14 DAY TRIAL // Snickerdoodle is a new maker board designed for people who like building stuff ranging from robots to advanced networking, and it can fit in the palm for the hand.
It seems that no matter how many maker boards there are on the market, there is still room for one more that does something that the rest couldn't. This type of minicomputers has been around for a while, but the Raspberry Pi made them famous. It attracted a large crowd of users that wasn’t even interesting in using the maker boards for building stuff, so the concept was diluted a bit.
Snickerdoodle comes from the other side, and it mostly addresses people who have a real use for this kind of technology. Sure, you can pick one yourself and do some simple stuff with it, but the real strengths of this mini PC will be only be used by people who want to build the Skynet of tomorrow or at least some robots that can travel back in time.
Snickerdoodle can also use Ubuntu Core
Snickerdoodle comes in a couple of different versions, but the cheapest one is just $55 (€52), and it comes with a dual-core 667MHz ARM Cortex-A9 w/430k ASIC Gates, 154 reconfigurable I/O connector, 512MB LPDDR2 RAM, single-band 2.4GHz 802.11n SISO Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth Classic & BLE. There is an extra option to get 1GB LPDDR2 RAM and connectors "down" (making it possible to connect to a motherboard).
“Snickerdoodle have now added Ubuntu Core support and that’s opening the door to even more possibilities! Combining Ubuntu Core support for ROS and the onboard FPGA makes it super simple to bring fast image recognition or image compression for drones and robots,” reads the promotion on Crowdsupply.
The fact that Ubuntu Snappy Core is supported opens up a wealth of opportunities, and it will be interesting to see what the community will be able to build with it.
The campaign on Crowdsupply has been successfully funded, and the Snickerdoodle will be shipping in March 2016, if everything goes according to plan.