to get announcements of the board's availability. So when is this thing going to be available? We're looking at later this spring. And once we do finally launch as time goes on, we're going to be adding more and more to the site. So you'll have all the stuff you need. We realize that the community aspect of the site of the minnowboard is going to be really fundamental to its success. So we'll have documentation, video tutorials, a wiki, a mailing list. You can start joining minnowboard on FreeNode IRC. And then the site will also be the central place where you can download the schematics of the board, which will be updated with any revisions of the board as they become available. And you'll be able to buy the minnowboard and its lures from various distributors. So definitely check out our website. You can also follow us on Twitter at minnowboard. And we'll also be using the Twitter feed to post updates of the board's production status. And if you either follow that or join that mailing list, you'll be among the first to know when that board is available to purchase from our distributors. The board itself, like I said, it's about four inches by four inches. This is not the final version of the board. So it's just a tiny bit bigger than that. But you can see it right here and you can actually see it running code later this evening at the demo reception. So definitely come by our table and check us out. Be happy to talk to you about the board and answer any questions there. And also, this is the end of the talk, so I'm happy to answer any questions.