About two and a half years ago, Arrow Electronics the Qualcomm® Snapdragon™ 410 processor was a brand new 64-bit processor that started to appear in smartphones around the world.
Not too long after, the same processor debuted at the heart of the DragonBoard™ 410c development board during several maker events, including at the 2015 World Maker Faire in New York. From its official announcement to its eventual widespread release, this month we celebrate one year since Arrow Electronics made this board available to the public.
The DragonBoard 410c is one of the world’s first ARMv8 64-bit development boards to be produced in high volumes and made available at an attractive price point of $75, making it easy for developers to work on advanced mobile technologies.
The DragonBoard 410c was not only one of the first low-cost ARMv8 64-bit development boards to be mass produced, but also one of the first 96Boards branded products. 96Boards is an open specification which defines a platform for the delivery of compatible, low-cost, small footprint, 32-bit and 64-bit Cortex-A boards. These boards come from a wide range of manufacturers and ARM SoC vendors and offer various additional features on top of the basic 96Boards specification. The specification includes standardized expansion busses for peripheral I/O, display, and cameras. This allows the hardware ecosystem to develop a wide range of compatible add-on products which can be used on any 96Boards device over the lifetime of the platform.
Over the last year, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc., Linaro, and Arrow have built strong software and ecosystem support around the DragonBoard 410c. Developers who choose this platform benefit from a wide variety of operating system choices including Android, Debian Linux, OpenEmbedded, Ubuntu Core and Windows IoT Core. These operating systems pair with the many available IoT development kits such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), AT&T M2X, Brillo, IBM Bluemix Watson and Microsoft Azure. With extensive documentation on Arrow.com, the Qualcomm Developer Network and 96Boards—and thousands of forum posts worth of insight, a weekly OpenHours video conference, and a series of well-attended events and hackathons—the DragonBoard 410c has rapidly become a flexible platform that developers can trust to get their job done.
Maintaining a consistent development environment is one of the primary goals for 96Boards, which takes great care to future-proof their designs. Developer code, devices and hardware developments will run or easily port to any current and future 96Boards products by virtue of their standard hardware layout with maintained software platform. Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. has committed to supporting the hardware platform for an extended period of time and software will be maintained and updated around the Linux Long-Term Support (LTS) kernels. A standard reference software platform also exists, which includes support for the most recent kernels. Finally, an expanding range of mezzanine products and readily available compatible hardware peripherals and accessories continues to extend the functionality of the 96Boards line and allow 96Boards developers to keep pushing boundaries. Any mezzanine board or accessory developed for one 96Boards will work across all the boards conforming to the same specification, which means less low-level work for engineers and more time for innovation.
With contribution from Robert Wolff of Linaro