ARM boards

D

drgnfang

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Oct 13, 2007
Messages
1,085
Does anyone have a comprehensive list of "consumer" (or hobbyist) available ARM boards?
 
There are tons and tons of them. What are you looking to do with it?

BeagleBoard is a popular place to start, though it really depends what you're looking to do. Sparkfun sells a pretty wide range of ARM (and other) development boards. ARM spans the gamut between small embedded applications with a few KB of RAM and flash that run pure assembly with no OS and 'almost a PC' applications with a few hundred MB of RAM and GB of flash running a full OS and managed code - with plenty of variation on peripherals, so you really need to give a bit more information.
 
I need a multi-wan router, and would rather build (and learn) than buy. I know I can source all the parts I need based on the Intel Atom, but I was wondering/hoping to give Arm a shot.
 
MIPS is the de-facto standard architecture for small scale networking applications like consumer routers, pretty much everything you get on the shelf at BestBuy is MIPS powered, though PowerPC seems to be widely used in enterprise gear. Anyway, not really a strength of ARM, but there are probably boards out there, however most that I've seen only have a single NIC if they have one at all.

So a couple suggestions that aren't ARM, but still a bit more DIY:

While it's still x86, the ALIX boards are great and I use them often, up to 3 NICs plus miniPCI in a small package with nice aluminum cases available - they're great for pfSense and well supported by that community. Or you could roll your own router with Linux or whatever else floats your boat.

If that's too easy for you, the slightly aging now (but I own one and it was fun to play with :p) ATNGW100 uses an AVR32 processor from Atmel. It doesn't look like they were very successful with these chips, but it's a pretty cheap and well documented development platform, and the architecture targeted networking applications so it performs pretty well for its modest specs. Runs OpenWRT pretty easily if you build it yourself and routing performance is decent, or you can use the Atmel buildroot and roll your own image. Only 2 NICs though, and I'm not sure if 802.1Q is supported or not on them so if you're looking for multiWAN it might not be the ticket, and depending on your WAN speed performance may not be up to snuff, some of today's common WAN connections can outpace it.

Mikrotik has their RouterBoard series which is MIPS based and most of them include a configurable switch so you can use the ports as virtual interfaces, and they're cheap. Pretty good community support for these, they are fairly well supported with OpenWRT, and of course if you want to go hardcore you can build your own image. Routerstation (Pro) from Ubiquiti is very similar, but unfortunate the Atheros switch they use is undocumented and last I checked nobody had figured out how to configure it from a custom OS (should look into this if you need that functionality with the routerboard series too, I think some of them might have the same problem).

There's also the Marvell SheevaPlug based devices which are ARM based and quite powerful, but I think they all have a single NIC so you'd need to add a separately controlled managed switch.

I'm only on the periphery of this field though so there are probably other more niche solutions out there that might be better for you, but those are what I've heard of that seem like they might fit your goals and a place to start for ya.
 
Thanks! I'll start digging through this.

Still open to all other suggestions to :)
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top